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National Rent Control, Falling Mortgage Rates, and Fleeing Homebuyers

National Rent Control, Falling Mortgage Rates, and Fleeing Homebuyers

A new nationwide rent control proposal could cap rent increases for any landlord with a certain amount of properties. But will it actually pass? How would landlords survive when rents can only marginally increase each year while expenses continue to see double-digit percentage price growth? We’re getting into this story and a few more hard-hitting housing market headlines on today’s episode!

First, we’re talking about the new rent cap proposal coming straight from The White House. This could significantly affect anyone who owns a large real estate portfolio or plans to in the future. Is this proposal merely a grab for votes, or could it actually come to fruition? Next, great news for homebuyers, as mortgage rates fall once again, all while completed homes see a sizable boost. Is this a sign that a healthier housing market is to come?

Why are international buyers fleeing the US housing market? Could this end up helping first-time homebuyers who have to fight off less competition? Finally, we talk about the twenty hottest housing markets that are seeing a BIG increase in home viewership. If you own a home in one of these markets, it might be time to consider selling.

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Listen to the Podcast Here

Read the Transcript Here

Kathy:

You may have heard that the real estate world is going into a frenzy over a new White House proposal that would cap rent prices. But is it likely to ever see the light of day? Are home buyers going to be encouraged after a fall in fixed rate mortgages? And what are today’s hottest markets? We’re covering this and more on today’s show.

Hello, I’m Kathy Fettke, one of your hosts today while Dave Meyers is out. Welcome to On the Market. I’ve got Henry Washington and James Dainard here with us today.

James:

Hello guys. Good To see you guys.

What’s going on Kathy, how are

Kathy:

You excited? We’re kind of jealous. I think Dave is on a beach somewhere in south of France. He deserves

James:

It. They got no service on the south of France. Beats. Yeah,

Kathy:

Well today we will just do our headline show without him. We’ll miss him though. This is a show where we pull four headlines from the news cycle and discuss how they impact investors so you can make informed investing decisions. Today we’re discussing a White House proposal to cap rents nationwide, a drop in fixed rate mortgages, international buyers pulling away from the US market and the 20 hottest markets in the country right now. But before we get into it, make sure to hit that follow button on Apple or Spotify to make sure that you never miss an episode and let’s get into it. Alright, the first headline is from the New York Times and it is the White House plan to limit rent increases nationwide reignites debate. And the key points are a new Biden proposal aims to withdraw tax credits from landlords who raise rent by more than 5% a year. It applies to investors with more than 50 units and new construction seems to be exempt. Now economists are pushing back saying that rent caps end up hurting the tenant in the long run because it limits the quality of rentals out there and it doesn’t incentivize new construction for sure. So guys, what do you think? Do you think this is ever going to pass?

James:

Well, I hope it doesn’t pass. We already deal with regulation up in Washington pretty drastically, and I think what’s going on is there’s this affordability crisis and they’re trying to figure out what to do. And I think this is more of an election headline than anything else. I think at the end of the day it’s going to come down to the state that you’re investing in. I do believe that the states that have more rent control and we’re definitely feeling it up in Washington, there’s a lot of legislation moving around. It’s constantly evolving where it’s protecting the tenant more that it’s going to continue to go that way. And I think I know as far as what I’ve looked into for the last year or two is what markets can I start also investing in to just kind of hedge against it? But I do think it is going to continue on the states and they’re going to keep pushing more and more rent control and it’s something that you really do need to forecast out.

Is your market worth dealing with the regulation or not? And the only people that can decide that is you as an investor. For me, it makes sense. We can buy value add, we can create equity and the headache’s worth it for us. But I think you do need to head in. And I don’t think federally, they’re going to be kind of rolling this out everywhere. I think it’s more of a headline. It’s kind of like the student loan forgiveness. It’s just like throwing free money at people to try to get votes. And so I don’t think it’s going to happen, but on the state side I would really put it on people’s radar. Henry, what are your thoughts?

Henry:

I mean, I agree with James. I don’t know that as a country it’ll get implemented, but I definitely think some states will implement a policy like this or similar. And my general thoughts are, as a good landlord you should be keeping your rents at or around market. You can strategically keep your rents a little bit under market so that you don’t price people out of neighborhoods, but rents do go up over time. So even if you’re using that kind of a strategy, you should be increasing a little bit every year in order to keep up with whatever market rates are. Because what happens is when I as a landlord come and I buy a property from an existing landlord who’s not keeping up with rents and maybe they haven’t in 10 or so years, I mean I’ve taken over properties where rents were around four to $500 that landlord had because he had a tenant in it for 10 to 15 years that they never raised rents and now market rents are sitting around $1,200.

And in order for me to be able to afford that property, there has to be this drastic increase. And although it may have helped that tenant for a little while, it now becomes a position where that tenant position because I can’t afford to keep the property unless the rents are around or close to market rents. And so if this gets implemented, I think that that’s where you start to see some problems. Because if I go and buy a property and that landlord hasn’t kept up with rents and now I can only raise rents $10 a year from the four or $500 it is, that’s a problem. But if you are keeping up with your rents and you’re raising them with the market, then I think that this can create a somewhat healthy situation. It’s just not going to be healthy in every sense. You cannot raise rents if you think about what this means.

If you have, let’s say you have a thousand dollars rent, you can only raise your rent $50 the next year if you have a $1,500 rent, you can only raise your rent about $75 the next year. And I don’t think that that’s unreasonable if your place is already priced at or near market rents. But if it is not, I think this creates a problem because it disincentivizes people from coming in and revitalizing areas and making the properties safe and comfortable living because they can’t afford to put tenants in them that will be able to pay rents that support them being able to do that. And so it may create less housing and it does, it’s going to incentivize people to stay away from value add because you can’t make money in apartments doing value add where you can’t raise rents above 5%.

Kathy:

Yeah, I don’t see how this could pass, especially at a time when we’ve just experienced inflation as high as 9%. If there was a cap of 5%, why does the landlord have to take on that burden? Burden? I can understand maybe giving tax credits to a family who’s really having a difficult time affording to live in an area, but to penalize the landlord for a situation that’s really out of their control for the most part it usually comes down to supply and demand. If there is just not enough supply and a lot of demand, then prices go up on whatever the item it is. And that includes rent. So the solution is not rent caps, it’s helping bring on more supply so that there is, and we’re going to talk about this in a little bit, but so that there’s more competition and prices come down, member competitions, everything. And if there’s too much competition, you’re just going to see rents rise. And that’s the problem. They’ve surged 26% in just four years and your rent going up a quarter percent and you’re a family that maybe hasn’t experienced that in your income and things are just getting tighter and tighter for so many families. So there needs to be a solution. Unfortunately the solution can’t be done right away. You can’t just bring on new supply overnight. But rent caps just not a solution.

Henry:

And to be clear, I’m not totally against some level of regulation and capping. I think we do need to be fair to tenants, but we also need to be fair to landlords who are trying to be good landlords and create affordable housing in these neighborhoods. And so maybe it’s that there’s a cap once that property is already at or near market rents, but you have to give landlords some incentive to want to come in and purchase these properties and make them viable living units for that community so that community can continue to grow and thrive. And again, I’m not talking about coming in and raising rents and then pricing people in that neighborhood out of that neighborhood. I’m not talking about gentrification, I’m talking about revitalization. There are properties that are either in service or shouldn’t be in service because of the condition of them. And you need investors to come in and bring those properties up to a safe living standard and then offer it back to that same community at a price they can afford. And you want to be able to incentivize landlords to do that.

James:

I think this is more of a manipulation, a headline in trying to get voters attention because there’s no solution on this, right? You can’t just roll it out nationwide as property taxes and insurance and other expenses are crushing landlords. Landlords are always made out to be the bad guys, but we’re the ones getting our butts kicked right now by expenses and the cashflow has already been going way down. It’s causing mass fits for people. You can’t just cap rent because that’s a one-sided solution. You have to look at the whole problem. How do we get the expenses down? Well then let’s share the savings around the board and figure out how do you get those core cost down because rents are going up. But the thing you also hear is people’s cashflow is not that’s, and so it’s a one-sided argument. Most people I know are making less cashflow even with increasing their rents, that rent increases are not keeping up with the expenses.

Kathy:

People have to decide, do they want the government providing them housing that has not worked so great in the past or do you want investors providing that rental housing? And that’s a double bonus because it’s also helping the landlord create a retirement so they don’t have to be dependent on the government later. People just have to make that choice. And if you just completely deincentivize landlords, it’s already tough, like you said, with rates so high and all the additional costs, so high. Again, you got to choose, do you want government as your landlord or do you want individuals? Alright, we’ve got to take a quick break, but don’t go anywhere. We’ve got some good news for investors right after this. Welcome back to On The Market. Let’s jump back into the latest headlines. Alright, James, why don’t you read the next headline for us?

James:

Well, I got better news than you, Kathy. The housing market gets back to back. Good news. We could use some good news. The 30 year fixed rate mortgages fell again last week from an average of 6.89% to 6.77% 15 year fixed average just fell over 6%. The US Census Bureau also said they completed homes rose last month by 10% up 15.5% a year ago. But home buyers are still hesitant. And so where I feel like this is good news currently we have a lot of properties for sale. We’re seeing this trend nationwide, and I’m hearing it across the board and I’m seeing it too. Months of supply is slowly increasing up in a lot of different markets and that’s to be expected with the seasons. We always see this summer seasonal slowdown. And that’s one thing I think people need to remember. I’m talking to a couple investors recently like, oh man, the market’s hitting a wall.

I’m like, well, it is summertime. That’s just what happens. Things are starting to slow down, but buyers are being very hesitant and it’s not even just that they’re being hesitant, they’re sitting on the sidelines because the amount of showings we’re seeing have dropped off substantially. I mean, we’re talking about our showings locally have probably dropped down at least 50% in the last four weeks and there’s just less buyers coming through because things are really expensive. And I think this is good news, but I feel like the last 12 months, every time we heard this, investors were like, the market’s going to explode. It’s going to explode. But I got to say, I think the Fed is just doing a good job making it this transition right now. Yeah, I got to say I hated on Jerome Powell quite a bit when he just stepped on the gas with these rates. But it seems to be kind of slowly working. The market’s kind of cooling down. Rates are starting to get a little bit of relief and we’re not seeing a J either way. We don’t really want to see that anymore in the market. We can’t see the market jumping and dropping and jumping and dropping. It is not healthy to invest in. And so I think it’s bringing some normality to our market, which I definitely appreciate.

Kathy:

Yeah, I actually think that it’s going to be exactly what you said. I think there’s going to be another boom just like we’ve been talking about. It’s the ups and the downs. And as soon as mortgage rates go down combined with more inventory on the market, which kind of will help cap the price growth, it’s going to be a robust fall would be, if I were to predict, I would say the combination of low rates and home price is not going up so much because of more inventory. I think it’s going to be a really good healthy year. So to interpret it, it seems just more healthy. It’ll be less out of reach for a certain group of people who’ve just been on the sidelines and are just a few dollars off from being able to qualify for that loan. Now they can and they can jump back in. So Henry, what are your thoughts?

Henry:

I was going to say, I think this is good news. This is what we haven’t had in a while, which is a little bit of predictability. If we understand that there’s not going to be this crazy jump one way or another, and we understand that there’s less buyers and we understand that there’s a little more inventory we can be, we can underwrite appropriately. We can buy deals that only make sense given the environment that we’re in, and then we can try to monetize those deals in this current environment. What we’ve been dealing with the past couple of years is we’re buying a property, we’re trying to underwrite it the best we can, but historical data isn’t factual anymore because the market’s changing so fast that it’s almost like if you’re not an experienced investor, it feels like it’s a crapshoot. Is this property going to be worth what I thought it was when I bought it, or is it going to be worth more?

Is it going to be worth less? Who knows? Tune in next week and we may find out, but now there’s a little health and predictability. We have to be conservative in our underwriting. We have to buy deals and then we can expect that they’re going to sell at the price points we underwrite them at in a couple of months. If you are an investor, this can be beneficial to you. You just have to again, be conservative and you’ve got to be fundamentally sound. But isn’t that what you want from your investors who are coming in, buying properties, renovating them, and then selling them to your general public? You want them to be able to buy them at a price point that allows them to fix them appropriately. You want them to have to pay attention to what they’re doing, fix the actual problems, make a good product, and then be good marketers of offering that product to the community, a safe, comfortable product to that community at a fair price point.

And then you want the buyers to be able to come in, buy the property, but be able to do the necessary due diligence that they need to do in order for them to feel comfortable buying that property. This is what a healthy market should be, this is what we need as a country. And so yes, is it tougher for a flipper? I mean, in comparison to three years ago, yeah, it’s tougher, but flippers weren’t forced to produce good products back then. Flippers were just getting in the game, buying something, putting lipstick on it, throwing it back out there. And so now it forces you to be a good flipper. It forces you to pay attention to the product you’re putting out there and to think about your consumer and to be fundamentally sound. This is healthy.

James:

And I think right now as you go into a transition, there’s always a market that goes up and down and moves around that’s just investing. And I think people forget that timing is everything in real estate, especially when you’re doing flip disposition. The amount of applications has been slowing down in the winter. They’re down 5% and I think they’re down a 28 year low right now. They have not seen this low of mortgage applications since 1996. But what you are seeing an increase in is FHA applications. And so as investors, you want to target where the movement is. And for us as flippers, we’re trying to look at where’s that median home price inside that city that it’s in. It doesn’t matter about whether you’re in an expensive market or a cheap market is what is affordable inside your market. Those FHA buyers want low down payments. They want to be around that median home price for whatever the city it is. And that stuff is moving more. And also the applications have gone up nearly half percent in this last month and that tells you where the activity is. And so if you’re nervous about investing, target where the movement is. And that is a huge hit alone, that first time home buyers and people trying to get in the market are still looking. And that’s where the sweet spot is.

Kathy:

It’s amazing to me that still so many people aren’t aware of the FHA loan or the fact that they can get a loan for three, three and a half percent down. I keep hearing, oh, I got to come up with this huge down payment. And there is so much assistance for first time buyers. So if you’re wondering how you’re going to get into the market, just really check out those options that are available for people. So if it’s more FHA loans today, that means that there’s more first time home buyers in there. I think a lot of the data you just said James has to do with, it’s a little bit dated, right? It’s before rates came down, so rates were high with home prices at all new highs, so the market just froze. But now that rates are down, I think the next time we get a report, it’s going to be better, especially if they stay down. Yeah, we’re seeing

James:

Any uptick in showings, I will say that. So that’s real-time information. That is my favorite thing to track how many bodies are coming through houses, and I will say over the last 10 days, we’ve seen zero increase. Wow. And if not a decrease, even with rates coming down, which is kind of a new feeling in the last six to nine months, and that’s okay. It’s just to be expected with the seasons, but they might need to cut the rates a little bit more to pump the bodies back in.

Kathy:

Henry, are you seeing the same thing?

Henry:

We are definitely seeing less showings, but we weren’t seeing a ton. So where James had kind of an uptick maybe a couple of months ago in his market, we kind of stayed flat. And so we’ve come down just a little bit on showings, but our market is so steady that it’s not terrible news. What we are still seeing is if it is priced appropriately, and especially if it is priced under $300,000, you’re going to get showings and you’re going to get an offer within 30 days. It’s just steady here. When you’re starting to see really the big dropoffs are on the kind of that second tier home where you’re upgrading to your second tier home or the luxury home. But even we’ve had some cushion there because our local market is a little different and the companies here have required people to move back to the area in order to stay employed. And so those high income earners who have either moved away or got hired when they live somewhere else, are now having to move here and they’re buying up some of those second tier and luxury homes. We’re pretty steady here.

Kathy:

Yeah, it’s a double-edged sword, these low interest rates, because as we go into the fall, we have heard it’s pretty certain that the Fed is going to cut rates. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean that mortgage rates will come down and it may already be priced in because the world knows that the Fed is going to cut rates. But with that said, we’re in a different cycle. Everything’s changing right now. The cutting rates was meant to slow down the economy. Now we’re at the shifting point where the Fed is going to cut rates and do the opposite. So it’s really like a tide shift, which changes everything. And they’re going to probably continue that trajectory into next year. That’s great. If you’re trying to buy a house, what’s not so great is it also means increased job losses. That’s usually what comes along with a stimulus of the economy, their cutting rates to kind of stimulate it. And part of what happens during this part of the cycle is job losses. That’s what the Fed wants to see, but we might already be there where they want to be, so hopefully it won’t be too many and there’s still enough job openings that people who lose their jobs could get another job. But that is sort of what comes with low mortgage rates is higher job losses. All right. Well, let’s move on to Henry’s headline, headline number three.

Henry:

All right. And this headline is from CNBC, and it says, here’s why the international buyers are pulling way back from the US housing market. What they’re saying in this article is that international buyers have purchased about 54,000 existing homes from April, 2023 to March, 2024, and that’s a 36% drop from the previous year. So this is the lowest level of international investment since the NAR started to track it in 2009. And if you look at it in terms of decrease in dollar volume, the dollar volume of these purchases was 42 billion, and that is down 21% from the previous year. The foreign buyers are facing the same challenges as domestic buyers, which include high home prices, higher interest rates. The average purchase price for the international buyer was 780,000, and the median was about 475,000. And both of those were the highest ever recorded by NAR. But some of the challenges that the international buyers are facing that we don’t have to face as domestic buyers are the strong US dollar that they have to take into account, plus they don’t have credit scores and some of the other things that make it easier for us as domestic buyers to be able to buy homes.

So why does this matter for investors?

