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Florida property taxes could drop to 0%. As the state struggles with some of the lowest affordability in the country, with home insurance almost doubling in five years and home prices increasing by more than 50% compared to pre-pandemic pricing, Floridian homeowners have seen their housing costs explode. So, what if they could save thousands of dollars a year by ditching property taxes?

If Florida makes it work, this could open up the floodgates for many other states to pass similar bills. But WILL it work? A significant amount of Florida’s tax revenue comes from property taxes, so will they be efficient enough to work with a tighter budget, or will infrastructure break down due to the massive loss in government funding?

And, if property taxes are eliminated, boosting affordability, could buyer demand surge as well? We ran the numbers, and the potential savings on housing costs are substantial. If Florida proves a successful 0% property tax test case, other states (including yours) could be next.

Click here to listen on Apple Podcasts.

Listen to the Podcast Here

Read the Transcript Here

Dave:
Can a state just get rid of property taxes? Well, Florida is apparently testing the feasibility of this bold idea. And other states like Wyoming, Kansas, Montana, North Dakota, have also been exploring ideas to either limit or completely abolish property taxes. And if these things pass, they would of course have a huge impact on the way the housing market works. So today we’re going to explore this idea. Is it feasible? Why do it, what could the impacts be? And could this be coming to a state near you anytime soon? Hey everyone, it’s Dave Meyer, head of real Estate Investing at BiggerPockets, and today we’re talking about one of the hottest topics and one of the biggest challenges in real estate today, which is property taxes. If you own property already, you’ve probably noticed a big, potentially huge increase in property taxes in the last several years, and we don’t yet actually have 2024 tax data reminder.
Those are due soon, but we do have data up through 2023. And if you look at the change in property taxes between 2019 and 2023 across the whole us, the median property tax went from about 2300 bucks to 2,800 bucks. That’s a 24% increase in just four years. And while this isn’t the only reason, by any means that housing is getting less affordable, you also have to blame high mortgage rates, soaring insurance costs, higher property values, all contributing to lower affordability. But this tax issue is a significant component of higher housing costs in general. And as such, many state and local governments are looking for ways to improve home affordability. And property taxes is actually a very logical place for governments to start looking because it is the element of housing affordability that they actually have some control over. Insurance is private, mortgage rates are driven by big macroeconomic forces.
Supply quantities are really complex and they’re very slow moving taxes though those can actually be changed relatively quickly if there is a government willing to do that. And if the government does implement or change a policy, those changes can go into effect actually pretty quickly as well. So it makes sense that state and local governments are examining whether lowering or eliminating property taxes is a viable solution, and that’s why we’re here talking about it today. It’s also why Florida in particular has been in the news so much and why they’re introducing some pretty bold ideas to lower taxes. Now you probably know this, but Florida has been hit particularly hard in the housing affordability arena. It’s also experiencing one of the larger corrections in terms of prices across the country. Now I want to keep that in context. The state of Florida has declining home prices, but it’s one, two, 3%.
It’s nothing like a crash, but it is worth calling that out. Now, other states are experiencing similar dynamics, but I do want to just pick one state for this episode to just use as an example. And because Florida represents a lot of the issues and a lot of the potential solutions that we’re going to be talking about today, it sort of fits as a good example. So we’re going to be following Florida most closely. Now let’s just talk about what’s going on in Florida since the pandemic property values have just exploded. It was one of the fastest growing states in terms of appreciation. In fact, we saw 66 0% increases in home price value across the state from the end of 2019 to today. So that is just massive appreciation even relative to all of the appreciation that we saw during the pandemic. This was one of the fastest growing states.
This for people who already owned property, was great for your equity value and growth, right? But it is not good for housing affordability for people who are trying to buy homes now or maybe trade up to a different home or just move to a different part of the state, it’s not very good for that. In addition to property values, taxes went up in a corresponding way. Most property taxes are based on the value of properties, and so when properties are appreciation, taxes go up. For example, we’ve seen taxes in Tampa. One of the hottest markets in Florida have gone up 57% since 2019. In Miami, they’re up 48%. And you see similar numbers all across the state. One of the unique things that’s happening in Florida as well, that’s really just hammering housing affordability is home insurance. The premiums have just been going crazy. This is sort of this double whammy that’s happening in Florida because premiums have gone up 72% over the last five years.
So that’s even faster than home price appreciation, and that is more than most states. I think it’s actually the most out of any state. Alabama and Louisiana are also up there, but this is another reason why Florida is seeing such a big hit to housing affordability and why they are probably being aggressive in terms of exploring the idea of limiting or eliminating property taxes to help take some costs off the table for Florida homeowners. So just all in all, to me, it makes sense why they were looking into this because housing has gotten so expensive. It’s a key component to any state’s economy and GDP to quality of life, to the desirability for people to move there, for business to move there. There’s so much to the housing market. So it makes sense to me why Florida is actively looking into ways to make housing more affordable.
And I’m sure at least on paper, to anyone who owns property in Florida, this sounds like a great idea, less taxes, but we have to remember that there are a lot of trade-offs and considerations here. So we need to dive in a little bit deeper if this actually makes sense and if it’s actually feasible. The first thing we need to look at are how high are Florida property taxes in the first place? Now, it’s important to remember that it does vary locally. Different cities, different counties will have different property taxes, but when you look across the state in general, it averages 0.8% of home values. That probably means nothing to you, but just relative to other states, it’s right about in the middle. The highest states are in New Jersey, which is 2.2% Illinois, 2.1%. Then you have other states like Massachusetts, New York, and Texas all around 1.6%.
So those are all double or more than Florida’s property taxes. The lowest is Alabama with 0.38% property taxes. So actually, if you’re looking for the median, Florida is not that far off 0.81%. It’s about normal, and it’s important to note that this actually isn’t what changed. So you have to remember here that Florida didn’t increase its tax rate. That’s not why people’s taxes are going up. It’s just because property values appreciate so much. So it used to be 0.8% of a $200,000 house. Now it’s 0.8% of a $400,000 house. And so obviously that’s good for equity, but it hurts people’s cashflow, right? Or your savings rate because maybe you’re building equity in your property, but you might not have access that might not be liquid assets that you can use to pay those taxes or that increasing insurance costs. So that is what is going on with property taxes today in Florida. But I think there’s actually some bigger questions that we need to dive into. How much total tax is the state collecting and what different buckets do they collect those taxes in? Because property tax is just one of those buckets. There’s also sales tax, there’s also income tax, and you have to look at this bigger picture to figure out and realize is this actually feasible in any state? Is it a good idea? And which states might actually be able to pull something like this off? We’ll get into all that right after this break.
