First, I want to be clear that I'm not saying you are wrong. I don't know. I personally doubt the fees enter most people's speculations, though.
Specifically, my intuition is that most people don't speculate in housing because they don't have the capital to do so. More, most of the people I have known that had the capital to do so, did, in fact, speculate in real estate. Similarly, most people I know that have purchased homes could only do so on highly leveraged loans. Again, they didn't have the capital to do speculation. They still stretched for as large of a loan as they could, at large. Which is its own form of speculation.
I'd be curious to know how much the fee for day trading can be. I know it isn't directly comparable, due to volume differences, but I'm assuming you weren't thinking real estate would get to day trader levels of speculation?
