Are websites the new real estate?

I live in Toronto where there is a huge real estate bubble. What that means is that homeowners are experiencing huge asset appreciation as more and more migrants flock to the city and drive up the price of housing exorbitantly. On the other side of the country, in Vancouver, the same thing is happening but on a larger scale. Asian investors are able to get huge loans from banks to buy and hold real estate, driving up the cost of housing and even creating a housing crisis for locals who are unable to find a place to live at a reasonable price. The problem has gotten so bad that the local government instituted a special property tax for unoccupied houses of $10,000 PER DAY.

I guess foreign investors can no longer buy an expensive house and just let it sit there until they sell it for 50% profit in 3 years.

Now that it's impossible to invest in real estate, I started looking at other places to invest my excess capital and I got really interested in websites that are generating positive cash flow as an asset that can both hold value and generate income. The great thing about this idea is that you can actually build a portfolio of wealth generating assets that will hopefully last into the future, especially if you're looking at getting into evergreen niches like finance and banking, weight loss or others.

I started looking though Flippa to get a sense of what options are available in terms of websites for purchase and some of them look almost too good to be true. For example, a stable RL business can often be purchased for 5-10x the annual revenue that it generates but some of these businesses can actualize a positive return on investment after the first few months only. I guess this is because a website is slightly less stable than a business when it comes to generating revenue.

Here's what I'm hoping to learn:

-Does anyone here have experience with buying or selling websites on flippa?
-Has anyone experimented with investment in websites? If so, what was the end result?
-What due diligence is required to make sure that things move in the right direction when taking over the website? How do you verify the reported traffic, traffic sources and revenue?
-What is the number one reason that someone typically sells their website and what unique insight do people have that makes them sell a $$ generating asset to somebody else instead of just maintaining it?

Any input and discussion will be appreciated!