Welcome back to on the market. We’re here talking about capping or eliminating property taxes as is being discussed in Florida and a couple of other states right now. And before we left off, we talked about what was going on in property taxes in Florida, but I said that I think there’s sort of two other questions that we need to be talking about. The first is how much total revenue a state government is collecting. And then the second is the mixture, the bucket. The second is the mixture or buckets by which they collect that tax. It’s not just property tax, it’s also income tax, sales tax, corporate taxes, all that because at the end of the day states they need income, they need revenue, and they generate that through taxes. And I’m sorry, I know there are some people out there who say that tax is theft.
No, it is not. I fully disagree with that. Taxes are the price that you pay for living in a civilized society. Personally, I want roads. I want airports. I want schools, a strong military, a police department. I want hospitals and those things, they cost money and taxes are how you pay for them. Taxes to me are not theft. It is like you’re subscription free for society, right? If you want music without ads, you pay a subscription to Spotify or YouTube Premium, you want to civilized society, you pay a subscription in the form of taxes. Now, of course, don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of worthy debates about the right amount of taxes and the right sources of taxes, what taxes should be spent on how efficient the government uses those tax revenue. Those are all great questions and topics of debate. So I know there are those fringe folks that say all taxes, theft.
That makes no sense to me as one of our founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin said, in this world, nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes. And I totally agree. So what we should be talking about is how much total revenue should they be collecting and what are the best ways to collect those taxes. So because taxes are inevitable, but there’s different philosophies on how much revenue you need to collect and how you should collect that. Revenue states have very different ways of collecting taxes. Like I said, the primary ways are property tax, income tax, sales, tax and corporate taxes. There are other things like permits and fees, but those tend to be smaller sources of revenue. So we’re just going to focus on the bigger buckets today. Now there’s actually a cool chart. I will link to this if you’re watching this on YouTube or we’ll put it in the show notes if you’re listening on a podcast, there’s a cool chart put together by the tax foundation that I was doing when I was researching the show that shows how each state collects taxes.
And it’s super interesting really to see how states do it really differently from one another. I just picked out two as examples. Kentucky and Oklahoma, they have a very balanced approach. They have about 25% from each bucket, from sales tax, income tax, property tax, and other taxes. Some states like Texas or New Hampshire, for example, are super weighted towards property taxes. Many states have no income tax at all states like Tennessee, Washington, Texas, Nevada, Wyoming, and of course the example we’re talking about today, Florida. So we need to consider this mix, how much revenue it generates and how it impacts an individual person’s total tax burden, right? Because a lot of people look at Florida and they say, Hey, there’s no income tax. It’s a low cost state. And that might be true, but it’s not necessarily true because maybe they have a low income tax, but super high property taxes, that’s true In Texas for example, they have a really high property tax or a state like Washington has no income tax, but they have a super high sales tax.
So they’re just getting you in different ways. It’s not necessarily a low tax state. So you actually have to look at what’s combined. The total tax burden for each state and where each state falls the lowest in the country is Alaska at 4.9%. That is very, very low. The highest is unsurprisingly New York at 12%. Then Hawaii, and I know California gets a really bad rap for having really high taxes, and it does have a super high income tax that actually goes up to 13% just for state income tax, which is wild. But that’s actually a tiered system. And the data I’m measuring with today is what the average person plays. So California is still high 10.4%, but it’s actually not the highest. So let’s get back to our discussion of Florida. Now, I said that Florida has no income tax, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it has a low overall tax burden, but it actually does it have a low overall tax burden?
In fact, it has the fourth lowest tax burden in the entire country. The average taxpayer in Florida just pays about 6.05% of their total income to state and local governments each and every year. Again, that’s about half of what the highest one is in New York. And one thing that I think is really interesting is that Florida, despite collecting relatively low amounts of tax from its taxpayers, seems to be relatively efficient with its taxes. Because if you look at the US News and World Report, it comes in 20th in terms of state rankings for total infrastructure for schools. It’s somewhere in the middle as well. There’s a lot of different sources for this, but it came somewhere between 15 and 25% for public schools. So it’s not at the top, but given that it has the fourth lowest tax burden, but it is in the middle in terms of infrastructure and education, I think you could easily argue that Florida is relatively efficient with taxes when it comes to education and infrastructure, which are two very important functions of the government.
But I think the thing here that really matters is going back to that sort of mix. So they don’t collect a ton of revenue, but 38% of the state’s total income comes from property taxes. So just off the bat, you have to think that that’s a little bit crazy. Eliminating nearly 40% of the state’s operating budget seems a little farfetched. But one thing that you need to know here is even though that they’re operating relatively efficiency, just based off a couple of different data points here, there’s tons of different ways to measure government efficiency. I’m just giving you some examples here. But the thing that you should know is despite collecting a relatively low amount of tax revenue per taxpayer, about 38% of the total revenue from the Florida budget comes from property taxes. So the question is, if Florida already has one of the lowest overall tax burdens and nearly 40% of their revenue comes from property taxes, does it actually have room to go lower?
Right? That seems to me to be the big question because they’re already pretty low, and that would be eliminating 40% of their revenue. And again, I get it. I know that a lot of Florida homeowners like this idea, but sort of the question becomes how low is too low? At what point do services and infrastructures start to decline because things obviously cost money, or might they just shift the tax burden? Maybe they keep that total 6% tax burden that we were talking about, but shift it away from property taxes and more towards an income tax or more towards a higher sales tax. Now, I feel like one of the things that has really made Florida a popular place for migration and businesses moving it is that they don’t have an income tax. So I am highly skeptical that they are going to introduce any towards some income tax.
Could they increase their sales tax? I mean, if they implemented a total ban on property taxes, which I’ll let you know in a little bit if I think that’s likely, but if they did that, I think they would have to increase sales tax. That is already the biggest piece of the pie. I actually found some data that breaks down Florida’s total revenue. And yes, they have seen increases in corporate tax revenue, which is great. It grew actually a huge percentage, 72% in just two years. But corporate taxes are still just sort of a drop in the bucket. Sales tax, at least according to the data I’ve seen, is 10 times more than corporate tax. So even though there are companies moving to Florida, it’s not going to be a big enough difference to offset just eliminating property taxes. I think it would probably have to go to an increase in sales taxes or just collect total revenue, but that would probably come with budget cuts. But could this actually take hold? And if so, what does it mean for the housing market? We’ve talked a lot about Florida, their revenue, how they collect taxes. Do I actually think that this is going to happen? And if so, how could this all play out? We’ll get into that right after this break.