Kathy:

Well, it’s less competition from people outside the country. That’s probably good for our inventory levels, but I really think it’s not going to last that long. It’s just, in my opinion, a situation where central banks and other countries have already started cutting rates. We haven’t yet. So once the Fed starts cutting rates, I think we’ll be more on par with other countries and we’ll see those buyers come back, but not right now, while the exchange rate is not really in their favor.

Henry:

So in my market, we don’t see a ton of international buyers. I’m sure people in foreign countries aren’t salivating over the thought of investing in Arkansas, but in California, I think this is one of the areas where international buyers do end up buying a lot of homes. Do you feel competition from international buyers there?

Kathy:

There’s a lot of international buyers where I live and also where we invest, yeah. Yeah, we do. But we’re not really seeing an impact in our markets yet, at least that I’m feeling.

James:

I will say they’re still in ours. I think for your normal homeowner, the decrease in foreign purchasing actually has been a good thing for ’em because when the market starts slowing down, it goes through little cycles. The foreign buyers are typically the most opportunistic. They can go from a red hot market to cool down and they’ll throw out offers, what they feel is reasonable. And that’s okay. So I feel like it’s actually helping certain buyers in our market right now because they’re way on top of the stack and they can get a little bit of a better deal. And then the foreign competition, cash is quite a bit below, but for that affordable product for investors, it is definitely still moving because if they’re getting a buy, they will still buy it. And the one thing about foreign money that you’re always competing against, or at least we do in our market, it’s expensive.

Our cost of money is expensive, and we got to deal that and build that into the deal. Their expected returns are so much lower than what we are shooting for, that we are still getting beat out on deals that I would never buy as a rental property because they’re paying all cash, they’re not levering up and they’re clipping maybe a four and a half percent return, but it’s better than what they can get in their own country. And they’re okay with that. Four and a half percent is the most boring return I could ever think of. That is not for me. But they’re still buying. And if it’s a clean, discounted property, they’re aggressive on that. Heavy fixtures, not as much. And then I think that premium product, new construction, that stuff is definitely not moving. That’s going to your buyers that need the housing. So I think it’s been kind of a good thing. Yeah.

Henry:

Again, we don’t have a lot of foreign buyers, so that would make it a foreign concept to me. No, nobody. Okay, and so that was going to be my question since you guys do have them. It sounds to me kind of like they buy maybe a hedge fund buys, they come in and they’re willing to pay 80 to 90% of the current value of the property and they pay all cash. And that can hurt the consumer who’s looking to buy a property to live in. But does it really hurt you from an investment standpoint? Are you buying the same product?

James:

I feel like they don’t buy hedge funds. The hedge funds buy a lot on just built-in returns, at least from my experience working with them where they have a minimum cashflow, a specific type of product that they’re going to put in their portfolio and it hits the number or not foreign transactions and foreign money, I see a lot more. It’s that value approach like, Hey, I can buy this for three 50 a foot in markets 400. They’re looking for that extra value in there because the re metrics sometimes makes zero sense, especially when they’re buying expensive neighborhoods like California, Seattle,

Henry:

Florida, the thing that’s

James:

Expensive, your returns, like if you buy a cashflow property in Bellevue right now, even if you get a decent buy and you pay all cash, you’re getting a two and a half cap or three, and you might be buying below market, which they are. You can buy that product cheaper now with the cost of money, but you still can’t cashflow it. Well, and so that’s where I’ve been seeing them transact more as buying on the value rather than the actual rent metrics because the appreciation alone, if it goes up three and a half percent that year is still way better than they’re getting in their own country.

Kathy:

We do have to take a quick break, but we have one more headline about the hottest markets in the country right now. Are we investing in any of these? We’ll discuss this when we return.

Welcome back investors. Let’s get back to the conversation. Well, let’s move on to our fourth headline. This is from Yahoo Finance, and it is if you live in one of these 20 housing markets, consider selling while it’s still hot. So the article goes on to say that the markets including Manchester, New Hampshire, Springfield, Massachusetts, Rockford, Illinois, new Haven, Connecticut, they’re all just hot, hot markets. I think it was like 16 days on market as their average. So a recent report from realtor.com showed that listings from the 20 hottest markets received three times the views as the national average. So Henry, would you say it’s a good time to buy and these markets are a good time to sell?

Henry:

Well, I mean, if values have gone up and the markets are hot, it is a good time to consider selling. And so when this happens in my local market, when I invest, what I start to do is I call it like you start to look at trimming the fat on your portfolio. So if you’ve bought deals, especially if you’re a buy and hold investor, so if you’ve bought deals, you should really be looking at your portfolio and saying, well, what properties are actually hitting the metrics that I underwrote them at? Are they cash flowing like you? You can take a look at your insurance costs. We know insurance costs have gone up all over the country. Take a look at your total net cashflow. How are your insurance costs going? How are your taxes going? How are your expenses going? Has this property had more maintenance than you thought it would?

And so then you can look at that property and think, okay, well this property isn’t making me the money that I thought it was going to make me. How long would it take for me to get to that point? Or should I throw this property on the market, capture that equity in terms of a sale and then redeploy that capital into properties that are going to help you hit your numbers more effectively. And so you just want to be strategic about if you’re going to look to start offloading properties, what properties you’re offloading, and not just selling because the market is hot, because when the market is hot, you got to think this is what we want, right? As investors, we buy when the market is not as hot because we can get a better deal, and then we capture that value add or that appreciation when the market gets hotter. And it may mean that you need to hold on to some of your properties through this, but this is a good time to trim the fat on your portfolio, take a look at what’s costing you money and not making you money, and then get a premium for selling that property and redeploying that capital.

Kathy:

James, your thoughts?

James:

Well, there’s so many other reasons of why you sell, and Henry just touched on that and what you should be doing, right? As an investor, you should audit your portfolio or audit your buy box and your goals every year. What are you trying to accomplish and what market do you need to be in? And then how will that market help you get closer to your goals or improve your portfolio? If you’re not happy with your returns, you should be running. I always run return on equity every year. How much equity do I have? What’s my true, true return? And then I look at what’s available. Can I trade that out for a different type of property, increase that return, like Henry said, analyze the cashflow. Are my cost going up too much in a certain market and are they looking like the cost are going to go up higher?

If you’re in California and you’re not cash flowing that well, and you have a lot of equity and you think that insurance costs continue to rise, which it sounds like is going to, maybe it’s a good time to trade out. And so you want to look at more the asset rather than the location. Now I will sell anything, and so if I can get the right offer, I will sell it. But I think it’s more of an indicator of not men to sell, but that you’re actually, if you’re in any of these 20 markets, it’s that you bought in the right market, you bought in an area their people are still wanting to reload to, and you want to look at, okay, is that migration changing or is it going to continue? Maybe there’s more runway on that deal if the population is increasing, if the median income’s increasing and there’s still runway on that location, then don’t touch it. But if you’re starting to slow down, then look at disposing and try to catch that next runway city where there is growth, but there’s no indicators you should sell just because people are clicking on it more online. That should not be your deciding factor.

Henry:

James, always chasing the juice, man, always chasing the juice.

James:

But if I can squeeze the juice, I will sell always.

Kathy:

A lot of times we don’t even know what our properties are worth as buy and hold investors, unless you’re constantly looking it up. But let’s just look at this one market on here. Manchester New Hampshire, median days on market is 14, and the median list price is $630,000. I highly doubt that that property cash flows at that price. So it might be a time if you were an investor and Manchester and you thought, well, I have a lot of equity in this. I could sell this and go buy two or three properties in another market that’s also hot, but I’m going to really increase my cashflow this way. So finding out what are your buy and hold properties worth today, maybe they’re worth more than you thought. We just found out in Pittsburgh that a property we paid 230,000 for just a few years ago is now worth about 400 because a lot of the downtown Pittsburgh area is revitalizing. So we’re not getting enough rent to make that make sense. So we are selling that property in 10 31, exchanging into a couple of properties that are lower priced in other markets. So again, portfolio reevaluation. Super important. Take a look, find out what your property’s worth if you’re not a buy and hold investor, these seem like pretty hot markets for flipping. If there’s 14 days on market, there’s demand for sure. So seems good for flippers.

Henry:

No, I totally agree with you, Kathy. That’s a great point.

Kathy:

Thanks. Well, that is it for today. Thank you so much for joining us. And as a reminder, if you want to learn more about real estate, be a savvy investor, just visit biggerpockets.com. There are so many resources for you there. It’s kind of a one-stop shop. You don’t need to go anywhere else. biggerpockets.com. We will see you soon for another episode of On The Market.

Dave:

On The Market was created by me, Dave Meyer and Kaylin Bennett. The show is produced by Kaylin Bennett, with editing by Exodus Media. Copywriting is by Calico content, and we want to extend a big thank you to everyone at BiggerPockets for making this show possible.

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In This Episode We Cover

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  • Mortgage rates drop again, but are more rate cuts coming this year?
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National Rent Control, Falling Mortgage Rates, and Fleeing Homebuyers

Will Home Renovation Costs Go Down in 2024 as Demand Begins to Dip? w/WSJ’s Ryan Dezember

For the past four years, everyone, and we mean everyone, has been doing some form of home improvement. All your friends are redoing their kitchens, your spouse keeps asking when you can renovate the bathrooms, and your best friend just built their dream home office with—don’t get too excited—recessed lighting. This was the home renovation boom of the decade, and now, we could be at the tail end of it.

With home improvement spending starting to dip, interest rates keeping homeowners from big projects, and labor costs still sky-high, what happens when enough demand leaves the market? Do material prices fall as manufacturers try to lure homeowners back in? Will labor costs soften with contractors waiting for work? We brought on The Wall Street Journal’s Ryan Dezember to get some answers.

In today’s show, we discuss the boom and bust of lumber prices, why home renovations are starting to stall, what impact this could have on materials, and whether or not the home improvement spree will pick back up as new construction starts decline. If you’re planning a home renovation, you’ll want to hear this episode before you begin.

Click here to listen on Apple Podcasts.

Listen to the Podcast Here

Read the Transcript Here

Dave:

Will home renovation costs ever become reasonably priced again? And will Americans continue to just dish out whatever they have to pay for home remodels and renovations because they’re preferring to stay in place rather than trying to move to new homes? Today we’re going to dig into the home repair market and what it looks like after the pandemic. Hey everyone, it’s Dave Meyer. Joining me today is the master of home renovations and construction at James Dainard himself. James, I know that costs in terms of renovation and supplies have really been impacting your business, so hopefully you’ll have a lot of good questions for our guests here. Today

James:

Is boring, is building cost material sounds. It’s one of the most exciting things I can talk about, has such impact on a daily basis, and I’m always addicted to the deal, find cheaper products. It’s a puzzle right now to get your cost down.

Dave:

Well, I’m glad we brought in you as the co-host today because you’re probably the only person on earth who thinks that this is super exciting. But I agree that it’s important, exciting or not, this stuff really matters because as an investor you want to understand how to be most cost effective, how to time, potential renovations, when and where you want to add value to your properties. And so to help you understand that all we’re bringing on Ryan Dezember. He’s a reporter at the Wall Street Journal and he covers all sorts of things like commodities, oil, natural gas, lumber, and rental houses. And today we’re going to talk to him about the stark rise in home remodeling costs from peak pandemic numbers until now and what the true drivers of those costs are. And then we’re going to discuss some indicators that predict what we may see in the future. We’re curious if we’re at the tail end of a home repair, boom, are we in the middle? Are we at the bottom? What is going on in this industry and the larger housing market so that we all can make informed investing decisions? So James, if you’re ready, let’s bring on Ryan.

Ryan, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us today.

Ryan:

Thanks for having me.

Dave:

For our listeners who aren’t super closely following the home repair industry, I am one of those people. Can we just take a step back and have you walk us through what’s been going on with just home supplies and repair costs? Maybe let’s start with the beginning of the pandemic.

Ryan:

Yeah, so if you go back to lockdown, if you remember, we were all suddenly at home, markets were crashing stocks, commodities, pretty much any asset class was tumbling in the unknown. And that summer what started to happen, we noticed that lumber futures started ticking up really rising pretty sharply. And if you think back, everyone’s stuck at home, everyone’s bored, everyone’s not going out and spending money on going to baseball games or dinner or movies, vacations. They’re looking around their house and they’re like, how can we make this house better? We’re here. Let’s do that project. Let’s clear out the old bedroom and make a home office. Let’s build our dream deck. All these things are happening and everybody has the same idea at once. And you may remember lumber futures, they almost became like a meme or a joke they shot up. So take me somewhere someplace expensive and it shows a couple eating dinner in the lumber aisle at Home Depot and sort of remodeled and mass. And what happened is that accelerated a long trend in home improvement and repair spending that we’ve had in America over the past couple decades. And it really just juiced it and to the point where we had lumber futures go to nearly three times the pre pandemic record, just obscenely expensive two by fours, which are sort of the base commodity for building and repairs.

And that really didn’t slow down when the feds started raising rates to cool down inflation and just sort of douse all that spending that comes from rising property values and full savings accounts, lumber prices did react and they were the first thing to sort of fall one of the first asset classes, but it didn’t really change Americans mentality or desire to do to remodel their homes and repair their homes. And now we’re sort of two years in, we’re starting to see signs that that is slowing down. Lumber prices have fallen, we’re starting to see some other things happen that suggest maybe this long boom in home repair and improvement spending is starting to slow down. There’s a group at Harvard that studies this and they put out an index called the leading indicator of remodeling activity that has started showing the first downturn in annual spending of this sort since the housing crash of the two thousands to 2008, 2009 housing crash. So these businesses that supply building materials are really on high alert for that to happen. We don’t know if it’ll come true. Every time it predicts a downturn, something happens. It predicted the last time it predicted a downturn was heading into 2020. It didn’t predict the pandemic and what would happen there. So we’ve had this tremendous acceleration and now we’re sort of seeing the brakes being put on.

Dave:

And when you say that it’s coming down, is it total remodel costs like individuals are spending less money? Is it that less individuals are doing projects or that material costs are actually coming down?

Ryan:

Yeah, that’s a good question. Really. You kind of have to look at it in a couple different segments. You want to paint a room, you want to replace the faucet in your bathroom. Those are small jobs. You go to the hardware store, you get it done, it’s under a few hundred dollars, you do it yourself. Probably those things are going to still continue a pace. And if you look at Home Depot and Lowe’s earnings, you’ll see that what’s really slowing down is the things that people have to finance, the big projects, the big deck, the big new kitchen, things like that. And one of the big reasons for that is the higher interest rates have made tapping your home equity line a lot more expensive. We have this tremendous buildup of home equity, something like 17 trillion that people are sitting on, but they’re kind of prevented from tapping into that with interest rates. It could be seven to, I don’t know, into up above 10% for those sort of loans. So that’s really put the brakes on a lot of big project spending.

James:

We do a lot of different types of construction. We build new, we do renovation, we do apartment renovation. So there’s all different types of construction that we do. And it’s been kind of weird the last 12 months. We see little peaks and valleys in each different segment too. And where we’ve noticed the cost of construction on new construction, our pricing’s actually gone down about 10% year over year for our cost to build because it spiked up for a minute and we were building, I think around 300 bucks a foot and now we’re back down to 62 70 a foot. But the one thing we’ve seen increases on is the remodel cost, and it’s not the building materials, it’s the labor. The building materials have actually came down quite a bit to where you’re not really, you’re paying not too much more than you used to be.

Like lumbers came way down, HVAC equipment came way down, but the labor cost on the remodel side is still just exploding right now. I mean, I feel like every month that goes by, they’re charging three to 5% more really, and I think it’s more of a shortage of bodies, whereas the new construction, they have bigger teams, way more bodies and they have to keep ’em working. They don’t keep ’em working. They’re in the red. And so it is been kind of interesting to track. Have you seen a difference? Cost of construction has gone down, that’s building materials, but I’m still seeing labor starting to pop up pretty heavy still.

Ryan:

If you parse the construction spending numbers like the big picture stuff, what you’ll see is, I mean we’re still in the middle of an all time factory building. Boom. We’re building factories in America like we haven’t since World War ii, post World War II decades. A lot of that’s coming from, remember the Chips and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act that encouraged a lot of construction of things, of solar panels and things related to the energy transition and computer chips, things like that. But there’s also a company, I cover graphic packaging. They make your paper coffee cups and the boxes, your shoes or cereal or a 12 pack of beer come in, they’re building a facility in Texas that it’s going to cost more than a billion dollars. It’s going to take two years. I went to a factory they built in Kalamazoo. They had every electrician they could find in the lower 48.

Working on that project for a while. You couldn’t get a hotel room in Kalamazoo while that thing was going on. That construction, these big projects will really suck up a lot of that labor and especially the skilled labor. And so if you’re a construction worker and you can go get on a project like that and get a paycheck for a couple of years, you’re not going to be messing around with renovations and sort of odd jobs. You might turn to that when things go slower on the high end, but you have all this high end construction really consuming the labor and not really leaving a lot of people to do the small jobs around town. When I grew up, I grew up working at my parents’ hardware store and outside of Cleveland, and we would see that when times were good, you would’ve contractors coming in when money was tight. People come in and buy stuff and do stuff on their own and you could kind of judge the economy based on who was shopping. And you kind of see that on a grand scale with this factory building boom and the infrastructure that’s being built.

James:

Yeah, that’s kind of how it works. In my office, if I’m picking specs, that means we need to save money. I’m like, no, no, no. I’m on Amazon. You’re picking these specs. And if it’s good, I let the brokers and everybody pick whatever specs they want and it looks shiny and it costs a little bit more.

