EOS is real estate because it works in a completely different way from Bitcoin or Ethereum: token holders get a percentage of the bandwidth of the EOS network relative to their total share of the tokens. If EOS can handle 100k TPS and you hold 1% of tokens, you are reserved 1k TPS. The only cost to developing your dApp is purchasing tokens in the first place. Furthermore, if you are not a dApp developer, you can rent your stake in the network, allowing you to collect interest on your stake.
EOS encourages people to buy and hold their tokens– not just for speculation, but because they need to in order to reserve network bandwidth.