Hey everyone, welcome back to On the Market. It’s Dave here talking about property taxes and some states’ efforts to limit or eliminate entirely property taxes. So far we’ve talked about how states collect revenue, what it means to them, what they do with those tax dollars, but now let’s shift our conversation to could this actually take hold and if so, what would happen to the housing market? So overall, and again, this is just my opinion, could this take hold? I think so. I think that when you look at what’s being discussed, there’s a very broad spectrum, right? Some states are talking about capping increases or lowering the percentage of property taxes relative to their value. I think those are going to gain steam in the next couple of years because frankly, I have a hard time believing that housing affordability is going to get a lot better anytime soon.
I think it will get better, but it’s going to be gradual. And caps on increases could help play into that. So those caps, I think that might come into play in certain states, the complete elimination of property taxes, I think that’s a little farfetched right now. Some people might propose it, but just think about that. Think of Florida as a business. If someone came in and said, we’re going to eliminate 40% of our revenue, that would be crazy. So maybe they would do that and they would shift the tax burden elsewhere. My guess, and this is just following housing policy for quite a long time, my guess is that they’ll start with more modest measures like caps on increases or putting more dollars into homeowner assistance programs. Because actually right now if you look at Florida, they put about 14 billion per year towards homeowner assistance programs.
And so they might just increase that or find other ways to improve housing affordability without completely eliminating property taxes. Now, what states and where could this happen? My guess is that they will be more popular in states where property taxes is already a smaller share of total tax revenue. So these are states like New Mexico, Delaware, Kentucky, Louisiana. We also have West Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama. Because a state like that, it’s not going to impact their revenue as much as a state like let’s say New Hampshire where 45% of their income comes from property tax. So if New Hampshire wants to limit or eliminate their property taxes, they’re going to have to basically rebuild their entire tax code, whereas a state like New Mexico or Kentucky can make modest adjustments to property taxes and not have it change their entire state budgeting. So that’s my estimation of what we’re going to see over the next couple of years is probably efforts by state and local governments to improve housing through revisions to their property tax policy.
I don’t think the complete elimination of property taxes across entire states is very likely, at least not yet. I think they’ll probably try more modest approaches before they go to that. What I think is sort of an extreme measure now in the states that I think that this could happen, and if they do happen, what does that actually mean? Well, for real estate investors, there are some potential things that you should be thinking about. First and foremost, I think for out-of-state investors, it could be a net potential benefit or actually for people who own multiple properties. But let’s start talking about out-of-state investors. Let’s just go back to our example of Florida. If you live, let’s just say in Ohio and you invest in Florida, that’s going to have a net benefit on your bottom line. That’s going to increase your cashflow each and every month.
But if the state decides just to shift the tax burden elsewhere, say to an income tax or a sales tax, by being an out-of-state investor, you’re not going to be impacted by that. I mean, I guess you would be impacted a little bit if there’s sales tax on repairs or maintenance, but not for everyday expenses, not when you go out to eat, like the sales tax isn’t going to impact you because you’re living in Ohio, but you’ll be disproportionately benefited by having a decrease in that property tax. And sort of that same line of thinking, at least for me goes through when owning multiple properties. Because even if you live in Florida, yeah, your sales tax might go up, but you would get a proportionate benefit because if you own multiple properties, right, you’re going to have your tax burden come down across those multiple properties.
And yeah, some of your everyday expenses will go up because a higher sales tax, but that might be offset or more than offset by the cumulative total reduction of property tax. So those are the two ways I could see this impacting investors and just strategy. So what would actually happen to the housing market in these areas where these things might get passed? Could they actually change supply and demand dynamics? I actually think that they might. I calculated an example just to look at this and start thinking this through. So just let’s just imagine that you bought a median price home of about $400,000. You take out a mortgage for 80%, that’s $320,000. If you had six and a half percent interest, and if your normal tax right now would be about $3,000 a year, insurance is about the same. Your monthly payments each and every month would come out to about $2,600 per month.
Now, let’s just say that they go full bore. They just completely eliminate property taxes. In this same scenario, all things being equal, other than property taxes, your payment would go down to $2,350 a month. That is a reduction of $250 a month. Or in other words, reducing your monthly payment by about 10%. That is a lot. That has a very measurable impact on affordability, and we’ve never really seen this done before, but I would have to think that this would get some demand into the market. If you look at corollaries, if you look at modest decreases in mortgage rates that improve affordability, you do see demand come back into the market. And so I would have to imagine if all of a sudden houses got 10% more affordable in terms of monthly payments because of an elimination of property tax, I think that could drive demand.
So this is something you definitely should be keeping an eye out for in your state and local government news because I do think it has real impacts for investors and the housing market in general. But again, as I said, I don’t think that total elimination is the most likely scenario. I think instead we’ll see some states introduce caps to increases. Maybe we’ll even see some reductions. We might see more affordability programs. Like I said, Florida has a lot of programs to improve homeowner affordability. We see that across a lot of states and states might, instead of eliminating or eliminating revenue, just offer more tax credits as an example. Those measures, all of them could help affordability, but probably not to that 10% tune I was just talking about before. So I do think it will probably be more modest, but I still think it could at least marginally increase demand.
I think it could help with buyer confidence, right? I think if I were considering buying in some market where taxes have been going crazy, it would be nice to know that the state or local government was considering ways to limit that ever increasing liability. And of course, those laws could always change in the future, but it might at least get some buyer confidence back into those markets and drive some demand. So again, my general feeling is that it’s not going to be these huge swings. It’s going to be more modest, incremental efforts that would help, along with what I’ve been talking about for years now, other ways that the housing market is likely to probably get more affordable, but gradually. So these improvements in property tax prices might also help go along with slower appreciation rates, lower mortgage rates, increasing wages, all those things combined could and hopefully will improve housing affordability over the next couple of years. So that’s it. That is my take on what’s going on with property taxes in the news right now. But I would love to hear your take. If you are watching this on YouTube, drop us a comment and let us know. Or if you are listening on the podcast, I always appreciate personal comments that I get either on Instagram or on BiggerPockets, so make sure to drop me a line there. Thank you all so much for listening to this episode of On The Market. I’ll see you next time.