Ryan:

Yeah,

Dave:

We got to take a quick break, but stick with us more from Ryan Dezember when we return. Welcome back to On the Market podcast. We’re here with Ryan Dezember from the Wall Street Journal talking about home repairs. So Ryan, I’m curious if you could sort of break down some of the costs and trends for us, because when we’re talking about remodel, it’s a pretty big generalization. Are there any areas that are seeing a particular slowdown or any other types of renovations that may be remaining more resilient?

Ryan:

Really, the high end is coming down anything that needs to be financed and that’s interest rates. And you have to figure, a lot of people just built their dream deck in their dream kitchen the last few years. So the pandemic and the lockdown sort of sucked that demand forward. We haven’t really seen a big slowdown in the small projects painting a bedroom or building your garden boxes or whatever. Those small things are still happening and lumber’s way down from what it was. So if you could have waited to do a project, it’s going to be a lot cheaper now if you’re not paying for labor.

Dave:

I’m sort of surprised to hear this, Ryan, because I guess I was expecting that renovation trends would at least stay pretty stable right now given what we’re seeing with the market. Because with the quote lock in effect, we’ve seen transaction volume in the housing market go down by 40, 50%. And so the logic is that with fewer people trading up for new homes, trading down whatever, that they’re going to spend money or just try and improve their current living situation. Does your hypothesis or your research show that that sort of trend has run its course, people have already done that and now people are sort of content or they’ve run out of money due to inflation or what do you think the reason is?

Ryan:

Yeah, well, I think there’s a lot of people, probably just investors with the stock market waiting for interest rates to come down. The market’s basically all in on a September rate cut that’s basically priced into everything that’s assumed to be coming. That won’t dramatically lower cost for financing these projects, but that’s the start of it coming down. Maybe people put things back on the drawing board and start thinking about lining up those projects. Right now to your point, you have these people that are locked into homes and there are companies out there making a bet along the lines of what you said that they’re not going to move, they’re going to add on. We published a story not too long ago about a company called trx. They make that composite decking.

Dave:

Oh, I know it. Yeah, it’s awesome. It’s very expensive, but it’s awesome.

Ryan:

It’s like this amazing product of recycled material, very high end decks. These are decks that contractors are building. People aren’t messing around with a circular saw out back. This is pretty high end stuff. And they’re betting that demand will not slow on that high end that they’re looking around saying people are going to stay in place. There’s not a lot of homes for them to go to, so they’re going to tap their home equity, they’re going to build their dream deck with the kitchen and the outdoor living room, and to the point that Trex is spending something close to a half a billion dollars to build a new manufacturing facility in Arkansas to crank out more of this stuff. And you think about it, it didn’t make sense. That’s the cheapest way to add square footage to a house is to do it outside. The other thing that companies like that have going for ’em and contractors is that the American home is not getting any younger. On average, the American House is about 40 years old, so they’re in need of renovation. They were built to a different era. I don’t know how you guys grew up, but when I grew up as a kid, the houses that people lived in were much simpler, smaller, different designs with a lot of separate rooms, hallways, hallways are like a thing of the past now, all these different changes. So you’re going to see a lot of houses needing to be renovated, redone, regardless, major repairs.

James:

And on some of the remodeling in 2022, I think there was almost a record request for HELOCs because people decided, Hey, I’m going to stay in my homes and start renovating. And it seemed like we saw the spike in HELOCs getting pulled, especially for owner occupied because that was the only ones you could get 2020 2, 23. Now these costs of HELOCs have gone up quite a bit, where now investors are paying sometimes 10 to 12% for their heloc, and I feel like they’re all pulling ’em, but then they’re not using ’em, which is probably a good thing half the time where they have ’em, but then they want the rate to fall before they take on that renovation project. And I feel like the building’s kind of gone a little bit softer recently. We have a lot more contractors reaching out to us on the regular right now going, Hey, do you have more work? Do you have more work? I mean, I had some guy from four years ago, he reached out to me the other day, he’s like, Hey, I need some work. This is who I am. I’m like, yeah, I remember you stole $15,000 from me, what, four years ago? And I’m like, oh, hi Sam. How are you? He’s like, good, you got any work for me? I’m like, yeah, where’s my money? And he’s like, oh,

Dave:

He scammed so many people. He forgot that he scammed you. Yeah,

James:

Totally. And then I sent him back the no soup for you picture. I was like, don’t call me again. But we’re getting so many more phone calls, even when we post a coming soon sign trades are calling us, Hey, do you have work? Do you have work? But I do feel like the labor actually could jump again because I know probably I just know a ton of people waiting to do their renovation. They just don’t want to pay 12% for their heloc. So as soon as my HELOC goes back down to eight, 9%, I’m doing my renovation. And I do remind ’em like, you don’t understand this is floating half the time where even if you pull it at night, it could go back up. But I feel like there’s this, actually, we hear a lot about tsunamis. There’s a tsunami coming, there’s tsunami coming, but once those rates fall, people do pull the trigger quick. And I do feel like some of the renovations also slowed down just because the cost of money. Credit cards are expensive now. A lot of people were putting their home renovations on the big box credit cards, and it is double the cost almost on interest. And people are really thinking about it now, going, okay, I don’t want to pay this cost. And as soon as those rates come down, I do feel like people are just going to pull the trigger and start really renovating their house again.

Ryan:

That’s sort of like the question, the stock market with all the money and money market funds, it’s like how far down does the rate have to come before that levee breaks and all that money comes rushing back into the stock market? Or what rate is it where people that have been dreaming up their kitchen but they’re waiting for rates to come lower, and is it just that one token rate cut that shows that direction to your point where they’re counting on over time, the rate will come down and the Fed will keep chipping away at it. Is it one rate cut? Do they need to see it go to a full percent lower? Obviously the Fed funds rate is not what people are paying, so a quarter point reduction in that may be a larger reduction in what people would pay to tap their heloc. But that’s sort of the big guessing game that all these companies and the Home Depots of the world are looking at. It’s like, what is that psychological number where people make that decision and alright, let’s do it. It’s

Dave:

Complicated, but I always wonder if the average American consumer really follows the interest rates as much as we do because we’re all paid to do this in some way. And I get it that some people are saying, Hey, a 25 basis point cut is great, but at the end of the day for the average renovation is a 25 basis point cut going to really make that big of a difference, especially with inflation going up. You might be better off doing it now, even with a rate cut if supply costs might go up.

Ryan:

Right? I mean, using lumber is sort of a very cyclical one. Sawmills are shutting down from British Columbia to Florida. The price is just not, they can’t keep losing money in today’s prices. Well, it’s like all commodities are like that. It’s just oil oil’s high. Everyone drills an oil well, there’s so much oil, the price falls shut ’em all in. It’s this never ending thing. So if you’re not buying lumber now and you’re like, oh, it’ll keep going lower, well, at a certain point enough sawmills will shut down to balance the market and the price is going to shoot back up. So you’re sort of like, you might be waiting for the rate to come down a bit, but then your supplies might turn on the commodity cycle.

Dave:

Just another example of how impossible it is to time the market. There’s just too many complicated factors here that if you want to renovate your house, you should probably just do it.

Ryan:

Another thing that the Trex folks pointed out is that people that are doing really big stuff, especially older folks who are maybe retired or toward their end of their working life, the higher rates have been great for them. They’re making 5% on their savings. They haven’t had that in a decade or two. It’s like that could drive demand for things like fancy appliances and elaborate composite decks and outdoor swimming pools and things like that.

Dave:

We do have to take one more quick break, but more from on the market when we return. Welcome back to our show. Let’s jump back in. Ryan, I wanted to ask you, you’ve been talking about Trex super interesting company. And again, this is sort of a high-end lumber alternative wood alternative for decking. But you said that they’re expanding and they are building out a new manufacturing plant. In my mind that means more supply of this. Does that mean that there’s a chance these types of luxury or high end materials or any other supplies that real estate investors might be using could come down in the future?

Ryan:

It’s possible. I mean, that’s sort of the risk that Trex is running. Now. On the flip side, they, like many others did not see the pandemic prompting this huge remodeling boom. They almost ran out of product. They were sold out. And that’s terrible for a company because all of a sudden you’re getting replaced on the store shelves. You’re getting replaced in blueprints. You’ve lost that business in the south with that Arkansas plant. One thing they’re doing is trying, they’ve got a plant out west in Nevada. They’ve got one, their main one in Winchester, Virginia, and they’re trying to basically come into the south in the pine belt and compete with Southern Yellow Pine and get people to replace that. So that be’s sort of a market share wager, but they’re also, they’re going out and they’re expanding into a situation where most people think that that spending’s going to go down. They’re taking the other side of the bet. They’re saying, your house is old, you’re not going to move because rates are what they are and the supply of housing is short. You’re going to improve what you have.

James:

And at one point in Trax, I remember because I like Trax, but I don’t put in a lot of my projects just because it’s expensive. We put it in our nicer stuff and I would opt for Trex over a nicer wood, like an iron one or anything like that. It just lasts longer. But there was one point, it’s probably like 12 to 15 months ago where Trex was cheaper than Cedar and another decking. Wow. We would price out lumber versus Trex almost every time. And I probably installed seven or eight decks during that time where Trax was basically flush. Wow. If not a little bit cheaper. And now that was just a moment in time. I remember I was like, oh, let’s trax everything. And then especially on our rental properties, we were buying Trax it, it lasts a lot longer. I actually like to put it on our rentals because it’s way Lessed for maintenance, but I’m kind of questioning their bet now.

I know their Trex, it says their net sales went from 2 39 to 3 74 50 7% increase. When they’re talking about those sales growth, is that from back orders or is those all recent too? Because I felt like people were buying Trex a lot, but now they’re looking at ways to get their cost down and your typical wood deck’s going to cost you about 25% cheaper than Trax for materials. And depending on who’s installing it, some guys charge a lot more to install Trax, some don’t on their sales. Is that usually built up pipeline sales that they’re delivering on or is it pretty recent because I’m like, I wonder if there’s going to be a slowdown on that. No way. I’d buy Treks today. I’m already over budget on everything else. I can’t opt to go up on the deck.

Ryan:

Yeah, I think it’s a mix. I mean, they sell to the big box retailers, so there’s obviously a pipeline and an inventory that they’re watching there, but then they have this sort of network of contractors that they deal with who get a lot of stuff straight from them. So I think that ramp up, some of it may just be them catching up with the demand. They probably could have sold a lot more in 2020 through 2022 had they had full production. Now, their Winchester, Virginia facility went through a major expansion during the lockdown, and the company says without that they would’ve been in real deep trouble in terms of meeting demand, the overarching sort of bet that they have though is that lock in effect, that aging home, the aging homeowner and sort of that argument that, look, these people, they’ve made their money. They’re on their second or third deck.

They don’t want to be going to the hardware store and dragging that five gallon bucket of Thompson’s water seal every home, every spring or summer. And so they’re sort of betting that people will pay that. Now, the contractors I spoke to for that story, they were like, it’s a little harder to sell people on this stuff. We’re having to go back and hold people’s hands a little bit more and convince ’em no to now it’s the right time. But ultimately, they did fill up for the summer. All the contractors I talked to were booked for the summer. It took ’em a little bit longer to get booked. It wasn’t as crazy, but they did fill up this summer with work. So you mentioned Cedar and one of the companies that does a lot of specialty Wood, teal Jones, a closely held Canadian company that has a lot of sawmills in the south and some specialty mills up in Canada. They filed for bankruptcy protection this spring. And that’s kind of shocking because you think we just had $1,700 lumber where mills were just printing. So they put the money back in, invested in their business. They’ve got a mill under construction in Louisiana. Didn’t even make it to see it finished. So that’s sort of the risk of expanding into a declining market for this stuff.

Dave:

Awesome, Ryan. Well, thank you for sharing this information. But before we let you get out of here, do you have any predictions thoughts on where the home renovation industry might be going? Particularly any information that’s relevant for small to medium sized real estate investors?

Ryan:

I mean, we just got the housing numbers today and they looked good, but if you separate ’em and take out multifamily, there was an upturn in multifamily single family housing permits starts are down that segment. We would expect there to be more houses. There’s heavy demand, but I think if you go through and look at entitlements and land purchases and things, that next wave of home building is going to take a while. People are not going to wait. They’re going to be working on their homes. We have really two or three decades of evidence that this is just a boom industry. If you go back to after the housing crash, there weren’t a ton of industries that were doing well. Home improvement and renovation spending was one. And that really helped the American economy, the stock market, and that’s a really powerful force. And I think if we just get a little bit lower borrowing costs, you’ll see people start to come back in who have been waiting. So it’s hard to bet against, even though there’s signs of it slowing down. We might be in the slowdown now.

James:

Yeah, I think we are. It feels like we are, from a consumer standpoint, it feels like it’s slowing down and people need

Ryan:

Work. Don’t discount the effects of weather. We had a very wet spring in some parts of the country that slowed things down. That can have a big effect on the prices of things on labor like Houston, nothing’s getting done right now in Houston. Right,

Dave:

Right.

Ryan:

Yeah. Next month there’s going to be a lot of work going on in Houston. So these things can really warp the data. And so we really need a bigger view, a wider data set to really judge it. All

Dave:

Right, Ryan, well, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate your research and insight. We will link to Ryan’s stories about Rex and put all of his contact information in the show notes below. Ryan, thanks again for being here, and thank you all so much for listening for BiggerPockets. I’m Dave Meyer. He is Mr. James Dainard, and we’ll see you for the next episode. Very soon of On the Market.

Dave:

On The Market was created by me, Dave Meyer and Kaylin Bennett. The show is produced by Kaylin Bennett, with editing by Exodus Media. Copywriting is by Calico content, and we want to extend a big thank you to everyone at BiggerPockets for making this show possible.

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In This Episode We Cover

  • An update on the home renovation industry and why demand is shrinking 
  • Labor costs and the factory-building boom that’s taking away all the contractors
  • The surprisingly old age of most American homes and why so many renovations happened
  • High interest rates and their effects on home improvement project spending
  • Whether or not we’re already in the home renovation “slowdown” and what could happen next 
  • And So Much More!

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Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.

A World Without Airbnb & Why “Sinking” Could Cause Your Insurance to Skyrocket

A World Without Airbnb & Why “Sinking” Could Cause Your Insurance to Skyrocket

Airbnb bans escalate, a “tsunami” could be coming for this real estate niche, and “sinking” cities lead to skyrocketing insurance prices. The housing market changes every week, so we’re here to break down the headlines and sift through the hype so you know what could impact YOU. Dave Meyer and the entire On the Market panel are here to discuss four of the top real estate-related news stories from this week.

First, we discuss the commercial real estate credit crunch that could cause a “tsunami” in the office investing space. Next, one major European city will ban Airbnb by 2028 in an effort to give locals a better chance at buying their first home. Will it work, or is it just a move to get more votes? With the dust of the NAR settlement settling, homebuyers could face thousands in fees to work with an agent, but will this stop homebuying?

Before we go over our last headline, make sure you’re standing on solid ground because “sinking” cities are becoming the new norm. Is your home slowly sliding off a cliff? If so, your insurance costs could be rising even higher. We’ll get into this story and the rest of the relevant real estate news on this episode!

Click here to listen on Apple Podcasts.

Listen to the Podcast Here

Read the Transcript Here

Dave:

Imagine a world without Airbnb, would it really be the dream fix for the rental housing shortage? What’s happening with private equity firms? Are they swallowing up all that bargain commercial real estate out there? And how high are costs really gonna get for first time home buyers following the NAR settlement? Hey everyone, welcome to On the Market. This is your host, Dave Meyer, and today we’ve pulled some really juicy headlines for you that we’re gonna discuss and help make sense of so you can all make informed investing decisions to help me in that effort. Henry, how’s it going man? Thanks for being here. Hey, glad to be here as always, James, thank you for taking a, uh, break from your Hollywood glamorous lifestyle to join us today. It’s

James:

Very glamorous , but I’m happy to be hanging out with my people.

Dave:

If y’all didn’t know, James is filming an A and e TV show, so he’s uh, gone big time, uh, but he still makes time for us. Thank you. And Kathy, thanks for being here with us. Glad to be here. Alright, so the four headlines I got for the three of you today are sort of spanning the whole world of real estate investing. First up, we’re gonna talk about private equity firms and what they’re doing in the commercial real estate space. Then we’re talking about a world without short term rentals. Next, we’ll talk about first time home buyers in a post NAR settlement world. And lastly, we’ll talk about American cities that are literally sinking into the ground and what that means for real estate investors. Before we get into those headlines, make sure to hit the follow button on Apple or Spotify to make sure you never miss an episode.

All right, you guys are ready. Let’s jump into this. Our first headline comes from James, your Neck of the Wood, this Seattle Times, and the headline reads the Commercial Real Estate Credit Crunch. There’s a tsunami coming. The key points from this article are that one office values fell by almost a quarter last year. That is an enormous amount, 25% in one year, and there is almost $1 trillion of debt linked to commercial real estate that will mature this year in the us. We’ve talked about that a lot, but I think one of the interesting parts of this article that we wanna discuss is that private equity firms are trying to take advantage of opportunities for distressed properties. About 64% of the $400 billion that’s sitting on the sidelines right now in private equity has been set aside for property investments in North America, which is the highest share in two decades. So I’m curious if you think this is gonna put a bottom to the market. Do we have more downside? Is this gonna shake up downtown areas? Kathy, let’s start with you. What do you make of private equity involvement in the office market?