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In This Episode We Cover

  • Florida’s new legislative push to abolish or reduce property taxes for homeowners
  • How much homeowners would save every month if their property taxes were eliminated
  • Can Florida afford to ban property taxes, and which services would be compromised if they did?
  • States that are most likely to eliminate property taxes if Florida succeeds
  • Serious side effects of eliminating property taxes and who pays the price
  • And So Much More!

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What’s the best rental property for the average investor? It’s not a single-family rental, it’s not a large apartment building, it’s not even a duplex or a triplex—it’s a “sweet spot” small multifamily. These investment properties, ranging from five to 25 units, make more money, are easier to manage, and help you scale faster to achieve financial freedom. Even large multifamily investing experts like Brian Burke are ditching the huge apartment complexes to buy these.

But what makes these small multifamily investment properties so much better than their bigger and smaller counterparts? We’re discussing the massive investing opportunities in 2025 for these properties with Brian today and how new investors and those looking for a manageable portfolio can leverage these properties to reach financial freedom.

These types of properties are still experiencing low prices with limited competition, which means that if you know about them, you already have an advantage. How long do we have until multifamily prices rebound and these investments become out of reach for regular investors? How do you analyze a small multifamily property to ensure it makes you monthly passive income? Brian shares his wisdom and gives an exact timeline for when it may be too late to buy.

Dave:
Hey everyone, I’m Dave Meyer and this is the BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast where we teach you how to achieve financial freedom through real estate investing. Just recently I was on a panel for the BiggerPockets Momentum Virtual Investing Summit with our friend Brian Burke and he said something really interesting. He thinks the sweet spot in real estate right now is properties with five to 25 units. And if you don’t know Brian, he’s been investing for a long time. He’s been in the game for 30 years. He’s been contributing to BiggerPockets since 2013, so he is one of the most successful investors in the entire BP community. He’s also just one of those people who’s been right so many times that every time he says something like this, I pay close attention. Now, if you’ve heard him on the show before, you know that he’s not shy about telling you all the things that he’s not investing in.
So when I heard Brian say he is interested in this asset class of five to 25 unit properties, I wanted to find out more. And that’s what we’re doing on the show today. On this show, we talk almost every episode about residential real estate, which is properties from single family homes up to four units, and we sometimes talk about the other end of the spectrum, commercial multifamily real estate, mostly in the context of syndications that raise millions of dollars to go buy very large apartment buildings or housing developments. This middle ground though of five to 25 unit properties sometimes gets lost in the shuffle. So I want to ask Brian what makes those properties attractive, whether we’ve hit the point in the market cycle where investors should be jumping on deals in this category, and then I’m going to ask him his advice on how investors can analyze, purchase and operate this type of property. Let’s bring on Brian Burke. Brian, welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. Thanks for being here.

Brian:
It’s great to be back again even so soon.

Dave:
Yeah, well this is what you get for saying interesting things when we’re talking in different venues. Brian and I were talking on the Momentum Summit and you said something that really intrigued me about five to 12 unit properties. Can you just tell me and everyone why you think that’s kind of a sweet spot? Right now

Brian:
You have this kind of imperfect market in the small multifamily space, so you get into large multifamily a hundred units and up. It’s a very efficient market. It’s dominated by professionals who do it for a living. There’s not a lot of great deals to be found, but the small multifamily space, that’s where your mom and pop landlords live. That’s where you have tired landlords, that’s where you have deaths that lead to state sales and just all the kinds of things that happen in human life all happens in that smaller multifamily space. And as they say that chaos and dislocation breeds opportunity. So I think there’s opportunity in that smaller space.

Dave:
And do you think it doesn’t apply to even smaller multifamilies or does this also apply to two, three and four units?

Brian:
I think it applies to those two to four unit as well as it does that five to really, I’d say five to 25 unit space really kind of fits into this bucket. All of that applies when you get down into the smaller two to four unit space. There you have a little bit more competition from live in house hackers. You have some of that in that space, and I think you don’t have the economy of scale that you have with kind of that five to 25 unit space. So while the rules still apply there, I think that you get a little bit even sweeter spot if you’re in this as a real multifamily investor to be in that slightly larger space.

Dave:
Yeah, I’ve noticed that a lot and honestly why my personal interest has peaked to go into this commercial area is less about the economies of scale that you mentioned, but two to four units just seems super competitive and I think it’s BiggerPockets fault, I don’t know, but we’ve been preaching how valuable they are and they are. But you see now pricing on duplexes for example, is just kind of crazy unless you’re an owner occupant, and it’s because house hackers rightfully can pay more and still make those deals pencil. Whereas if you’re trying to scale a portfolio, you obviously can’t live in every property and you can’t pay as much as the person who’s going to house hack that property. So I totally agree with you on that. At the same time, I’m a little bit for some reason nervous to go beyond four units. Is it really all that different?

Brian:
There’s nothing to be afraid of. You brought up a good point about the smaller ones having maybe it’s BiggerPockets fault because you have all the house hackers coming in, but it’s also part of the reason that that space is so competitive is you can get Fannie Mae loans with lower down payments. You can get FHA. There’s regular conventional real estate lending that’s available to a single family home buyer. The same types of financing are available in that two to four unit space, and that does create a different competitive landscape. Once you’re five units and up, it’s considered commercial. That means the lending guidelines are different. It means down payment requirements are different, but operationally it’s basically still the same thing. Now the larger you get kind of in some respects, the easier it gets too.

Speaker 3:
So

Brian:
I had a 540 unit apartment complex. It was easier for me to manage than my 11 unit, and that’s just part of the way it is as you grow and scale and get teams. But when you’re starting out and trying to build a portfolio, this smaller multifamily space is a great place to learn. It’s a great place to build a portfolio, and believe me, you’ll learn more than you want to learn, but that’ll be really useful. And so don’t be afraid of it.

Dave:
The other thing that intrigues me is I personally got into real estate buying small that were in Denver and there’s kind of these cut up old mansions and Victorians. And recently I’ve only been trying to buy purpose-built small multifamilies because the organization of them, the consistency between units does in my opinion make a really big difference. Whereas all these old buildings that weren’t meant to be multifamilies that you cut up are just such a pain in the butt to manage and to fix. Whereas you buy a 540 unit, every unit is a carbon copy of each other. Maybe there’s a couple of layouts, but the systems, the clients you need, they’re repeatable. They’re knowable in a way that some of these small, so that part of it definitely appeals to me.

Brian:
Yeah, they can get a little crazy, especially when you get into these modified buildings and there’s lot those actually’s, a lot of em in Buffalo, when I was out there looking and bought this 11 unit, we looked at a lot of properties that were like two story single family homes that got repurposed into duplexes where the lower floor is one unit and the upper floor is another unit. And there’s all kinds of oddities that you find in that. And man, it runs the gamut. I mean between shared utilities and just a lot of those buildings are older and then their systems are really, really tough shape. So there can be a lot of challenges, but there’s also, again, anytime there’s challeng, there’s opportunity.

Dave:
Totally agree. Just when you’re reaching scale and when I’m trying to buy units in this part of my portfolio, I’m looking for ease of maintenance. So it just seems like this five to 25 unit area could be good, but I want to bring up sort of the elephant in the room, which is it a good time in the market to actually pursue these types of commercial deals. But first, Brian, we do have to take a quick break. We’ll be right back. Welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast here with Brian Burke talking about a potential sweet spot in the market right now, which is rentals that have five to roughly 25 units. Brian was telling us a little bit before about what appeals to him, but I’m curious, Brian, commercial has been in a pretty big correction over the last couple of years. Do you think we are approaching a good time to buy for this subset of the multifamily asset class?