Kathy:

There’s just so much money sitting on the sidelines waiting for waiting for deals, waiting for deals to happen. And we keep talking about real estate values, you know, all these foreclosures in real estate, but I don’t, it doesn’t look like it’s gonna get that far. It looks like deals are gonna be done before a foreclosure happens in the form of private equity. That’s what they do. They kind of come in, save the deal, but then they get priority, uh, to the other investors. So what I really think the headline should say is that the sharks are coming after the sea Lions would be a better one. Not, not so much a tsunami just wiping things out, but rather, uh, more consolidation of banks. I was kind of looking at the stats and in 1920 there were over 30,000 banks in the us of course, after the, the, the depression that went down dramatically.

Then, um, then for 50 years there was about 13 to 15,000 banks. But after the SNL crisis, and then after the last recession of 2008, we kind of got down to, I don’t know, 5,000, we’re about 4,000 banks now. Ooh, wow. So it just kind of an example of the bigger banks are gonna be taking over some of the small banks that fail, and that is not a new story. So more consolidation in the banking industry and probably more investors losing as the private equity comes in and takes priority. Those who kind of came in early or invested early in some of these commercial projects are most likely gonna lose their, their equity unless somehow values rise dramatically over the next decade.

Dave:

And just for anyone who’s not familiar, private equity is a type of investment vehicle where usually wealthy individuals, pension funds, you know, retirement funds, pool their money and invest across a variety of asset classes. It’s not actually all that dissimilar from a real estate fund, but rather than just investing in commercial real estate, they invest in a lot of different things. And one of the main things about this story that’s so important and that Kathy was alluding to is that during the recession or during the pandemic, excuse me, there was a lot of cash. I think we all saw that in terms of cryptocurrency prices, real estate prices, stock market prices, these types of investment vehicles also were able to raise a ton of money because what private equity does is they go out and get money from wealthy individuals and pension funds, but with a lot of them, they weren’t able to actually make investments before interest rates started to go up and the investing climate started to change.

So they’re sitting on a lot of that money. A lot of these private equity firms raised billions and billions of dollars and they’re just sitting there waiting till market conditions change. And so the question then, and that what Kathy was alluding to is like, they might just come in and start scooping up some distressed assets before it actually gets to the point of a foreclosure, public auctions, all of that. So James, let me ask you, this is coming from the Seattle Times. Do you, do you see a tsunami coming and have you experienced any of that in Seattle? Because you know, your, your market is one of those high price downtown areas that often gets mentioned when they talk about sort of these negative loops that commercial real estate is in.

James:

We keep hearing about the Doom loops and the tsunami doom

Dave:

Loops and tsunamis. Man, if you had a dollar for everyone,

James:

, I feel like every six months there’s an article that says tsunami of foreclosures somewhere coming, whether it’s commercial real estate or whether it’s regular foreclosures. Um, I don’t believe so. I mean, I, I think no matter what, we’re going through a transition period where there’s certain types of investments that are being liquidated right now and it’s not really good ones that are stable and it’s not ones that are rented. They’re properties that are vacant or that are under construction. Most of the sales that I see at least are half built, half permitted in the middle of adding value. Not that there isn’t other sales going on, but I i I just feel like it’s like these stats are always so pumped up. So in that article I talked about being down 25%, but it’s also because there’s just a smaller segment of sales. Like in two, from 2023, the commercial real estate transactions were at $647 billion in 2022 is 1.14 trillion. And when you have a slower amount of sales and more expensive debt, a lot of just the investments are getting traded around anyways, people dispositioning repositioning their investments and buying something different. I’m kind of sick of this, this, this headline. It’s like, if it’s gonna come, let’s get it on. But it never comes .

Dave:

Yeah, it definitely doesn’t. Henry, I’m gonna ask you, if you were the head of a hedge fund and you had $400 billion , what type of assets would

Henry:

You, what kind of island would I be on? Um,

Dave:

Yeah, exactly. . Are you thinking Caribbean? Are you thinking South Pacific?

Henry:

Right, right, right. Some, some warm sandy beach somewhere. Um, here, here’s my thoughts on this. Like if you think about the last real estate crash, it was because of financial factors, right? Subprime mortgages, those kinds of things. But how you monetized the asset didn’t change, right? You still bought real estate that went up in value over time that you forced or added value to. But this is a little different. So if I was a hedge fund manager, like I obviously taking advantage of buying real estate at a cheap price is a good idea. But a lot of the factors playing into why commercial isn’t doing well aren’t just economic related. It’s more related to less people need to rent office space or want to rent office space. There’s not as many people in the market anymore. And so I would only be wanting to go and put my money into these assets if we had a plan for how we are going to increase that vacancy, maybe with a different tenant base or, or doing something else creative. But just buying a distressed asset and then trying to put the same tenants in it who don’t want to rent it right now, even though you got it cheap, doesn’t mean you’re gonna be able to monetize it. Like you have to have a plan for, for, for this situation.

Dave:

It’s, yeah, it’s just like all those people who are like buy the dip in the stock market where they’re just like, oh it went down. Buy it. Like, okay, maybe that will work for some assets that will work for some stocks that will work. But it’s not just like an automatic thing. Just be you buy when prices are low.

Henry:

If you buy an office complex that’s 80% vacant and it’s been 80% vacant for the past six months, just ’cause you got it at a steal doesn’t solve the problem of you being able to put tenants in it. It may be cheaper for you to hold that asset but still not making money.

James:

What Henry just said is very important, and I’ve learned this lesson , uh, in 2008 we bought a building and we thought we just ripped the deal of the century. You know, we bought this building, it was like 10,000 square feet. We paid 900 something thousand for it. It was a million dollars below appraisal. And we just thought we hit a home run and we bought well below replacement costs, all the metrics you’d want. But then what we found out is that no one wants to rent it and no one wants to lease it. It’s a major problem. And you could buy whatever commercial real estate you want, but if it’s not gonna pay you dollars, doesn’t matter. And we had to pack up our whole office, move into this building that was 35 minutes from Bellevue where we were moving and then we, we literally had to micro out these units. It was like, I swear it was like the first

Henry:

Coworking space.

James:

Yeah, , yes. But it was definitely not as fancy. It was like, Hey, you could take this office for nine, nine bucks and we were just renting all these offices. But you know, I think the big thing about this commercial real estate is once someone figures out how to repurpose this real estate Yes. Into something more usable and more in demand, then it’s gonna really, you’re gonna see a tsunami, then they can use the word tsunami of purchasing . But it’s, no one’s figured it out really yet.

Henry:

Yeah. I am telling you, whoever figures out how to turn vacant office into affordable housing is going to make a lot of money. ’cause those are the two big problems.

James:

Hammocks and mini fridges.

Henry:

.

Dave:

Yeah. Well, I, I’ve, I I agree. I think personally it’s probably gonna take some like government subsidies ’cause it’s just not profitable in the way that is right now. But I just wanna say this like doom and gloom about private equity I think is like so overblown and is almost the opposite of what people should be thinking about. Investors play a very important role in setting the bottom of any market. This happened in 2009, 2010, 2011. No one wanted to buy homes, no consumers, no home buyers wanted to, it was investors who started to go in buying things off auctions, buying things that had been sitting on the market. And that that sets the bottom, that gets confidence, that gets transaction volume going again. And the same thing is going to have to happen in commercial real estate sooner or later. Like if you don’t want it to be private equity coming in to set the bottom, who else is gonna do it?

Like we need someone to come in and start buying these assets and making them profitable. That’s gonna start the next cycle for commercial real estate that I think we’ve all been sitting around and waiting for. So I’m all for it. I would love to start to see some of this dry powder come in off the sidelines. I think to me that would be a sign that maybe I want to get back into commercial real estate . We’ve hit our first headline on commercial properties and private equity firms, but we have three more headlines after this quick break. Stick with us.

Welcome back to on the Market. Let’s get back into it. All right, let’s move on to our second headline here, which reads, what does a world without Airbnb look like? This comes from the BBC, this story follows Barcelona like a lot of other cities that announced a total ban on short-term rentals starting in November, 2028. So they’re not even really grandfathering people in, they’re just saying four years from now, it’s done. Currently there are about 10,000 short-term rentals in Barcelona. And by returning those to long-term rentals, the city is basically hoping to provide some relief to the housing shortage crisis. There are obviously larger questions here about tourism and who gets to benefit from a place, tourists, locals, both, all of this. But this is not something new. This has been really popular in major cities and although personally I’ll just give you my opinion on the headline. I don’t think Airbnb short-term rentals as a whole are going away. But I’m curious, James, let’s start with you. Do you see a world where Airbnbs are no longer welcome, let’s say major metro areas? ’cause that does seem to be the trend. Places like Dallas, New York, I know Denver now Barcelona, um, are starting to ban them. Do you think this could trend could continue from here?

James:

Um, I do. You know, we have a big housing crisis going on and a lot of times in politics they like to start placing blame on things and then moving legislation just to, you know, try to act like they’re getting something done when they’re not . I did, it’s, i, it it is a big concern. Like I was, you know, in this article, one thing that jumped out to me was, you know, in British Columbia, uh, premier David Emby, uh, put the issue out and what he said, he goes, if you’re flipping homes, maybe that’s why I grabbed my attention. Uh, if you’re buying places to do short term rentals, if you’re buying a home, uh, to leave it vacant, then we consistently send the same message. Do not compete with families and individuals. And so politicians are now putting this into, into what they’re trying to do to get votes.

And it’s a message they’re, they’re trying to dump on which they should. Affordable housing is an issue. Cost housing is too much, and so how do we get it down? But then they start pointing the, they, they, they like to point fingers at the investors that are also trending that are easy to point the finger at, right? It’s like, this is not even gonna fix really much. But I do think this regulation gets worse and worse. And I always get surprised by like how much it gets tightened. And if I’m getting surprised today, that means it could be a very nasty surprise in three years. If you own short term rentals, you really wanna watch the, uh, the legislation because if there is major changes going on and it’s not gonna be grandfathered in, you wanna put that in your forecasting to sell and reposition it at a different type of asset class.

Dave:

Henry, do you think it’s gonna work?

Henry:

Do I think it will create housing? I mean,

Dave:

Yeah. Do you think it’ll actually improve affordability of rents in Barcelona?

Henry:

Here’s my, my general take is if you think about major metros like you were talking about, um, where I think, uh, the problem is, is in these major metros where you’re able to take smaller properties, right? Properties that would typically be rented to people who are probably struggling for housing and monetize them on short-term rentals. Yeah, I think that this could absolutely help alleviate some pressure in terms of housing. But if you look at places like Scottsdale, Arizona where it’s these multimillion dollar massive homes sometimes being used as Airbnbs, I don’t think that banning those are gonna have much, uh, are gonna have much implication on the affordable housing or the, or the, or people being able to buy homes within that, that part of the country. So, uh, maybe it’s that some of the legislation will have some sort of cap on or some sort of limit on the size of the house you’re able to do this on. Like, you can’t do it on, you know, a three bed, two bath, 59 square foot home, but you can do it on a, you know, eight bed, seven bath, you know, McMansion somewhere.

Kathy:

Yeah. So it’s, it’s sad in a way because bed and breakfast have been around for so long. VRBO has been around, you know, if you rent vacation homes, you know, that’s been around before Airbnb. It’s just that Airbnb made it so much more accessible to so many people. Uh, you know, it used to be that if you wanted to have a resort, it had to go through the whole permitting process and there had to be at a certain part of town. I live in a vacation town and there is talk about this all the time that they, they can’t get enough kids in the schools and there’s not enough families living here because so many homes have turned into rentals. So it’s really, for some cities it is hard. I kind of love what, uh, Southern California has done. At least Los Angeles. Los Angeles County has, um, not banded, which is amazing, because it’s California.

Um, but they recognize that a lot of people need the income. So it’s too, it’s like a different story for people who just maybe wanna rent out an A DU on their property or a room in their house, or they’re gonna go on vacation and want, want to rent it out. So LA has a law where it has to be your primary residence, and I think that’s cool. You know, I think that allows people to be able to afford to live in one of the most expensive places in the country because they can rent little parts of it out. Uh, but to have a full on business where you own a bunch of Airbnbs and you’re a hotel operator, basically that’s running too much under the radar. That’s, that’s more new and, and that does need to be regulated because hotels get regulated, right? So, um, that again, that’s just a solution.

You can’t just buy a house and put it on the, and buy 10 of ’em and put ’em on the Airbnb market in la. So I don’t love banning it completely. I think it’s important to have it. I hope that all of these vacation areas will at least consider still the, the old model of having a a, a Airbnb, right? That’s my, my mother-in-law and her mother, uh, it, they had a b and B in, in upstate New York for a hundred years. like guess this farm has been in the family and that’s how they were able to make those payments on the farm was renting out rooms and having, having a, b and b. So, you know, hopefully it’s not totally banned, but there’s just some regulation that you have to get, you know, you’ve got, there can only be a certain number in the city. Maybe that’s what Park City does, is you have to get a permit to have that Airbnb and there’s a limit to how many there can be.

Dave:

Yeah, I, I think there are a lot of creative solutions. I do wanna call out that there has been some academic studies about this. Most recently in the Harvard Business Review, it was a study of New York, which did essentially ban, uh, short-term rentals in most cases. And what it found was that there was very, very little impact on affordability. It was like 1%, or I, I forget the exact number, but it was very, very low. And the impact on affordability really happened on higher end, very expensive, uh, apartments. So it wasn’t really even helping the lower income folks that it was intended to help. Now that’s just in New York. There is no knowing if that would work the same way in other markets. But I do think it’s worthwhile noting that the little bit of statistical analysis, data analysis has been done on this, shows that it doesn’t have a massive impact.

But I think, you know, I, I get why people are doing it and I sort of understand that even beyond the affordability thing, there’s sort of like a psychological thing here, uh, going on that people want housing for their friends and for their neighbors and their family, even if it doesn’t have as much of a dollar cent and cents thing. I, I do think that makes sense, at least in these big areas. Um, but I, I really doubt there’s gonna be like a holistic ban across the board. I think we’ll see a moderation just like there is in every industry, you know, every industry there’s a gold rush, there’s a crazy period and then there’s regulation and Airbnb. Short-term rentals had its day where it was going crazy and it was pretty unregulated. And now we’re gonna see a step back and that’s gonna be okay in the long run for investors and for communities.

But we’re sort of in this sort of like realignment period, which is always a bit awkward. All right, let’s move on to our third story, which comes from the Indiana Gazette. The headline reads, first time home buyers could face thousands in new costs following the NAR settlement. NAR is the National Association of Realtors. If you haven’t been following the story, we’ve put out a lot of shows both on the BiggerPockets podcast and on the market about what’s going on there. But basically the business model of real estate agents is very much up in the air. And at this point people are really kind of just guessing or making at least educated guesses about what’s going to happen. But this article talks about that the fact sort of assumes the worst case scenario, right? Which is that rather than sellers, I should say worst case scenario for home buyers. And that scenario is where rather than sellers paying the two to 3% commission to the buyer’s agent, the buyer’s just gonna have to come out of pocket for the exact same amount, which would come to somewhere between 80 $512,500. So James, I’ll ask you first your real estate agent. Do you think anything’s really gonna change, like this ruling is going to affect? How is your business gonna change from it?

James:

I don’t think it’s gonna change much at all. It’s just a matter of structure on a deal. I mean it, at the end of the day, a buyer’s willing to pay a certain price for a property and whether the commission’s added on top or paid separately or paid by the seller, paid by the buyer, doesn’t matter. It’s all the same price. You know, it’s, it’s, it, I mean it’s kind of like when you’re buying an assignment deal. When you’re buying an assignment deal, you’re paying a fee to a wholesaler and the commissions charge to the buyer as a closing cost. It’s not paid for by the seller, paid by anything else, but you’re still just paying the same price for the property. Like whether the seller’s paying it or I’m paying it, as long as I’m at that all in number, it really doesn’t matter.

And the biggest impact short term is that the housing market goes up 3% all of a sudden because it’s just now the cost of a house goes up 3% across the board, which I wouldn’t mind my units would go up in value, but we’re already seeing buyers starting to push back. Right now, nationwide, there’s more inventory coming online, things are getting absorbed for less. And I can tell you one way, shape, or form, depending on the con the, the market cycle, whether it’s a buyer’s market, seller’s market, someone’s gonna pay for it. And is it gonna cost the buyers more? Well, maybe today if we’re short on housing, but if it goes into a buyer’s market, they’re gonna pay less. It goes with the cycle of real estate, just like any other thing. When you’re purchasing

Dave:

Kathy, what does your crystal ball say about what’s gonna happen with commissions? Do you think that we’re gonna have this, uh, worst case scenario?

Kathy:

Yeah, I can’t, I can’t say I don’t have a crystal ball anymore. ’cause Rich bought me one. Now I have one , uh, dunno how to use it. But I think if anything came out of this, it’s that people now realize that they can negotiate and for some reason buyers didn’t realize they could, but they always could. You know, you, it’s just, it all depends on supply and demand. Like James just said, if it’s a buyer’s market, which means that there’s a lot more inventory on the market and it’s hard to sell your home, you’re gonna pay your agent whatever you need to pay to get that home sold. If you’re somebody trying to buy a home in a seller’s market, which means there’s not a lot of inventory and you gotta work hard and you need an agent that can fight for you, you’re gonna pay whatever you need to to that agent.

But maybe the, the listing broker doesn’t need as much because there’s so many buyers. So again, it’s just all up for negotiation. And that’s, to me, the good thing that came out of this is now people are like, oh, I just thought it was set. It never was set. You could always, always negotiate. Um, and they may or may not accept that negotiation, right? It’s gonna be up to the agents. I really don’t think anything’s gonna change much in the structure of it. Uh, I’m seeing it all around of people saying, yeah, I, you know, just put it in the price of, of the home so that I don’t have to come out of pocket. And I think again, more and more buyers are gonna learn that there’s different ways to pay that fee. It can be in, you know, in the price of the home so that it’s, you get to have the loan on it and you don’t have to come out of pocket. Or maybe you just say, I’m gonna come out of pocket and I’m paying you half of what you want. And, and if it’s gonna close quickly, you know, maybe they’ll accept that. So I have not seen prices come down and I think a lot of areas have not seen prices come down. Some areas have, but that’s because of supply and demand, not because of this.

Dave:

Henry, I know you have a very good and longstanding relationship with your agent. You gonna start, uh, negotiating with him about every deal.

Henry:

Absolutely not, man. So key to my business, pay that man what he needs.

Dave:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, do you, do you think, uh, have you, I mean I know we, he’s been on the show a few times. Do you think, uh, he’s changing his approach at all? Or what do you see happening here?

Henry:

I don’t know. I’m, I’m kind of with Kathy. I don’t think much is gonna change here. Um, I think it’s, they’re making a big deal about, uh, just too much unknown. Um, and there’s, there’s multiple ways to get things paid for. And we also talk about like there’s, there’s, there’s potentially, you know, incentives that can come in and, and programs that people could sign up for that might include some of these commissions so that they can, housing can be more affordable. Like we have no idea what’s coming. But right now, uh, there I just haven’t seen much of a change. People are still paying the 3% because they feel like the agents are helping them do what they need to do in order to get into a home. So I don’t, I don’t think it’s a, I don’t think it’s a big deal. There’s ways to move that money around. There’s, it’s just, it’s, I think good agents who provide a good quality of service aren’t gonna have a problem getting paid or making money. And I think agents who don’t work hard, now you’ve got people that are gonna be able to pull your card and say, Hey man, like why am I paying you 3%? Totally because you’re not doing what I need you to do. Like I, this is what this is. Business should be, right? , yeah, this is absolutely what business should be.

Dave:

Absolutely. I obviously dunno what’s going to happen and, and no one really does. But, uh, i, I agree. I think it’s gonna be less impactful than people think. The one thing I do feel like quite certain is that people are not gonna be coming out of pocket this amount. It’s either like Kathy second be baked in or if it does wind up that people start paying out of pocket, I can almost guarantee it’s not gonna be 3% because that’s just not a, an amount people are gonna come out of pocket for. There’s gonna be agents offering cut rate services or just trying to put, do the volume play where they do a lot more houses at a cheaper price. But I feel quite confident that you’re not gonna start seeing people writing checks to their agent for 3% of the purchase price. That seems like probably the least likely outcome. So Indiana Gazette, I don’t buy it. I’m sorry, , we do have to take a quick break, but we have one more headline for you when we’re back.

Welcome back to the show. All right, well let’s move on to our last story, which is definitely a topic that we haven’t covered before. It comes from CNBC and it says US cities are sinking, like literally sinking. Here’s what this means for homeowners. This story says that lamb subsidence, which is a term I’ve never heard of, but it’s fun to say lamb subside land subsidence, there we go. Is when the lamb below a city is sinking because of natural and manmade causes. This is happening in cities like New York, Miami, new Orleans, San Francisco, so a lot of coastal places. And this is saying that the cost of home ownership can be driven up 8% because of this happening. I also actually, just to add to the story, I saw this article about Nantucket, which is obviously super high priced area, but this home had lost like, I don’t know, it’s like 60% of its beachfront and dunes because of erosion. So these types of, you know, na nature induced costs I think are on the rise and people are starting to pay more attention to ’em. I’m gonna ask you, Kathy, you live in Malibu near the beach, in a, in an expensive area that’s hard to get insurance. Do these types of things worry you on a personal level about your personal home?

Kathy:

Our house is on a hill and it’s on bedrock, so I feel, I feel fine, but our PCH the road that I need to take to get anywhere might get wiped out. So yeah, I actually do worry a little bit about it. I sold a condo on the beach. We lived in a, in a condo when we first moved to Malibu and I sold it because of the issues that that building is constantly having. Plus it’s old and it’s hard to have beachfront properties. They, they have more issues ’cause there’s so much wetness there and water is one of the worst things for, for, for property. And when you’ve got fog and, and ocean spray on your property, those, there have been homes in Malibu that just got swept off into the ocean. So it’s, it’s always a little bit riskier to be ocean front.

I’d rather rent and own there. Um, we actually have seen buildings sink. There’s, there’s the millennium, which was one of the biggest high rises in San Francisco that has been shrinking and people have lost a lot of their equity there. It’s, it’s just maybe the way it was built, um, that is having issues. If I were a gambling person, I would say your bigger issue in California for sure is earthquakes. And no one seems to worry about that. Nobody’s got insurance for it. Uh, they know it’s coming, you know, we know it’s coming. Most of us live on the fault. So, you know, people take risks. They live where they wanna live. If I’m guessing this sinking, it’s a slow sink, you know, it’s gonna be years if not decades. Um, but if you’re, if you’re owning in those areas, you’re taking a risk. I would, I would not want to own in Miami personally, that is ground zero for a lot of the climate change issues you got, we know hurricanes are, are headed there on a regular basis. I can’t handle that kind of stress , so I’m not into it and I’m always a little bit shocked at how many people are moving there and what they’re paying for being in a kind of high risk area. But then I look at me and I’m like, here I am on a fault line. So guilty .

Dave:

Yeah, but this isn’t like, I guess this is a fun word to say land subsidence, but it’s not really different from any other natural hazards, right? Like I have invested in Houston for example, and I made very sure to look at flood maps to make sure that I wasn’t investing in a floodplain. I have own a property in the Colorado Mountains and I made sure to invest in an HOA that does proper fire mitigation. So like I, I guess this is something to think about, but it’s no different from any other concern about maintaining your property and making sure it’s in a safe space.

Henry:

It’s a new scary thing to be aware of when you are considering investing somewhere. But I don’t think it’s anything like, I don’t think you’re building is here today, gone tomorrow, right? Like, it’s not that kind of a thing. What concerns me about it is what are insurance companies going to do or not do about this new risk that people may be aware of. I think they’re gonna see it as an opportunity, a, to have extra coverage or increase coverage or not cover these kinds of things. And then, so that’s what you need to be aware of. Like how is that going to affect your overall return on investment? Um, or are you going to be able to be covered and can you take on that risk? Um, but I mean I, it it, it makes sense if you think we’re extracting groundwater in places and building very tall, heavy buildings on top of the land at some point, yeah, you’re going to think the, the earth is consistently eating buildings. That’s what happens. Like that’s not new. Like, that’s not new. That’s why we get depreciation from the government on our, on our assets because the physical building deteriorates over time. But my biggest concern is what happens with insurance. And can you predict that? I just don’t know that you

James:

Can. And that’s just something that everyone has to watch out for is like, I’m trying to get insurance on my house in Newport Beach that we’re flipping right now. It is a nightmare. We got a policy, I got canceled in 60 days, then I’ve been on force place insurance, then I’ve shopped out. I can’t even get enough insurance to cover the whole building then to get insurance. They want me to gate off the whole property. And I’m like, what is going, like I got countertops going in and you want me to gate this whole thing. I’m like this, it’s, it’s nuts. I hired five different insurance brokers to go find me a policy one got me one done. It is unreal. The cost and just having basic coverage, right? Like that’s why I’m leaving. I’m like, this doesn’t make sense. If you can’t get normal basic coverage for your investments to make sure that you’re getting insurance or just basic needs that you need. I don’t know it it for, I don’t wanna invest there anymore. That’s just how I look at it. ’cause it, that doesn’t really make sense and I think there’s always gonna be something sinking. Mega earthquake is gonna come not, I mean I’ve heard about this mega earthquake in Seattle since I was a little kid that the earthquake’s coming, all of Seattle’s gonna fall into the Puget Sound and then mate, Mount Rainier is gonna explode and cover us all with Ash. I’m like, well, okay, that doesn’t sound good, , but it

Dave:

. Yeah, it doesn’t, it doesn’t. So

Henry:

No, that does definitely does not sound good.

James:

these things are going to happen, but as long as you have the coverage and if you can’t get coverage and insurance for like even what Dave, Dave made a really good point about just researching your market. Like what are, what’s going on? Is it flood pains? Is there fires? Is there, whatever the environmental is, make sure you can get coverage and if not, don’t deal with it. That’s my opinion. ’cause it’s just like if you can’t get it today or it’s really hard to get it today, it’s gonna get harder tomorrow. And if it’s really expensive today, it’s gonna get even more expensive tomorrow.

Dave:

Yeah, absolutely. It’s a great point on insurance. I just wanna call out too that like the cost associated with this sinking and other issues are not just insurance, but they also do get reflected in local and municipal taxes because whether you’re paying for them as a homeowner or the government is going to pay for them to create resiliency or to repair things that are broken. Like the money’s gotta come from somewhere and so they’re gonna either raise taxes or pass it on to homeowners in terms of property taxes. So one way or another, when you have these types of expenses in an area, it’s going to impact you, but you obviously want, if you are still comfortable with that and wanna invest in the area, you wanna make sure that your property is as well positioned as possible within that larger

Kathy:

Market. And so important to understand the local regulations. Like in California, the Coastal commission kind of rules , everybody. Um, and one of the things that they’ve decided is they want the ocean to run freely and to do her thing. And so they, you can’t actually put up a new sea wall. You just, if your sea wall falls apart, you don’t get to build a new one so that the ocean can, can, can thrive. And so there’s multimillion dollar properties right on the beach who now can’t really protect themselves. And there’s this famous story about this guy in Laguna Beach who did it anyway. And uh, , the coastal Commission came in and said, you need to tear that down and red tagged it and so forth. So the coastal commission, not elected officials, but they really call the shots and make the rules that you just gotta know what your local area is, who, who’s in charge? of making laws

James:

In Newport Beach. Two homes slid in our neighborhood, slid off the hill. It’s like all of a sudden they went from a $5 million property to work nothing. And the coastal commission won’t even let them build a house back there. Now there’s houses all over the street, but they’re going, no, now that’s a park. I mean, what do you do if you can’t get proper insurance? You can’t rebuild a house there. You’re toast. Yeah, don’t, don’t mess around with with, uh, with people that can make those kind of calls.

Dave:

All right, well that’s it for our headline show. Thank you all so much for being here, Henry, Kathy, James, we greatly appreciate your time and your insight. And if you wanna connect with these fine investors and talking heads, we will put their contact information in the show notes below. Thank you all so much for listening to this episode of the BiggerPockets Network. I’m Dave Meyer and we’ll see you next time.

On The Market was created by me, Dave Meyer and Kaylin Bennett. The show is produced by Kaylin Bennett, with editing by Exodus Media. Copywriting is by Calico content and we wanna extend a big thank you to everyone at BiggerPockets for making this show possible.

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In This Episode We Cover

  • A world without Airbnb and whether the newest ban could actually help homebuyers
  • Another “tsunami” coming for real estate and whether there’s truth behind the hype
  • Private equity’s new plan to gobble up even more real estate as one niche suffers
  • More fees for homebuyers as agent commissions change, but will this have to be paid out of pocket?
  • “Sinking” cities causing rising insurance costs and sliding home values
  • And So Much More!

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Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.

A World Without Airbnb & Why “Sinking” Could Cause Your Insurance to Skyrocket

Did We Just Find 2024’s Most “Under-the-Radar” Real Estate Market?

We might have just found the most under-the-radar real estate market of 2024. It’s got jobs, appreciation potential, and affordable homes, and it’s growing…fast! The best part? We’re not sure anyone has ever talked about this specific market, so we’re going to be the first. But you had better be fast; most investors might start looking up homes for sale in this market after this episode! Which market are we talking about, and why are we so excited? We’ll share all the details in today’s show!

We’ve asked the entire On the Market panel to each bring “under-the-radar” real estate markets to share on today’s show. Many of these markets are small(er) towns but boast some HUGE investing benefits you won’t find in big cities or the already-hyped areas. From Midwest cash flow to Southern healthcare hotspots and one town that our panel gets VERY excited about, any of these markets could help you build wealth WITHOUT having to fight off competition from other buyers.

If you’re still looking for an investing market, check out our new tool, Market Finder! Dave and his team designed this tool to help you easily identify your next market to invest in! Once you’ve found a market, check out properties with our Deal Finder tool!

Click here to listen on Apple Podcasts.

Listen to the Podcast Here

Read the Transcript Here

Dave:

If you’re anything like me, you probably spend a lot of time hunting for new markets and trying to figure out what strategies work in those markets, but I’m guessing that most of you aren’t like me and don’t spend your time just researching random markets. So instead of making you do that today, we’re going to bring you some under the radar markets that might work with your strategy. Hey, what’s going on everyone? This is Dave Meyer and with me today is the whole gang. We’ve got Kathy, James, and Henry joining us today, and what we did is I asked each one of them to research and find an under the radar market to share with us today, and I did the same. James, how’d it go for you? Was this a hard assignment? You

James:

Know what? These are always a hard assignment. I start going down the rabbit hole and all of a sudden I’m in all 50 states looking at every city, so it took me a while to find the right one.

Dave:

Henry, are you just sticking with Arkansas? You’re just like a one trick pony. Did you follow the assignment this time?

Henry:

It was very hard not to pick Arkansas. You just love it. But I did pick a market that has strategies that I only do a little bit of right now, but that I want to do more of, so I wanted to bring something different to the audience because everybody’s used to hearing about buy and hold in Arkansas for me.

Dave:

All right, well I’m excited to hear that. Kathy, how many different data sources did you look at to research your market?

Kathy:

I probably cheated a little. You guys. This is the end of my due diligence on this market. I’ve already been to it and researched it, so it’s been a three month process, so I’m sharing that with you today.

Dave:

Well, that’s not cheating. If we’re getting the results of three months of your work, I’m very happy for that. Well, you can see why we’re doing this show for you all because it does take a lot of work to research individual markets and hopefully you like the four markets we’re going to be discussing today, but if none of these match your strategy and you are looking for a market, I have a very exciting announcement for you. BiggerPockets has just launched a brand new tool. It’s called the Market Finder. You can find it at biggerpockets.com/find a market. This is something I’ve personally been thinking about and dreaming about and trying to make it BiggerPockets for years, and it’s finally here so you can do all your research on BiggerPockets and we have a new listings platform, so once you find a market, you can go and find a deal right in that market. Go to biggerpockets.com/find a deal. Really check them out. They’re super, super cool. Really high value in art of these new developments. We thought we’d bring back this popular idea of under the radar market. As I said, we’re each going to present a market and hopefully you can learn not just about these four markets, but how each one of us thinks about different markets to invest in. So let’s jump in.

All right, so I drew the short straw and I am going first in today’s market description and I don’t know how I became a Midwest market pusher over the last few years because I’ve never lived in the Midwest. I have some family there, but I don’t know why. I just like being a contrarian and everyone’s always investing in the west and the southwest, and I’ve just decided to make the benefits of investing in the Midwest, my personal cause over the last few months. And so my market today is Des Moines, Iowa. I’ve never been there. Have any of you been there? Nope.

James:

Nope,

Henry:

I have not.

Dave:

Okay. Wow. I don’t know if that bodes well for this market, but I feel like

Kathy:

None of us are Buffet fans then or something.

Dave:

Hey, wait, Warren Buffett. Yeah, he’s Omaha. Oh, see you guys don’t even know the Midwest at all.

Henry:

I was going to pick Omaha for my market, so I learned a lot about Berkshire Hathaway.

Dave:

Omaha’s a good market. Just

Dave:

Cut that section. Just cut that

Dave:

Knowing about No, we’re keeping it. Kathy.

No, I unfortunately don’t know any facts about Des Moines except that the population size is 211,000 people and unlike some areas of the Midwest, it is growing 1.1% year over year, which is tied with Madison, Wisconsin for the fastest growing Midwestern city, which I like because you do see a lot of areas, particularly in places like Ohio, some areas of Pennsylvania, Michigan, you see that we are losing some population and so that is really beneficial and despite that growth, the unemployment rate in Des Moines, Iowa I think might be the lowest I’ve seen of any market. I’ve researched at 2.6%. Now I don’t want to spoil it, but do any of your markets have unemployment rates that low? Nope.

James:

That’s

Dave:

Pretty low. Yeah, I didn’t think so. Alright, Midwest for the win. Okay, we also had rank growth of 6%. Some businesses are moving there and the thing I really like about it is that it is an affordable city. The median home price is about less than half of the median home price in the US at 207,000 and appreciation over the last year was nearly 7%. So given what I just told you guys about the stats in Des Moines, what do you think? Do you think this is a reasonable place? Maybe we should all go visit.

James:

It’s not on the top of my visiting list right now.

Dave:

Anyone jump in? No one wants it. No one likes

Henry:

It. I just didn’t want to walk all over somebody. I have an opinion.

Dave:

Okay, what’s your opinion, Henry? Tell me how dumb it is.

Henry:

No, I don’t. I like the dynamics. Like I said, I was looking at Omaha, Nebraska, which isn’t very far from Des Moines, Iowa, and I think the only thing that kept me away from using Omaha as my under radar radar market is that I just wasn’t comfortable with the employers in that area and their growth in those industries. So my concern with the Des Moines and the Omaha is that we don’t have strong employers that are employing the majority of the population there, and so I would be scared to invest long-term, but the dynamics of the market seemed great.