Brian:
Well, that depends. Dave, do you like to buy things at the top or the bottom? Bottom? Well then I think this might be the time for you, then it might not be the time for everybody. The challenge of doing that though is the best time to buy anything is when it’s most uncomfortable to do so. I have a mentor of mine in stock investing. He says the stock market is the only market where buyers fear a sale,
And I think the real estate market also kind of fits into that category. When times are tough, people get scared and they don’t want to get in, that means it’s a good time to get in. Now, I can’t say that today is the precise bottom of the market, but I can tell you that it topped out in the second quarter of 2022 and it’s been on a down slide ever since. And if we’re not at the bottom, we’re close enough to it where if you make a move now on a really well-priced property because you found some needle in a haystack, then I don’t think you’ll be sad that you did. This to me is a good time to buy. New inventory is starting to decline. Rents will come back when new deliveries start to decline in the second half of this year. So I think this is a really compelling opportunity in the small multifamily space.

Dave:
I love hearing that because I am very interested in buying these right now. So that’s very good news. I really do think this is a really interesting sweet spot for people. So hopefully everyone is also considering this because as Brian said, commercial real estate has been on sale for the last couple of years. But Brian, we are starting to see the residential market slow down right now. I’ve said that I think we’re going to have relatively flat prices this year. I think you sort of agreed when we were talking a couple of weeks ago. So can you maybe help our audience understand how and why the commercial space and the residential space don’t necessarily move in lockstep?

Brian:
Yeah, people always like to talk about the real estate market as if there is such a thing that all real estate does the same thing at the same time. And there’s a market cycle slide that you’ll often see people put up when they’re talking about real estate market cycles where the cycle goes up and it peaks out and then it comes down and then it troughs out and then it goes back up again. But I have a slide that’s way better than that and it has a bunch of lines that are crisscrossing in all kind of different ways because that’s really what the real estate market looks like. It’s looks like total chaos because you could have home prices in a slide while multifamily is increasing. Industrial could be going up while offices going down and hotels are trading sideways. All these things can be happening.
And what is also interesting is even within the same type of real estate, it can be moving in two different directions in two different locations. I mean, it might be where multifamily in buffalo is on a tear, but multifamily in Los Angeles is on a downside. These could be happening at the same time. So we always have to keep that in mind. But there’s a lot of bad news that’s been coming out about commercial real estate. Multifamily office especially has been in a really bad spot. What you have to look at is where in the cycle are we and what are the chances that that cycle is going to bottom out and then start to move in the opposite direction. Now, if you’re talking about going out and buying office buildings, yeah, it’s really bad out

Speaker 3:
There.

Brian:
Will they come back? That’s debatable. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. But on the multi side, you see new deliveries coming down. You see rent growth starting to flatten. It was negative for a while. Now it’s flattening. When I look at rent growth forecast for the future, they’re trending up in most markets starting later half of this year and into next year. So if you can buy before that’s already happened, what do they say? Buy on the rumor and sell on the news. This is kind of we’re in that rumor stage. So I think that despite the fact that there’s been a lot of turmoil, I just think that that’s what creates opportunity.

Dave:
All right, well now you’re giving me FOMO and anxiety that I need to go buy something immediately. How long do you think this opportunity lasts? Do you think we’re just starting and there’s going to be opportunity for years to come, or is this kind of like a right here, right now kind of opportunity?

Brian:
I think that we have a little bit of time. There’s no sense to rush anything. You can let this play out. I don’t think that we’re looking at a V-shaped recovery where all this sudden we’re going to have this immediate massive bounce. I think that this recovery is going to be a process, and I think over the course of the next couple of years, you’re going to have some really sharp buying opportunities. And I think over the subsequent couple of years, you’re going to see the market start to mature. I’ve made up a few sayings. I might’ve said ’em on one of your podcasts before. I don’t remember which one, but people used to say about the multifamily markets survived till 25. These were the owners who were trying to just hang on. Well, they got to 25, but they’re still in a lot of distress.

Dave:
Yeah, nothing got better,

Brian:
Nothing got better. Their interest rates are still high, their loans are still coming due. And I had come up with a bunch of new saying and the dive in 25 was my first one, and that meant that the market’s going to stop going down. I mean, before it goes up, it first has to stop coming down. And I think we’re going to reach that point this year. And then I think it gets fixed in 26, meaning that I think next year we’re going to start to see some of this work itself out. The market’s going to get legs under it. I think you’re going to be an investor heaven in 27, meaning there’s going to be deals out there. You’re going to see the stuff that you bought. You’re going to get rent growth. You’re going to start to see price growth, and I think if you wait until 28, you’re going to be too late. Those are my sayings for the day. I

Dave:
Like this. All right,

Brian:
Take it for what it’s worth. So

Dave:
Brian, I want to ask you about property class. Within this space, do you recommend people invest in class A really nice polished spaces, class B, class C? How do you see that trade off in this particular subset of the market?

Brian:
It really has to match to your risk profile and the amount of work you really want to put in. If you have a high tolerance for risk, and let’s say you’re a real young go-getter, I’m going to kill it in the real estate business and I’m going to go find this really super below market deal, put in a ton of work and really turn it around. Buying class C properties might be for you because there’s some people that just won’t touch. They’re really management intensive. It’s really difficult to pull that off. It takes a lot of energy and a lot of time, and it’s a lot risk. If you have that in you, that’s a really great place to start, and I guarantee you will learn 10 times more about this business than you will if you want to just go buy class A properties

Dave:
And more than you want to, like you said, more than you want

Brian:
To, yeah, a hundred percent more than you want to. But if you’re kind of like moderately risk averse, going into that class B space is probably a good place to be. And if you’re just absolutely hands-off person like, look, I don’t want to mess with anything. I want no risk. I don’t want bad tenants, I don’t want it to deal with any of that stuff. Class A properties is probably the best place for you. Now, you’ll probably find that it’s the least amount of return, but on a risk adjusted basis, it’s a very good return. So you’ve got to match your personality and your risk tolerance and the amount of work you’re willing to put in and then decide from there which class is right for you.

Dave:
And I’m going to ask you a question you’re absolutely going to hate, but I’m going to ask it to you anyway. What is a good deal in this market, right? I know that cap rates are going to be very different in different property classes, different markets, but can you just maybe give us a little bit of a guideline for how you would look for and spot a good deal in today’s day and age?