Dave:

I do admit, I agree with you Henry, when I was looking at the biggest companies in Des Moines and who the major employers were, there weren’t that many companies that I recognized as big industry leaders, so that was a little bit concerning to me, but it does have strong manufacturing, agriculture, those sorts of things that tend to be pretty stable. But I do agree with you, there’s not a lot of big sexy companies, jobs, people moving there in any significant way.

Kathy:

James and I like sexy, so it’s probably not on our list.

Dave:

Just crickets over there.

Kathy:

I’m just going to blame it on my California education. I’m going to pull that card where we just don’t know geography, Omaha, Des Moines, we don’t know, but seriously, I do normally love an off the radar market like this because you just don’t maybe have the thousands of investors flocking in and you kind of can own your market. So I think if you dove in, knew it well, you could do very, very well. You don’t have everyone else competing.

Henry:

You don’t have you. California’s coming in and buying up all our real estate,

Dave:

They don’t even know how to find it. They can’t even get there.

Kathy:

Give me a map. Let’s see how I do. It’s not going to be good.

James:

I think they call this the flyover state for a reason. Oh,

Dave:

I knew someone was going to say that and now James is going to get all the hate in the comments, so that’s fine. We just hate hate on James instead.

Kathy:

Yeah, forget about me. Just point it at James.

James:

Yeah, they call Iowa the fly over state and I’m going to fly right over investing there. It’s not for me. It’s a little too slow grind.

Dave:

Fair enough.

James:

I don’t want to visit, I don’t want to invest there. Not

Henry:

Enough juice.

James:

There’s no juice for me. Yeah, I’m going to apply right over to a juicier market. That’s what I’m going to do.

Dave:

Alright, fair enough. Well, I will tell you this, the reason I came up with Des Moines was I was actually working on that deal finder tool that we’re launching at BiggerPockets and I was just clicking around and it does some cool stuff where it shows you what the expected cashflow might be and what the rents are and so you can find the idea is find deals on the MLS and I was just clicking around and Des Moines and there are good cashflow on market deals that are in good areas for like 200 grand. So I understand for people like James that doesn’t the rent even a six, 7% cash in cash return on a 200 doesn’t pay for a yacht, but for those of us who are still trying to build their portfolio out, this could be a good option. Good appreciation, good cashflow. So that’s why I picked Des Moines. Okay, so you’ve heard now my very compelling case that no one can deny about why you shouldn’t snooze on Des Moines. We’ll ask what markets James, Kathy, and Henry have up their sleeves and we’ll find out right after the break. Welcome back to On the Market. Today we’re talking about underrated markets. Alright, well that’s what I got to say. Now we got all the Midwest out of the way. We can now move on to parts of the country that Kathy could potentially identify on a map. Let’s hope because you’re going next Kathy. So let’s see if you could tell us what state your market is in.

Kathy:

This is not going to be much of a surprise to anyone, but it is Texas, but I’m going to be giving away another secret that I hate doing because now it’s not going to be an under the radar market. Well, I’m sure a lot of people know about it, but we’re talking about San Antonio, bear County spelled B-E-X-A-R. Don’t say it wrong, it’s bear. And within that market people often will say, oh, I like Tampa or San Antonio or Dallas, but it’s really within the market that matters. Where’s the migration? So there’s this little town called Burn and it is just exploding with growth in the San Antonio area. San Antonio in general. It has 2 million people. I like that. I like to be in cities that have at least a million people. There has been a 1.2% increase year over year in population and the latest census report said, okay you guys, I’m giving away my secrets.

It’s been three months, but here we go, the fastest growing city in America right now. So there you have it and a lot of people don’t realize that it’s the seventh largest city in the US but it kind of still feels like a small town. It’s huge and people love it even though it has that small town feeling, especially Bernie, it’s just adorable, cute little Texan town, 22,000 people migrated there in 2023. The mayor is freaking out a little because there’s so much growth coming, they don’t know how they’re going to house people. That’s an opportunity. That’s what we’re doing. The unemployment rate, not as good as Des Moines, but 3.2% down from 3.7, which to me is a healthier market because in Des Moines, if you’re trying to find workers you’re going to have a harder time. There’s barely any, the unemployment rate is so low there.

So I kind of like that it’s a little bit higher but still just a robust economy and growing rent growth has slowed because there is more supply coming on, but to me that’s okay. I’m looking in the future and I just talked to a demographer recently and he said that area between San Antonio and Austin is the fastest growing in the nation as well, which is basically what the census said. Median home price is still pretty low. It’s under 300,000, 273,000. It changes every month, but under 300,000 is good and appreciation has been not great this past year because it already appreciated so much and I think they found their affordability max. But what we plan to do is serve the people who can’t afford to buy. Right? They are maxed out. We are going to do a build to rent community there. We’ve already tied up the land. That’s why I feel okay talking about this because we’ve already tied up the land and on our pro forma it’s showing a 21% IRR to do this build to rent community. So yes, there’s cashflow in something like this. We also work with builders out there who buy down rates and down to the 4% level and it can cashflow with lower rates, but when you build it and you build a community, you can also do really well and it’s small, it’s just 40 homes but still a strong deal.

Dave:

A 21% IRR is nothing to sneeze at. Like Kathy, the most important question is what country borders Texas?

Kathy:

I believe it is Canada. Kidding? I know

Dave:

That’s a hundred percent correct,

Kathy:

But honestly I do know it is Mexico and a lot of the reshoring, again, I interviewed a demographer recently and he explained that a lot of the, I asked him about onshoring or reshoring like bringing manufacturing back to the US and he was like, yeah, but it’s still cheaper in Mexico so it’s easier to onshore or I forget what he called it, nearby shore to manufacture in Mexico and send it over the border in San Antonio is going to be one of those transportation hubs for all those new goods coming into America. So that’s why it’s growing so quickly In addition to the military being there and expanding and Austin nearby is expanding and it’s getting expensive. So more employers and people are moving just a little bit south. It’s only an hour south so lots of potential now the secret’s out.

Dave:

And Kathy, can you tell us why you chose Build to Rent instead of purchasing something that already was built or building some ground up development to sell it off?

Kathy:

We just think the margins are better for build to rent. We ran the numbers build to sell our build to rent and the build to sell was still a good option, but for me, every time we build a subdivision and sell off the properties, I regret it. I always wish we had held it and now I’m really pushing for that whenever it makes sense. I would rather hold those properties for five years instead of giving away all the future growth to someone else. So I mean we have investors in it so there’ll be others benefiting and again, providing affordable housing. If we can build a community of rentals, people could still live in a home. They don’t have to live in an apartment which is preferred. Usually when you have pets and children you can have a yard. So the build to rent model is really, really popular. It’s also a little easier to do build to rent single family homes versus building an apartment. It’s just a little bit cheaper to be able to build that and provide that affordable housing.

Dave:

Alright, James, is this juicy enough for you?

James:

I like the market because A, it’s got high quality living, it’s got some growth, but I almost feel like it’s running out of gas a little bit and it’s kind of flat lining out not as far as rent growth and that it could be a steady investing or place to invest, but I am kind of that appreciation guy, so when I’m looking I want to see what’s still got legs and runway as far as appreciation and I think this is a little bit more standard at that point, so there’s nothing wrong with it. Even Des Moines, Iowa, there’s nothing wrong with it. It depends on what your strategy is. If you want slow and steady and a really good five and 10 year plan, I think Kathy’s market could be a great market to do it and it’s got low unemployment, it’s got higher population growth. The only concern for me in that market is it looks like there’s more owners than renters and so is there that mentee renters coming into the market to rent those, but I think it’s got some legs, but for me I’m picking an appreciation and with the insurance costs rising so much in Texas, cost of living has gone up in Texas. I just think some of the markets are flatlining out a little bit, which is Florida, Texas and California. I would consider it but probably not on my top buy list.

Kathy:

James, I agree with you.

James:

I wouldn’t fly over it.

Kathy:

It’s those pockets though. This little area that we’re focused on is growing so quickly. I agree with you. I don’t want to do a bunch of work for nothing and in our proforma we put in 3% appreciation per year. I think it’s going to be a lot higher than that over the next five years, but slow and steady at this point in my life. I’m good with that. I’m good with slow and steady. I’ve tried to do some doozy deals and ended up being much harder than I thought. So I’m all about conservative, but you’re younger than me. You can just go for it.

Dave:

What about you Henry?

Henry:

I like Texas obviously. I picked a market in Texas as well, which we’ll get to in a minute, but San Antonio was one I was looking at. I’m not a big city investing guy. I like a more suburban off the beaten path kind of. I’m boring man. I just want my appreciation over time. I want to be able to make a little bit of money every month and then before you know it in 20 years you look up and you’ve got all this wealthy accumulated. I’m just boring.

Dave:

Yeah, I get you. I actually maybe two or three years ago was looking for a new market to invest in and narrowed and was really honing in on San Antonio to the point where I flew from Amsterdam to go check it out and wound up not investing there. I just couldn’t figure it out. I don’t know, I’m kind of like Henry, it’s so big and it’s sprawling and I couldn’t figure out the pockets. To your point, Kathy, if you can identify what pocket is going to grow, I personally couldn’t figure out a way to make money there, but I also don’t have the resources or the experience that Kathy does to do a build to rent community, so I didn’t consider that, but just as a buy and hold investor trying to do Burr down there, I couldn’t make the numbers pencil, but I know that there’s a lot of very positive data that suggests that San Antonio is going to keep growing a lot. With that said, let’s move on to our third market. Henry, where in Texas did you pick?

Henry:

I picked Tyler, Texas and here’s why I picked Tyler, Texas. So I’m from a town very similar to a Tyler Texas, so Tyler Texas is about two hours away from a major metro, which would be Dallas. I’m from a town called Bakersfield, which is about an hour and a half away from Los Angeles and there’s great market dynamics where I live in Bakersfield but didn’t want to pick that as my market. I’ve been intrigued with this town for a little while. I have some family that is living in Tyler, Texas and near Tyler, Texas and they talk so highly about it, but why I picked Tyler? Well first of all, let’s talk about the market dynamics. So you’ve got about a 242,000 population size, which is a decent sized town. It’s got population growth consistently, so it’s about 1.8% year over year like normal market dynamics unemployment rate’s 4.3%, which is okay, not great, but not terrible.

The town is doing a lot of investing in the infrastructure in terms of expanding their healthcare facilities and operations because healthcare makes up for two or three of the largest employers of the top five in the area. It is a healthcare market and so they’re growing in that industry and they’re expanding in that industry and they’re investing more money in the area for that industry and you have a median home price of about 263,000. So again, you’re under that $300,000 price point, which makes it fairly affordable for the salaries that people are making in the area. And so I mostly chose Tyler Texas because I have been, well first and foremost in my current investing portfolio, we have tested out midterm rentals as a strategy and it’s working very well. We are able to now make a good amount of cashflow on assets even with interest rates being high and we’re helping our community because we’re providing temporary housing to people who are either coming in and working in the hospital system or coming in and working in the construction industry because they’re building infrastructure in and around the area.

And so the midterm rental strategy has allowed us to increase our cashflow to sustain our portfolio in this high interest rate environment as well as one of the things that I’m looking into in my personal portfolio is I am looking to take single family homes and turn them into residential assisted living facilities. And so that is something that we’re looking to do here in Arkansas. And so I picked Tyler because of the healthcare environment, they have not enough midterm housing for the people who need to come and work at the hospitals and I also just really enjoy single family and small multifamily investing. I’m just not a large scale multifamily guy. It doesn’t excite me. I don’t really like it. And so this market would allow me to be able to purchase single family homes and then use those single family homes to either provide midterm housing to the healthcare providers in the area or it would be able to use it to turn single family homes into residential assisted living facilities and provide quality care to the aging community. We all know about the silver tsunami and about how baby boomers are aging out and they’re going to need this type of care soon. The problem is we don’t have nearly enough beds for the aging community and so you’ve got more elderly folks being cared for by less people and so that we just kind of have a passion for that because of my personal family situation. And so a market like this has good dynamics for both of those strategies.

Kathy:

Oh my gosh, Henry, that is so good. So good. It’s so needed. The silver tsunami that they talk about where there’ll be a bunch of houses on the market. I don’t know about that so much, but I mean there will be, but I don’t know that it’s going to, it’ll just help. We need the inventory.

Dave:

Yeah, I’m with you on that.

Kathy:

But what people aren’t talking about is the need is the for care as the oldest of the baby boomers are 80 and you are on it. That’s incredible.

Dave:

What does the cash flow look like in this market? Is it reasonable to think you could find a deal that cash flows without a super heavy rehab

Henry:

From a long-term rental perspective? So I think just buying something on the market and getting it to cashflow is probably going to be a bit of a challenge. It’ll take you a while to be able to find that. I don’t think you could like in Des Moines where you just buy something in your cashflow and instantly not going to be the case with a $265,000 price point. I don’t think that your long-term rents are going to be able to cover it, but if you could do a midterm strategy, definitely buying something on the market, but I think you can absolutely find things off market that are going to get you to cashflow. Cool. So it definitely there.

Dave:

All right. Good to know. I would ask James, but I already know it’s not juicy.

James:

Well, there’s definitely some things I like about this market. The quality living is really good, but I also like that Henry selected a market. I think it’s important for all investors to do is what is the strategy that’s working for you right now? I think there’s so much noise where people rush to these markets because they go, oh, everyone’s investing there. Well what’s the strategy that you’re doing and all the markets that we’re looking at, depending on what you want to do as an investor, that’s why we’re selecting these and it’s a strategy that work. Dave’s is going to be different than Kathy’s is going to be different than Henry’s and from what Henry just went over, there’s a high demand for midterm rentals because of the healthcare industry and if that’s what’s working for him in his portfolio, it makes all the sense in the world for him to invest there. It’s got high quality living, there’s population growth, low unemployment and the demographic he’s trying to create revenue and income with are needed in that space. And it’s not just about the markets, it’s about pairing the right strategy with the market. That’s where you can absolutely crush it.

If I was a midterm rental guy, I would definitely be like, oh, that’s an interesting market to look in. I’m more long-term or just more stabilized rents and so it might not work for me for what I do, but it’s got all the math that you would want and all the growth that you’d want if that’s your strategy.

Henry:

Yeah, exactly. James. My thought process here was where could I buy property and hold it for the long term, make it make money while I’m holding it for the long term and then get the appreciation year over year. So I’m not a big multifamily guy, so I don’t want to find multifamily in markets. I’m like, where can I find single family, rent it out, make money month over month, but then look up in 20 to 30 years have paid off assets in markets that are appreciating. If you look at the appreciation in Tyler, Texas over the past couple of years, it’s been around anywhere between three and 4%. So it’s sitting at like 4.2% right now. That’s pretty solid. And so if you’re just going to average your steady growth one to 4% year over year, and I know I have demand in the healthcare industry, then I can sit here and I can make money month over month and then grow my steady appreciation year over year, look up in 20 to 30 years and have paid off assets.

Plus I get to serve a need by providing housing to the healthcare providers and providing housing to the aging population. If you look at the stats on what we’re going to need in terms of beds for assisted living facilities by 2025, we will need approximately 156,000 new assisted living facilities nationwide. And if you consider Texas as one of the largest states, they’re going to make up a good chunk of that. So we need, and those are across the country, so if I’m able to meet some of that demand, help people and then make money year over year in a good steady market. I mean, like I said, nice boring real estate man. I’m in

Dave:

Henry, you got one we all agreed on. All right. Henry’s winning. We have to admit

James:

People love roses. It’s the rose capital of the, it’s the rose stop call. The roses is your kind of unwinding down so it’s got the right attraction.

Kathy:

Yeah, I can’t wait to hear all about how you pull this off because I think you’re going to have a lot of people wanting to replicate what you’re about to do. It’s really exciting and so needed. I

Henry:

Hope so. We’re super excited about it.

Dave:

Okay, we have to take one more quick break, but stick around for the secrets of James’s underrated market and which market we ground the winner right after this. Hey investors, welcome back to the show. Awesome. Well let’s move on to our last market, which is let’s see how juicy James gets with his deal. James, what market did you pick?

James:

You know what, I have been zipping Henry’s secret sauce and I’m in Arkansas. I picked Arkansas. I’ve got to know Arkansas a lot better just because of Henry. And I picked high fill Arkansas, which is a very small area population whopping twenty two hundred and sixty eight people. And so I went for a very small under the radar market. Wait,

Henry:

Wait, wait.

Dave:

He’s trying to steal your shit. Henry, you

Henry:

Hold on a second. James, did you give Dave crap about a flyover state and not a juicy market and then pick a town with 2,500 people as a population

Kathy:

2,222.

Dave:

That’s a very good point. Thank you Henry for defending my honor. I appreciate that.

James:

I think this is a goldmine town. You’re going

Kathy:

To have a lot of buyers, a lot of renters.

Dave:

I feel like I know James’s strategy. James is literally going to buy every house in the town. He’s just going to go in there and he is just going to be like, you know what?

Henry:

He’s going to be the mayor.

Dave:

I’ll take ’em all. Give me every house,

James:

Be the new hedge fund of the market. All

Dave:

Right, tell us why you like, hi Phil. Yeah,

James:

Okay, so why I like high HiFi and now granted the stats are always going to be skewed when you’re dealing with this small of a population, 2,268 people. Not a whole lot of people, but this is why I like it. Okay, the population growth trends at 16.7%, which again, it doesn’t take much to move that up, but people are moving there. 16.7% unemployment rates at 3.4, which is almost nearly half the amount of the national average rent growth is a tough thing to find in a city this small,

Dave:

Right? No, it’s not. The unemployment rate is not 6.8% in the United States.

James:

I’m sorry, isn’t it 6.2 that I read last night?