Brian:
Yeah, I mean, a lot of people want to focus on cap rate and say, oh, a good deal means it’s this cap rate or that cap rate. Forget about cap rate.

Dave:
I know you hate that.

Brian:
I just hate cap rate. It’s just such a useless metric. What you really want to think about is the cash flow and replacement cost. I mean, if you can buy a property for a price that’s less than you can build it for, you’re already starting off on solid footing. But remember, this isn’t only called multifamily. This is also called income property. It’s another way that this is referred to as income property. You don’t go buy a 20 unit apartment complex because it’s a nice place for you to live. I mean, sure you could live in it, but that’s generally not why people buy 20 unit apartment buildings. They buy it because it’s income property. That means you got to look at what is the income, and if it doesn’t have income, it’s not a good deal. So when you’re underwriting, you’re going to look at your rent minus vacancy, minus operating costs, minus property taxes, insurance minus interest, what’s left.
And don’t forget about capital improvements. You’re going to have water heaters that break. You’re going to have parking lots that need to be resurfaced. You’re going to have roofs that need to be replaced, amortize the cost of those big ticket items over their lifespans and adjust for that as part of your cashflow question. And are you in positive cashflow territory? And is the cashflow that you’re going to receive enough to make the investment worthwhile? There’s another old saying that I really liked that says, all investments have risk, but not every risk is worth the investment. If you are going and buying a property that you have to put $200,000 a year into and you’re going to get a hundred bucks a month of positive cashflow, you’ve got to really consider whether or not this is a smart investment. If you could go invest in a mutual fund stock or whatever and get a much better return, you want to get a return on your capital. So look at it from a return on capital basis, not a cap rate basis, return on capital basis.

Dave:
Brian, I have more questions for you about these medium size multifamily properties, but first we do need to take a quick break. We’re back. Here’s the rest of my conversation with Brian Burke. Now, just totally asking for a friend and for our audience, not for myself, but if you were to be interested in this kind of deal, how does the underwriting and deal analysis process differ from either single family rentals or smaller two to four units

Brian:
In this five to 25 arena? It’s very similar to underwriting a fourplex. You’re going to look at your rent, you’re going to look at vacancy factor. And here’s something that I think is really important that people miss. If you own a fourplex, you can probably fill that fourplex up and have almost no vacancies for long stretches of time.
But when you get into this five to 25 unit space, your property is going to follow the market. So if the market has 10% vacancy, you’re going to find yourself 10% vacant. If you’re a hundred percent full, you’re doing something wrong. So really look at economic vacancy factors. Be respectful of what the market data is telling you about vacancy, about rent growth, about rental rates, because you’re going to be a byproduct of the greater overall market. It’s really tough to beat it when you get into these larger properties. The other thing to think about is the utilities. Who’s paying for them, who pays for what? Make sure you’re quantifying that and you’ve got a good management fee in there to pay a really good management company to help you with it. I’m not really a big fan of the DIY approach. I know some people really like to do it that way, but I’d much rather have a really strong competent manager in there and overseeing what they’re doing. So make sure that you’re accounting for those expenses. Those are the big things to look for when underwriting in this space.

Dave:
You said something that if you don’t have vacancy, you’re doing something wrong. Does that mean you’re just undercharging rent?

Brian:
Yeah, you’re undercharging rent. Yeah, rent. Rent. You should be at market vacancy. So if you’ve got 25 units and you’re a hundred percent full, your rents are too low.

Dave:
What about the debt side of things? Because for everyone who’s listening, just when you get a residential mortgage, usually you can get 30 or fixed rate debt. That is not typically what you do with commercial loans. They’re usually adjustable rate mortgages that have a balloon payment after 3, 5, 7, 10 years. So how does that factor the underwriting? Or what should we all be thinking about when we consider commercial debt versus residential?

Brian:
Yeah, commercial debt is a whole different animal. The best financing that you can find out there anywhere is the 30 year fixed fully amortized loan. And those are great for single family homes. You can even find ’em for your duplexes and fourplexes, but that’s not a thing in the small commercial multifamily space. Once you get over five units, you can sometimes find bank financing, especially if you have a relationship loan. If you’ve got a relationship with a local community bank, you might find some really attractive financing. I have that 11 unit building I told you about in New York. I had a local bank that financed it for me on a 25 year fixed rate, fully amortizing loan.

Speaker 3:
Wow.

Brian:
And so in the smaller space, you can find that debt out there. When you get into bigger multifamily, that gets even harder to find, especially when you get over 5 million. Those loans are really difficult to find. They usually will have some type of prepayment penalty. They’ll have shorter maturities like five, seven or 10 years. At that point, you have to pay ’em off for refinance. So it does get a little complicated as the loan size goes up, but if you’re under that 5 million mark, you can find really compelling financing from local community banks. That’s my starting point for that size.

Dave:
Alright, that’s really, really good to know. I guess the question is, assuming you can’t get one of those great fix rate debts, assuming you’re getting a more traditional kind of loan five, seven year or something like that, how do you underwrite that? Because do you just assume that you’re going to get a refinance at some point? Because that seems to be one of the major problems that operators have been facing over the last couple of years that they weren’t able to refinance. So how do you manage that risk?

Brian:
You manage the risk with a longer maturity. And the reason that a lot of operators are having that challenge right now is they got too short of a maturity. There was a period right after Covid where a lot of buyers, especially of larger multifamily, were buying with three year bridge loans. And these loans were intended to buy a property, fix it up, raise the rents, and then get a new loan. That was the reason that you would get those loans. But they kind of got repurposed where these syndicators were using this debt as a crutch because they couldn’t raise enough equity. So they would use these high leverage loans to juice their returns and require ’em to bring less cash to the table. But the trade-off was is that they had three year maturities, and that might work when it works, but if the music stops and there’s no place left to sit, that’s when things go wrong. So the challenge of that refinance is when rates go up, values fall. That refinance is very difficult. Outside of that, assuming that rates stay level or maybe they only go up a little bit and values do not fall, the refinance is certainly doable, especially if you’ve owned the property for a while. And that’s why the longer term maturities really pay off. If you get a loan with a 10 year maturity,
It’s pretty sure that you’ll be able to refinance in 10 years. The market should have gone up by then,

Speaker 3:
And

Brian:
If it did go down, it should have had enough time to come back by that point. And if it went down right before it was refi time, it already went up for eight or nine years and you should still be in pretty good shape. It’s the really short terms that will get you, because three to five years is the blink of an eye In this business. It may seem like a long time, but once you buy a property, you’ll find three to five years goes by really quickly.

Dave:
Thank you, Brian. You’ve really demystified the underwriting process for me a little bit. It really doesn’t seem very different from all of the regular presidential underwriting that I’ve done, and hopefully everyone listening to this sees that this really isn’t all that complicated. If you can underwrite a single family home or duplex, you can make some small adjustments and be able to underwrite these types of deals as well. But I want to sort of just talk about, just strategically, Brian, if you think this is a good asset for just regular investors, the average BiggerPockets listener, someone who’s going to buy a handful of units over the course of their lives to support their financial freedom, is this a better option than buying a bunch of single families or two or three triplexes or something like that? Why or why not?

Brian:
Well, I think it’s a different approach. It’s hard to say that one is necessarily better over the other because a lot of this depends on your own individual circumstances. Now, with the larger the properties you get, the more units you have concentrated in one location. Now that comes with advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are, let’s say you have a 20 unit apartment building and you have 20 single family homes. Well, in the 20 unit apartment building instead of 20 roofs to maintain, you have one roof to maintain
Instead of 20 property managers, because they’re all in different places. You have one property manager, instead of having to hire a landscaper to mow 20 lawns, there’s one landscaper mowing, one lawn. So you do get economy of scale, but the trade-off is you get some operational complexity. You get big enough, you might have to have an onsite person in California. If you have more than 15 units in one location, you have to have a quote onsite manager. So that adds some complexity to the business instead of just being really simple. So the financing is a little more complicated in the larger stuff, but I’m a believer in economy of scale. I’m a believer that in real estate investing, your journey takes you to larger properties. And I don’t mean more square footage on a house, I mean larger properties than others, more units in one location because that economy of scale is what gets you cash on cash return, which eventually gets you retirement. And single family homes can do it, but it’s very operationally complex to have a lot of scattered houses in a lot of different places. So I personally advocate for kind of a balanced hybrid approach where you might have, instead of a hundred single family homes, maybe you have five 20 unit buildings, and those could be in different locations. That’s fine. You get kind of the best of both worlds by having some geographic and portfolio diversification, yet also some consolidation to capture economy of scale.

Dave:
All right. I like it. I mean, you and I both are I think friendly with Chad Carson. I asked him the same question. He said the exact opposite thing, if you all listen to this thing, he was like, go buy 75 single family homes. But I think personally, I’m more of your belief. I started with small multifamily. I have some single family, and then I went sort to the opposite where I invest in syndications and the kind of stuff you do, which is hundreds of units. But I’m trying to fill out that sort of middle spot that I don’t have diversification and an ownership over. So that’s pretty interesting.

Brian:
At one point, I had 120 rental houses, and at one point I had 4,000 apartment units. Wow. I think it was easier to manage the 4,000 apartment units than the 120 rental houses.

Dave:
That’s amazing.

Brian:
He might’ve pulled that off really well, but I dunno, that’s just me. I mean, everybody’s different.

Dave:
I’m curious about timing though, Brian, because I totally buy the diversification aspect, but is this something new people should consider? Do you recommend building your way up to it?

Brian:
I recommend building your way up to it as you’re scaling to larger properties. I mean, it doesn’t mean you have to buy a single family house before you buy a duplex, but if you’re in a skip single family homes and go straight into multifamily, I would suggest starting with something that’s in the one to four category, just because of the ease of finance and just learning and getting your feet wet. And then I would get into that five to 15 unit space. There’s not a lot of difference in five to 15 units. You get over 15 units carrying that 16 to 25, that starts to get a little bit more complicated. It might behoove you to start in that five to 15 beforehand. I personally, I think I had a duplex first, and then I went straight to a 16 unit

Speaker 3:
And

Brian:
It was complicated for me to figure out. So I really always recommend climbing the ladder as a much easier way to get on a roof than to jump up on top of it. So no problem with starting small and working your way up.

Dave:
That’s good advice. I like that saying you’re full of good sayings today, Brian. I like that story. I’m

Brian:
Trying.

Dave:
Alright, well, thanks again, Brian, and thank you all so much for listening to this episode of the BiggerPockets podcast. If you enjoyed this episode as much as I did, please make sure to give us a five star rating either on Spotify, apple, or wherever you’re listening. We’ll see you next time.

 

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So, you want to invest in real estate…but where should you start? What’s the best type of rental property for a beginner? It’s easy to become overwhelmed by all the options, but in this episode, we’ll provide the four-step framework you need to make the right choice!

Welcome back to the Real Estate Rookie podcast! First, we’ll share four steps that will help you pin down the right investing strategy for your budget, lifestyle, and long-term goals. Then, we’ll introduce you to a few of the most beginner-friendly types of rental properties. Are you light on cash? House hacking could help you take down your first investment property with relatively little money out of pocket.

Are you looking to scale your real estate portfolio as quickly as possible? The BRRRR method (buy, rehab, rent, refinance, repeat) is one of the fastest ways to build wealth in real estate. Would you prefer your real estate investments to be mostly hands-off? Perhaps a long-term rental is more your speed.

Stick around till the end to learn about the three most common mistakes we see new investors make and what YOU must do to avoid them!

Ashley:
If you’re thinking about getting into real estate, you’ve probably asked yourself, where do I even start? There are so many strategies, house hacking, flipping a B, short-term rentals. That’s honestly a little overwhelming for most rookies.

Tony:
But what if we told you there’s a simple framework that can help you pick the right investment strategy today without second guessing yourself?

Ashley:
In this episode, we’re giving you the step-by-step formula to figure out which strategy is right for you. By the end, you’ll have the clarity and confidence to take action and start investing.

Tony:
Look, we see it all the time. New investors jump into real estate without a clear plan and they either burn out or they get stuck in analysis paralysis,

Ashley:
But not today, we’re going to break it down so you can avoid the common mistakes rookies make. I am Ashley Kehr,

Tony:
And I’m Tony j Robinson and welcome to the Real Estate Rookie podcast.

Ashley:
So there’s no one size fits all in real estate. Each person has a different set of circumstances.

Tony:
So we wanted to give you a super simple kind of four step formula that’ll help you figure out exactly what strategy makes most sense for you to start with. Now, be sure to stick around until the very end because we’re going to talk about some of the biggest mistakes we see Ricky Investors make when choosing the strategy. But let’s get into the actual four steps of this framework first. So I think the first step, and we’ve talked about this a few times in the podcast, but it’s really just about defining your goals and your motivations. And I won’t beat a dead horse here if you’ve listened to previous episodes, you’ve heard us say this before, but before you can really identify what strategy makes the most sense for you, you have to ask yourself, why am I doing this? Why am I investing in real estate?
Is it you want immediate cashflow today? Do you want long-term wealth for tomorrow? Are you looking to replace your day job? Is this just something that you want as a side hustle? What is it that’s actually motivating you to do this? And specifically when I think about motivations, you have cashflow, you have tax benefits, you have appreciation. And to a lesser extent, you have the ability to use properties yourself for vacations if you’re doing something like midterm or short term. But in most scenarios, you will not be able to equally satisfy all four of those motivations at the same time. So you’ve got to pick and choose which one is most important, second and most important, third most important, and then you can make a better decision around what strategy might actually satisfy those motivations.