Dave:

No, it’s 4.1%.

Kathy:

We would have a lot of

Dave:

Rate cuts. James is disqualified. Disqualified

James:

Was

Dave:

Green last night. No, it’s 4.1% I’m sure about that.

James:

4.1. Okay, well yeah,

Kathy:

That’s a pretty big

James:

Jump. Yes. Okay. Well it’s still below. We’re about 20, 25% below the national average.

Dave:

This is why James wants to buy the whole town. He’s going to go in there and he is going to tell people we have the lowest unemployment rate in history. We have the best economy in the world. Everyone’s just going to have to believe him. He owns everything.

James:

That is true. Yeah, I don’t know what I was reading last night. Yeah, when I was looking in, I saw it in the sixes, but this is why I like Arkansas and I’ve kind of gotten on a little bit of an Arkansas buzz because Henry likes to remind me that the big businesses are expanding there and Walmart is expanding a massive campus, 300 acres. And one thing that I have felt the benefit from is being in Seattle, Microsoft has expanded, Amazon has expanded. These big business expansions can lead to big jolts in your market. And the reason I like high fill is it’s a pretty close to the campus. It’s right outside Bentonville. It’s more affordable than vent and fill. And there is population growth 16.7, yes, that’s not that many people coming in, but the thing that I do like is the appreciation was 21.1 year over year.

The median house price is on the higher side over everyone else’s market, 380,000. Now I know that’s more expensive than what everyone’s talking about, but the reason I like this as a strategy is I like a little bit more expensive markets because when you have appreciation on the more expensive markets, you get more impact. And what I mean by that is if I have a house that’s appreciating at nearly 10% or 20%, it’s 380 grand. That’s 38,000 that I can get impact on in one single year. And the demographics for this, and this is why I really liked this, and now I’m actually really considering investing in this area. I like the Walmart growth, but then the dual income for this area is almost a hundred thousand dollars is 97,500 for dual working families at maybe a home prize of 380. There’s a lot of growth there.

The expenses are 30% below the national average. And I did check that one again, I might be off on the unemployment, but it’s below the natural average and it has this quaint feel to it. And so it’s where a lot of working professionals can go. They can live there, raise their kids in a very nice neighborhood. They have more disposable income than average because they’re making good money. They’re making nearly a hundred thousand dollars a year. It’s very affordable and it’s great for commuting, especially if they got to fly around the country because it’s close to the airport, but it’s a good quality of living. And this is what I think is gas for a market when it’s affordable, high quality living and big business expansion, that’s how you can hit those huge appreciation pops over a two to three year period. And that’s why I like this market.

People have money, it’s a good place to live. And I think it hasn’t ran out of runway. We’re seeing a lot of markets flat line and I think this one can keep going up. And the rents also, it’s hard to find when you’re looking in a small town, but I think at Arkansas there are over 16.5% rent growth for the year. And so there’s just legs on this and when you have legs you get big appreciation pops. And so for me, I’d be looking at flipping and then burr properties that I could keep and trade out later and just stack some equity, get some growth, and start buying units wherever I want to do. So I like the runway on this.

Kathy:

Oh, I can’t wait to hear what Henry has to say. Jump in. Henry,

Dave:

I’m not even going to say anything. Henry, you just take this

James:

One. I feel like I just told Henry he looks very pretty. He’s glowing.

Henry:

Well James, you are 100000% right? So let me add some color to what you’ve put together here. Absolutely right. So this market, yes, very teeny tiny town, but from a logistical perspective, it is very close to Bentonville. And what we know about Bentonville is it is a small town that houses a lot of people because of Walmart. It’s the largest company in the US and they just made an announcement recently. I don’t know if you guys know this, Walmart just made an announcement recently. Everybody that is working remote from Walmart has to now return to Bentonville. There’s a couple other cities in the US that they can go to, but they must come back. And so you’ve got this influx of people right now who are moving back to the area so that they can keep their job working for Walmart, which means you’ve got more people coming to a very small town in Bentonville, which means it is forcing people to move out and out and out.

So there are new housing developments going up and they’re pushing further and further out and it won’t be very long before he fill. Feels like it’s right here in Bentonville because of the growth and the expansion in the area. 35 people a day moving to Northwest Arkansas. So you’ve got people that are moving here, you’ve got this town that’s very close. What’s also they don’t know is you said it’s close to the airport. That is an understatement. It is like a couple of miles from the international airport. That’s huge because if you are working for Walmart, a lot of the jobs require you to travel. You want to live in a place like Ville because you don’t have to deal with the traffic and the problems of Bentonville. You get to get a house on some land, on some acreage, and you get to be with just a minute or twos Driving to the airport heel is going to be a very desirable place for people who want to live because you don’t have to get your cookie cutter house in a subdivision. You can go get a barn, you can go get a house on five, 10 acres. And the dynamics in heel are great, man. I think you’re onto something, James. Woohoo.

You nailed it.

Dave:

I love how nice you’re being Tim Henry, when you could have just been like, stop stealing my shit, man.

Henry:

No man. I’d see opportunities, man. This is opportunities, this is partnerships,

Dave:

The opportunities. You should go buy all the deals and then sell ’em to James.

Henry:

Let’s go figure out a small town around here, James. We’ll just go buy the town.

James:

I’m going to become the mayor.

Dave:

Alright, our last question for you guys before we get out of here. Each one of you tell me what market you would pick, not your own James, so you can’t pick, what was it called, the fel. What market would you pick if you had to pick one or the other one? I know you’re not going with Des Moines so you can feel free to insult me, but between Henry and Kathy.

James:

You know what I think I’m going with Kathy. I like being closer to Metro City. It’s close to San Antonio. A lot of people want to move to San Antonio because the quality of life right now. I know a lot of people in Texas are transitioning from other cities into San Antonio. And so I like the big city poll. So I’m going with Kathy’s

Dave:

Henry.

Henry:

I mean obviously I would pick Fel. I own property in the town right next to Fel already.

Dave:

Okay, that’s cheating fine. Kathy, what about you?

Kathy:

Okay, definitely. Hi Phil. I am sold. At first I thought James was crazy and then I looked up where it is and it’s just 25 minutes away from Bentonville. And I think Fayetteville too, not too far. So it’s not as far in the boonies and all the reasons you just said. I think we just need to make a trip out there to Arkansas. I heard it’s just got a lot of, I don’t know, rivers, lakes, and crystals. It

Dave:

Doesn’t. I’m ready whenever you are, but I’m picking Tyler. I’m going with you Henry. I thought we all agreed that was the one we liked. I think that’s a lot of interesting dynamics there. I’m into it. Alright, well I guess I’ll just be here by myself pushing the Midwest as usual. We’ll see where we end up 20 years from now. Alright, well thank you all so much for listening. Hopefully you’ll learn something. If you do want to find out more information about market you’re considering, make sure to go to biggerpockets.com/find a market. You can learn all the stats, information, the stuff we were citing here for pretty much any market in the US

Henry:

And make sure you subscribe to the show. So when we do our 20 year reunion special and we give you an update on these, we’ll know who’s winning.

Dave:

Yes, yes. We’re going to do our 2045 special about what market did the best. They’re all going to be holograms and it’s just going to be like AI speaking for us. There’s not going to be a job of podcaster in 20 years, but we’ll see. I’ll be

Kathy:

Living in one of Henry’s homes. That’s all I can say.

Dave:

Kathy will be living in Tyler, Texas. Hopefully. I will too. I would love to.

Henry:

I got you. I got you. All

Kathy:

Right. Excellent. Thank you.

Dave:

All right, well thank you all for being here. If you want to connect with any of these fine investors, we’ll put their contact information below. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time for On The Market. Bye-Bye. On The Market was created by me, Dave Meyer and Kaylin Bennett. The show is produced by Kaylin Bennett, with editing by Exodus Media. Copywriting is by Calico content, and we want to extend a big thank you to everyone at BiggerPockets for making this show possible.

Help Us Out!

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In This Episode We Cover

  • Four of our favorite “under-the-radar” real estate markets nobody is talking about
  • The TINY town that could see massive growth as one huge employer makes big moves
  • The cash-flowing Midwest city with rock-bottom unemployment and strong rent growth AND appreciation
  • The small town in Texas that Kathy personally picked for her new build-to-rent investments
  • Why medium-term rentals and assisted living facilities could see BIG returns in this healthcare hotspot 
  • And So Much More!

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Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.

A World Without Airbnb & Why “Sinking” Could Cause Your Insurance to Skyrocket

Housing Market “Stuck” Until 2026 as Insurance Prices Rise, Rents Slow

See Dave, Henry, James, and Kathy at BPCon2024 in Cancún, Mexico! Grab your ticket here!

The housing market is “stuck” and may stay that way for the next two years. With low inventory, high mortgage rates, stunted demand, and high rents, it seems like there’s nowhere to go. If you’re a homeowner, this could mean good news, as price stability keeps your property value high. But, if you’re looking to buy a home or work in a real estate-related industry, this isn’t what you want to hear. What happens after 2026, and what changes will come to the housing market over the next two years? We’re breaking it all down in today’s headlines show!

First, we’re discussing why economists think the housing market will remain “stuck” until 2026 and what happens to housing prices along the way. Next, if you’re looking for deals, you’re in luck! We’re showcasing some of the “coldest” markets in the US that are seeing prices start to fall already. Is your home insurance bill killing your cash flow? We’re diving into a recent survey on the insurance “shock” hitting landlords and what investors MUST do now to account for rising prices. Speaking of rising prices, are rent prices crossing the affordability threshold for most renters? We’re getting into it all in this episode!

Click here to listen on Apple Podcasts.

Listen to the Podcast Here

Read the Transcript Here

Dave:

Economists are now saying that the housing market may be stuck all the way until 2026. So how does this impact real estate investors? Is it just prices that are stuck or are home sales going to be stuck? Should we all just sit around and wait two years and not do anything in the meantime?

What’s going on everyone? And welcome to On the Market. I’m your host, Dave Meyer. Today we have a headlined show for you. That means we have the whole crew, Kathy Henry, and it was supposed to be James, but he thinks he’s better than all of us and he decided not to show up today. So we’re going to be doing this one without him. And on today’s headline show, we have some good ones. So he’s really missing out. On today’s headlines, we’re going to be talking about why economists think the housing market is going to be stuck for several years and how that might impact all of us as investors. We’ll also talk about overlooked cold markets where you may be able to snag a deal due to less competition. Our third headline is about investor sentiment regarding insurance premiums, which are the worst, and if you should be concerned about them too. And lastly, we’ll talk about how the average renter may not actually be able to afford current market rents. So we got a great show, but before we get into our headline show, we have a personal headline for you. Well, and we have a personal group headline, which is that all of us get to go to BP Con this year, which is in Cancun, Mexico, and I’m very excited. Are you guys pumped?

Henry:

I’m so pumped. Oh,

Kathy:

I love the BP Con party. I mean event, it’s going to be amazing. Yes.

Dave:

Well, I do think that is sort of an important part of it. There are many real estate events out there, but I think the great thing about the BP Con event is that it has incredible speakers and incredible education, but it’s also just so much fun. Every single year they do more and more. Last year they rented out all of Universal Studios and we just got to ride roller rollercoasters with no lines for hours on end. This year it’s at an all inclusive resort in Cancun, and I am dreaming about what a herding I’m going to put on that taco buffet. It’s not going to, they will lose money off of me in this proposition. I am sure about that.

Kathy:

Well, your network is your net worth or your net worth is your network, however that saying goes and there’s no better way to network than sitting out by a pool or on the beach in Cancun, but it really is so important. I mean, most of my success is because of relationships I’ve created over the years. It’s so important, right, Henry?

Henry:

The relationships are the key. The money is made in the hallways and at the networking events, guys just being around like-minded investors who are doing things, everybody’s got a power that you don’t have. And so being able to be that close to everybody around you who has something that you need to help your business and it’s all right there in proximity, is always life-changing.

Dave:

Absolutely. And it’s going to be a lot of fun. All of us are speaking. James is speaking too. Kathy and I are actually speaking together. We’re going to be doing a presentation together, so that will be a lot of fun. But if you haven’t heard about BP Con in general, it’s a conference BiggerPockets throws every year for real estate investors to learn from the best in the industry. That’s just a humble shout out to us being the best in industry. But this year the conference is in Mexico at this very cool all-inclusive resort and we’d love to see you all there. So if you’re interested, make sure to visit biggerpockets.com/mexico and you can get all the details there. You’ll learn a lot and have a very good time With that, let’s get into our first headline today, which comes to us from CNN. The headline reads, the housing market is stuck until at least 2026 Bank of America warrants.

Key points here are that economists from Bank of America have stated the housing market won’t become unstuck until 2026, and that is basically projecting or predicting that this era of low home sales and somewhat stagnant prices may be with us for a while. And this is due to a combination of home prices that went up during the pandemic, of course inflation, high interest rates, all of that, but they still expect home prices will climb by 4.5 this year and then another 5% in 2025 before eventually dipping in 2026. Henry, what do you make of this? Do you feel like the housing market, let’s just start there. Do you feel like the housing market is stuck?

Henry:

Yes. Okay. Yes,

Dave:

Absolutely. In what way? How do you feel that

Henry:

It’s just all the economic factors that go into what would need to happen for the market to not feel unstuck? So if you think about it, yes, housing prices are continuing to go up. Interest rates I don’t think are going to come down anytime soon, and if they do, it won’t be by very much. And so I don’t know how much of an impact that’s going to have on the housing market. Affordability continues to be a problem, and all of this is wrapped in a pretty bow by supply and demand because there just isn’t enough supply to satisfy the demand out there in terms of homes. And so unless we see something change on the supply side, which could happen if somebody gets creative with creating affordable housing, then I think we’re going to continue down this path of prices will be where they are rising slowly and interest rates will be somewhere between seven and 9%, but it’s the new normal and I just don’t see a way anytime soon that makes a shift. And so we just try to make sure that we are underwriting deals given today’s environment and if we can make deals work now, if things get better, that’s great, and if things get worse, well we’re still buying at a discount and we can pivot. Are you

Kathy:

Feeling stuck, Kathy? Oh, this is a funny headline. So another way to look at this headline, because remember I’ve said before that if it bleeds, it leads if it, it’s always got to be a negative twist to things when it comes to headlines. But another way to write this would be that homeowners are in the best position they’ve ever been in. Historically, their debt to income has never been so good, meaning that they are locked into fixed low rates and yet they’ve seen wage growth generally over the past decade. So the headline in 2008 was, ah, homeowners are in the worst position they’ve ever been in. They can’t afford their mortgages because the mortgage payments are going up. We’re not there today. The positive angle to this is that people who do own their homes are in the healthiest position they’ve ever been in. Now, if you’re a vulture, if you’re a real estate investor looking for a good deal, this isn’t your time and listen, I am one.

So you have to dig a little harder to find an opportunity. So there’s a positive angle to this. What was interesting is that finally the headlines and the larger corporations are saying it in this article. B of A says it could be six to eight years before we see a change. So who this is not good for is the person who doesn’t own their home. But for homeowners today, they’re literally in the best position they’ve ever been in. Housing is more stable than it’s ever been because homeowners are in the strongest position they’ve ever been in. But people who are not homeowners are the ones who are challenged. And if we can focus on that, hopefully we can find solutions for renters and for people who would like to own a home, but it’s not going to change probably until interest rates go down. The fact of the matter is there’s no housing crash coming and instead prices and it’s finally admitted in the headlines, prices are probably going to continue to rise, and if people know the truth, then they can start to do something about it.

Henry:

I mean, over the past couple of years, everybody’s been talking about how unstable the housing market is, and this is a bit of stability and there’s always power in stability because it allows you to make decisions and seize opportunities because you have the time and because of the predictability, you have some sense of what’s actually going to happen. There’s opportunities in every market and even when the market was at a place where people could buy and get really cheap interest rates, there were still people on the sidelines saying, well, this isn’t a great time to buy. So I don’t know that even if the housing market gets unstuck, that that changes things for a lot of people. I just want to be able to leverage the fact that there is a little bit of stability right now. And so that means I know what to go and look for and I know how to monetize it and I know how to protect myself.

Dave:

I am going to disagree with you a little bit, Kathy, and with this headline, I don’t think housing prices are going to go up 4% and then 5%. I think that is too aggressive of a forecast. Personally, I think prices are going to be a little bit closer to flat over the last next couple of years because what they’re talking about is that yes, I agree that home sales volume is going to stay relatively low, but what we’re seeing is that inventory is starting to go up, not that much, but it is starting to go up a little bit, and that is likely to decrease the pace of growth. I’m not saying that means it’s going to go negative, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw home prices a year from now up maybe 1% year over year or 2% year over year, which is more in line with normal growth rates.

Usually it’s like two to 3%. I just don’t think we’re going to see this outsized growth rate, which in recent years, four and a half percent, 5% doesn’t sound outsized, but that is higher than the historical average. And so I actually think we’re going to come back closer to a healthy housing market and that would mean more normal appreciation levels. The thing I do want to call out here though is that this is going to be rough for service providers. I think we’ve seen that the slowdown in home sales has just hurt the industry, and it’s not just home buyers, but loan officers, real estate agents, appraisers. And unfortunately if this is correct, it means it’s going to be another tough year or two because in Covid we saw 6 million home sales per year. Now they’re forecasting 4 million next year that’s a 50% reduction in transaction and transactions, how these people make money. And so I do think this is going to be a tough time for the whole real estate industry in general and the broader economy, if you look at GDP housing makes up about 16% of GDP. And so if we’re forecasting a big decline that is going to drag on the economy in general. So just a couple other data points to throw in there.

Kathy:

And Dave, I have to debate with you since we’re going to be doing a session together at beeping,

Dave:

Let’s do it.

Kathy:

I just want to say that our whole economy is based on the velocity of money. Things need to move, things need to sell. That’s how taxes are collected. If you have a stuck market, you’re right, there’s not going to be as many jobs as many people making money, but that’s exactly what the Fed has been trying to do for the past few years is slow down that velocity of money and they’re getting there. So the next steps are going to be for them to speed it up a little bit. It’s most likely that this year they’re going to cut rates in the next year even more, which speeds up the velocity of money. And I think there will be more sales, there’ll be more activity, which then creates more, again, more tax income and so forth. So that will be my debate is that we are now at the precipice of the beginning of stimulus, at least that’s what I think.

Henry:

So it sounds like to me that Dave is saying housing prices are going to go up slowly and then maybe trail off in 2026 and Kathy’s saying no, it’s going to go up. So Kathy says buy and Dave says, no, wait,

Dave:

No, I’m not saying wait, I’m buying right now. I don’t think it’s bad to buy in a flat market at all. I think it’s going to slow down sooner and then accelerate because I do agree that rates will probably come down, but I don’t think it’s going to be that much. And I think what a lot of people in real estate are overestimating is that the reason there’s no supply is because rates are high. And where we’re saying, oh, rates are going to go down, so demand’s going to come back, but you also have to assume that supply is going to come back too because if rates cause demand to drop and supply to drop, and you sort of have to assume the inverse is true. And so when rates go down, supply is going to come back a bit and demand’s going to come back. We don’t know exactly in proportions, but thinking just people are going to buy and inventory is going to say the same. I don’t think that’s what will happen. But we’ll see. Kathy and I are going to box, live on stage, live

Kathy:

On stage. The problem is you’re almost always right, so this is bad for me.

Dave:

Definitely not almost always, right?

Henry:

But also if you are boxing, my money’s on Kathy. Yeah,

Dave:

I also would put my money on Kathy, please don’t make me do that. Alright, so we just got through our first headline, but we do have three more right after this quick break.

Welcome back to the show. Let’s move to our next headline. Okay, let’s move on to our second headline, which is want to snag a real estate deal, these 20 cold markets, maybe a buyer’s best Shot at a Bargain. This comes from realtor.com. Basically what they’re saying is that there are certain markets, a lot of them are in Texas and Florida or Louisiana where houses are sitting longer and there’s just less transaction volume. And we are actually seeing days on market really starting to tick up in some of these markets. And so the question to you then, and we’ll start with you Kathy, is are these good opportunities, even though they’re slower, some of them are actually even seeing housing prices decreased modest like 1% maybe year over year, but would you be hesitant to invest in one of these markets or do you see it as an opportunity?

Kathy:

No, I’d be absolutely hesitant. One thing I do not do is invest in flood zones and a lot of these markets are really affected by hurricanes and flooding and the insurance costs have gone up 20%. So that’s just not a risk I’m willing to take. There’s enough good places to invest where I don’t have to have that stress every day. I invest all the time in Florida. That is one of my hot markets and Texas, but we stay away from those flood zones. We invest in a little bit more inland in Florida. I just interviewed a climate expert from CoreLogic and he agreed with me. He’s like, yeah, central Florida is really, it’s not an issue even for a hundred years on the a hundred year map, but today we know for sure that there’s certain areas in the Gulf that just are getting hit and hit and hit and you’re not even if you buy the property at a low cost, are you going to be able to insure it and for how much? So that’s my concern. Now, I wouldn’t buy in those areas no matter how cheap.

Dave:

Lemme just read you a couple of the places on this list here. We have Lake Charles, Louisiana, Huma, whoa, this is going to test my pronunciation. Helma Thibo, Louisiana. Never heard of that. Panama City, Florida, Punta Goda, Naples, Cape Coral, Miami. Then in Texas we have Macallan Brownsville, and then a couple places in the Sunbelt like Las Cruces, New Mexico, Phoenix, Arizona and so on. So yeah, I think a lot of those places in Louisiana, Texas, Florida definitely in flood zones. Henry, just sort of in a philosophical level, do you think there’s something wrong with buying in a colder market?

Henry:

No, I mean there’s two lenses to look at this through. So you can look at it from the investor standpoint, which is I’m an investor, should I go look to snag up a property in one of these cold markets? I guess that depends. You’re going to have to do your research. I mean we’re going to talk about this a little bit later, but insurance costs are going through the roof and so you want to make sure that you’re underwriting that deal correctly and you’re not just considering getting a deal, but what are all the ancillary costs that are going to be a part of that deal? But there are probably some cities here that have decent appreciation, that have longer days on market where you can go and make offers with some contingencies that are going to be in your benefit. Now the catch is this only works if you’re going to hold it for a while because you’re not going to be able to buy something, even if you are getting some contingencies and then turn around and sell it in a year and make money, this is probably going to have to be a play where you’re going to sit on it for a little bit.

Now, from a homeowner’s perspective, people live in these places. So if you live in one of these cities, yeah, I think there is opportunity for you to get yourself into a property where you get some contingencies. Affordability is a problem, and so if you’re in one of these blue dot cities on this map that we’re looking at, well then you can make offers that maybe allow you to cover some of your closing costs and get yourself some of the price reduction so you’re not bringing as much of a down payment. And so that way it makes owning a home actually more affordable for you. So I think there is opportunity there.

Kathy:

Yeah, there’s one city that I was really surprised isn’t on there, and it’s Austin. I

Dave:

Think Austin has bottomed out a little bit. It’s still down. If you look from peak pandemic levels, it’s still down. I think the most of any major metro New Orleans has been hit pretty hard too. But yeah, I think this is just year over year data, so just in the last one year. But I do think that that sort of Austin is a perfect example of what I was just about to say, which is that there’s this sort of interesting dynamic where a lot of the markets that have corrected the most since the pandemic are some of the markets with the best long-term fundamentals. Austin’s just this enormous economic growth, enormous population growth. They just went crazy for a little while. And so at a certain point you have to think that a correction in those market is a good sign because there’s probably a good chance that it’s going to go back up. It’s not like a dying city, Austin is anything but a dying city. So it’s like you have to figure out if you can time the market, which is super hard, but if you can find a good deal in a market like Austin, you got to feel pretty good about it. If you’re buying five, 10, 15% off peak, I mean, I would be interested in something like that.

Kathy:

Yeah, I think Austin’s probably a great opportunity. McAllen on this list surprised me a little bit and I’d like to dig deeper into that or if any of our listeners know what’s going on in McAllen, that whole area is growing so quickly, maybe prices got too high or I don’t know what’s going on there. I don’t know why it was on the list.

Dave:

Yeah, I don’t know. Texas has just been in the last couple of months seen a lot of declines often because they just grew too fast. And I do think it’s important to caveat by saying that if you look at a lot of these markets, even with the declines, they’re probably still some of the markets that have grown the fastest since 2019, for example. So it’s like maybe they got a little overheated, but in the grand scheme of things have been outperforming a lot of the rest of the country. So just keep that in mind. Alright, let’s move on to headline number three. As Henry alluded to the headline reads, the home insurance shock hitting the housing market has landlords concern too. This comes from Fast Company and from a survey conducted by Lance Lambert at Resi Club, if you recognize that name. Lance has been a frequent guest on this show.

He talks a lot about real estate data, but his company, resi Club did a survey and showed that the average US home insurance premium rate rose 11.3% in 2023, which was double the increase of 2022. So that’s a lot. I mean in any other year, 11.3% would be insane. I’m sure people in Florida are like, I wish my premium only went up 11.3% because we’ve seen in that market some of them are going up 50% a year, some of them are doubling. And the interesting part of this story here is that Resi Club conducted a survey, and not surprisingly, I guess 37% of investors are very concerned on a national basis about the rate of increasing insurance while 43 are somewhat concerned. So basically 80% of landlords are worried that this is going to impact their business in a significant way. So Henry, first of all, how has this impacted your business so far?

Henry:

So from an insurance perspective, we actually are conducting an audit right now of what we’re paying on our monthly premiums and actively shopping them around to see where we can save money. As we sat down and looked at our total company budget, our largest spend outside of our staff is on insurance costs. And so obviously those are things that you can do something about if you can shop that around. So this, and in all honesty, this is the first time in the seven years I’ve been investing that we’ve actually done that. And so that tells you that the premiums and the prices have gone up. It’s also changing how we’re underwriting the deals. We’re having to underwrite them based on higher costs, and that means I now have to buy a property cheaper to offset those costs. So it’s definitely impacting our business so much so that we are taking a holistic look at our entire portfolio.

Dave:

You miss the good old days where insurance was kind of just like a check the box thing. It was like whatever. Yeah, 1800 bucks, cool, whatever.

Kathy:

It was kind of always the same. You could just plan for it and proforma for it. You guys know I syndicated a development in Utah and Park City and I was talking to some of the homeowners just last week and one guy said he couldn’t get insurance and this is in Utah where it’s not typically a place with storms. Not that bad.

Dave:

Yeah.

Kathy:

And so I was like, what did your insurance agent say? And they said, well, it’s California and Florida’s fault, probably also the Gulf that insurance costs have gone up so much just to cover all the losses from the fires and the flooding. But the good news is, and again this is anecdotal, this is from these conversations, but also from conversations I’ve had with a bunch of insurance companies is that they do see it potentially changing soon, maybe a year or so that there’s going to be either a government mandate or something because there’s just too many homeowners. What are we going to do? You can’t just not have insurance. So it did sound like the consensus from the people I spoke with anecdotal. Again, I don’t have evidence of this from anybody in a boardroom, but that it will get better, but right now we’re kind of in the thick of it. So I’m holding onto that hope.

Dave:

I hope you’re right. This is obviously unsustainable, 11% returns. I mean for me with underwriting depending on the property, but I used to just assume that things like insurance would go up at roughly at the pace of inflation. It’s like two or 3% a year, but now I’m going to at least for the next year or two think it’s going to go up 20%. I hope I’m wrong, but I’m going to just budget for that because recent evidence suggests it might.

Henry:

And again, this is one of the things that I think that new homeowners, so not investors need to think about. You need to understand what insurance is doing year over year because I have heard so many stories of first time home buyers buying properties and then their mortgages going up so much between insurance and taxes that they are finding themselves in a situation where they need to sell their homes because they can’t afford the payments anymore. We

Dave:

Had a guest on maybe two months ago who was talking about this and he said that in certain states, I think in Louisiana specifically, that for a certain amount of home buyers, taxes and insurance were now as much as principal and interest on their mortgage. It’s a second mortgage. It’s insane. That is crazy. And no one budgets for that. And we talk all the time on the show about the benefits of buying real estate, being that when you lock in that debt, you’re assuming principal and interest are the big parts that you want to lock in. And maybe for the first time, at least in my 14 year career, but maybe for one of the first times ever, we’re starting to see the fact that insurance and taxes are variable really starting to impact obviously investors, but probably even more so homeowners.

Henry:

Absolutely.

Dave:

We’ve hit our first three headlines, but we do have one more super important discussion for you. Can your tenants still afford rent? We’ll hit this when we return. Well,

We back to on the market. Let’s jump back in. All right, let’s move on to our last and final headline, which comes from Redfin and Reed’s. Renters must earn $66,120 to afford the typical US apartment. The problem is that the typical renter makes $11,000 less than that in a year. So you can probably figure this out, but basically the average US household that has renters in it earns an estimated $54,712 per year, which is 17% lower than what the average person needs to get the median price apartment in the US right now. The good news is that rent growth is slowing down in a lot of places, actually turned negative in a couple of cities and wage growth is outpacing this metric. So that should make things affordable in the long run, but that can take a little bit of time. So I’m wondering, Kathy, are you concerned this could lead to further rent declines if it’s just not affordable? This

Kathy:

Is a huge issue guys, and this is something of course we talk about all the time on the market. I think it was realtor.com came out with a report saying there’s seven to 8 million affordable homes needed. So you often hear there’s like three to 4 million homes needed, but affordable. Affordable is the issue, and it’s tragic when I talk to people or when I’m out and about and listen to people at the airport or whatever, they’re struggling because most of their money is going towards rent. Now, coming back to me personally as an investor, I like to invest in areas where the average person in the area can afford. When I’m offering, that’s my metric, I want to know what’s the average income in the area and what’s 30% of that and make sure that I’m providing that. Then I know at least there’s, when you take the average, that means that more people can afford what I’m offering, but that does not mean I’m solving the problem for people who don’t make the average income. And that isn’t necessarily something that can fall on real estate investors because we’ll lose money doing that. We’re not in it for charity and you can’t probably provide housing that’s cheap enough for people to be able to handle. So it’s a huge problem. Nobody knows how to solve it. It’s not changing what I’m doing. I still feel like I’m really providing an important service, which is affordable housing for the average renter.

Henry:

Henry, what are your thoughts on this? Rent has stayed pretty flat here over the past year or so. We’re doing incremental increases where it makes sense, but I think what we’re seeing though is we have so many people that need to rent that it is making the market somewhat competitive. And so the challenge for investors is we need to go out and buy, but then we’re faced with the high interest rates and the higher cost of real estate, which means now we have to rent that at a price point where it makes sense. And I think what’s causing a lot of the issue is either inexperienced investors who are buying things at too high of a price point are trying to get either too much rent or forcing rents up in certain areas, or you’ve got money coming in. So we’re in the middle of the country.

And so you’ve got people in some of the higher dollar areas selling properties and then putting that money to work here, and they’re buying properties and paying more because they can, they got California money and they’re buying Arkansas properties and then now they’re trying to get those higher rents and it makes affordability a problem. And so we’re starting to see a shift where a class properties become B class properties and B class properties become C class properties. And so people who would want to find themselves in a class and are renting a B or a C class. And so I think it’s just like this trickle down effect from the housing market. I don’t know how we fix it unless we all come together, meaning builders, investors and city and local governments to provide some sort of relief or affordable housing. There are some things that investors are looking at doing rent by the room to provide some of that affordable housing that gets them to get a total increased rent, but your rent by the room, it then becomes affordable for that one person who’s renting that room. But it would need a whole lot of that to make a big impact.

Dave:

I mean, unfortunately, the only real long-term solution to something like this is more supply demand’s not going anywhere. We’re going to need housing for people, and that takes a long time. And with interest rates the way they are and the other things we’ve talked about, which is insurance rates and taxes being as high as they are, the climate for building more rental units is not great. Right now we’re actually seeing a huge drop off in multifamily construction. So I don’t really know how this plays out. There’s no easy solution here, but I guess it’s a similar forecast to what many people think will happen in the housing market that perhaps what happens is rent stays relatively flat for a little bit, at least relative to inflation, and that real wages go up and so things do get affordable for people. It’s kind of this idea where one thing stays steady while the other one steadily climbs. That could be another way, but in the long run, that would still be short term until there’s enough supply to meet demand. That’s just how a market works. So hopefully developers, governments, businesses can figure out a way to do this because obviously this is not good for those individual renters or really for the economy in general.

Henry:

There’s one thing that Kathy said that I absolutely want to reiterate. She is not buying properties banking on the highest possible rent that she can get. She is protecting herself by buying properties and underwriting them under the market rent. What that does is it protects your investment and it provides more affordable housing for people. So it’s a win-win in that situation. And I don’t think a lot of investors are underwriting their deals like that. Everybody wants to know what’s that max rent that I can get? And they’re going to making their offers based on that. But we are, you are probably not going to get that max rent, especially when you’re in areas like where we are, where they’re building a class. Apartments everywhere right now.

Kathy:

Yeah. I was just grossing out over the past few years when I would get ppms across my desk saying, Hey, we bought this apartment, we’re going to jack up rents and that’s going to increase the value and then we’re going to flip it. And it’s just like, ah, yeah, but what about society? There’s a maximum that people can afford. Now, a lot of those people are suffering. A lot of those apartment owners are kind of getting paid back, I guess you could say today, because they’re not getting the numbers they thought they would get. But we’ve got to be obviously conscientious as landlords, but we also can’t be in the negative, right? And when we’re seeing property taxes go up and we are seeing insurance rates go up and the cost of repairs to go up and all of those things, well that translates into rent. This is the problem. There’s more people who need a place to live than there is places to live. So that has to be solved. And it’s not easy when the cost to build is so expensive.

Dave:

All right. Well, thank you both so much for your feedback, insights, opinions, all of it about these four headlines. I hope you all learned something about what’s going on in the economy and agreed with me over Kathy in our debate. But we’ll just see what happens there. And if you want to see Kathy and I in a more amicable setting where we are going to be working together to talk about something, make sure to check out biggerpockets.com/mexico to learn more about BP Con and all the fun and networking we’re going to be doing there. Thanks so much for listening. We’ll see you soon for another episode of On the Market. I’m Dave Meyer. He’s Henry Washington. She’s Kathy Feki. See you soon.

On The Market was created by me, Dave Meyer and Kaylin Bennett. The show is produced by Kaylin Bennett, with editing by Exodus Media. Copywriting is by Calico content, and we want to extend a big thank you to everyone at BiggerPockets for making this show possible.

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In This Episode We Cover

  • Why the housing market may stay “stuck” until 2026, and what happens after
  • Home price appreciation predictions and whether we’ll continue to see values increase
  • The “cold” real estate markets seeing price cuts and stagnant listings
  • How new and experienced investors can prepare for the insurance “shocks” that keep coming
  • Affordability updates and why rent prices may be peaking as tenants struggle to afford housing
  • And So Much More!

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Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.