Ashley:
And some of the common mistakes that I see new investors make when they’re trying to determine their strategy is they jump in without knowing their true motivation, which can lead you to choose the wrong strategy. When you choose the wrong strategy and it doesn’t align with your why or your goals, you’re going to feel burnout. You’re probably not going to like doing it, and you’re going to get frustrated because you’re not closer to achieving your goal, even though this might’ve been a shiny object that you listened about on a podcast and you wanted to do this investment because it seemed like it was going to bring you lots and lots of money. But if that wasn’t your true goal was high cashflow, and now you are spending every single night and every single weekend operating a short-term rental that you definitely didn’t want to do, maybe you make that pivot and that change.
You realize it was actually time that I desired financial freedom and time to actually do the things I want to do. So a high demanding operational investment was not actually the right strategy for you. So there should be some additional questions that you’re asking yourself. What is your desired monthly cash flow goal? Or how soon do I want to see results for my investments? Are you financially comfortable right now? Do you enjoy your W2 job? Are you not strained for cash and you don’t need anything immediately? Right now you’re looking farther down the road. So you really need to know your motivations and why you’re actually investing to make sure that the strategy you choose aligns with that.

Tony:
So that’s a super important first step is just making sure you understand your motivations. I think the second step is just really taking a moment to define not only the time that you have available, but also lifestyle that you want to live. It ties into that first piece of the motivations, but how much time do you really have? I mean, most people listening to this probably have some combination of family commitments, work commitments, hobbies, community commitments. Maybe they just want free time in general, but there are always demands on our time. No one has absolutely nothing to do. So ask yourself, how much free time do you have within those other responsibilities to actually dedicate toward building this real estate portfolio?

Ashley:
Garrett Brown, who kind of leads the bigger stays YouTube channel we’ve had him on before to co-host with us. He tells a story about how he did this $50,000 glamping investment where he bought the 10, and all of these gurus told him, you’re going to make tons of money just from this $50,000 investment. And he said he is never worked harder in his life to actually make that investment become successful, that he didn’t anticipate the operational, the hospitality, and the work that would actually have to go into it besides just making up that initial investment and setting up the tent. So you really do have to look at what goes into it other than just purchasing the deal.

Tony:
Yeah, I mean, we talk a lot about lifestyle and that’s a big reason why people get into real estate investing is because they have this idea of the life they want to live, but then they pick a strategy that doesn’t actually give them that lifestyle. It’s like you said, short-term rentals, right? The niche that I’m in, we have a hotel, it’s like those aren’t passive. Those are things that we’re actively involved in on a day-to-day basis. And if you really want just to be sipping my ties on the beach in Cancun, then maybe you need to be a private money lender. Maybe you need to be something else. But anyway, we’ll get into the examples later. But I think the goal is understanding lifestyle and the time that you have available to help point you in the right direction.

Ashley:
And we know this because we both started, or at some point in our journey, picked the wrong strategy and realized that we needed to pivot. Tony started out with long-term rentals and pivoted to short-term rentals. I started out with long-term rentals, but then I got shiny object syndrome and I went to campgrounds and I almost bought a million dollar campground and did a whole syndication deal. And that was my pivotal moment as to I actually don’t want to do a syndication deal. I don’t want to run this million dollar property. And I pivoted back to what I was good at and what was actually helping me reach my end goal of getting more time and being financially free. Some of the questions you should ask yourself is, do you want this to be a side hustle or a full-time pursuit? And even when we say side hustle, you still want to operate it as a business, but are you going to keep doing what you’re doing?
Whether you’re running a business already, you have a W2 job and you’re just going to build this real estate empire on the side, or is it that you want to go full-time into this? You want to be a real estate and foster? And also, how comfortable are you with unexpected issues with tenant calls, with communicating from people? And then kind of the last thing here is do you prefer passive income or active involvement? So usually, typically the more active you are involved, the more money you are going to make compared to things that are passively because you will have to share the gold with people who are actually involved in the management of the asset.

Tony:
Alright, Ricky, so we have two more steps to cover and then we’ll also break down some of the most popular strategies for rookies, but we’ll do that right after a break from today’s show sponsors. Alright, we’re back and we’re going over the four step process for helping you identify what you want out of real estate. So let’s continue with step number three. So step three, and this is a big one, but it’s to assess your own financial situation. I think a lot of people don’t fully grasp where they’re at financially and what it takes to actually get into real estate. And obviously there’ll always be strategies where you can get in for no money down low, money down, but in a lot of scenarios there is some form of capital that’s needed to get started in real estate. And I think one of the biggest questions you can ask yourself is how much cash do I actually have on hand?
Or how much cash do I have access to? If you’re low on cash, that’s going to send you to maybe one strategy. If you’ve got an abundance of cash, it opens up a little bit more doors. But I think a common mistake that I see with new investors is that they get fixated on, Hey, this is my idea. And then I say, okay, well how are you going to afford that? And they’re like, well, I don’t know mean people don’t just give you money when you’ve got a great idea. So you’ve got to have some form of understanding of where you’re at from a cash perspective.

Ashley:
Yeah, some resources that you guys can check out is some kind of app to actually track your assets, your liabilities, to build your own personal financial statement, but also to see where your personal finances are at. Look at your mortgage balance, look at your credit card balances, look at how much you have in cash. Monarch money is a great app. It’s the one that I use, but there’s a ton of other, and they have budgeting things set in. So if you really do need to assess where you are financially, getting an app like that to try and help you establish that kind of base can be scary to actually see where your money is spending. But if you’re having trouble saving right now or living within your means, that’s a great way to start to actually build the capital to invest in real estate. One of the common things that can happen besides just not being able to financially afford the strategy is not having enough in reserves and not being okay with spending that money in reserves.
That reserves are not your life savings. Those reserves aren’t your kids’ college fund. That’s not the money that you would use for their orthodontics. This is the money that is specifically saved in reserves for your rental properties so that if you have to spend that money, that’s okay. That’s what that money is there for. So you have to switch that mindset of, oh my God, I’m taking money out of our life savings to pay for a new HVAC system instead. That’s what this money is there for. And if you don’t have to spend it and you get to keep it like, yay, that’s a bonus. But I think that’s a big mistake is co-mingling almost that your financial life savings for your family is the same that you have for reserves for your rental property. And that makes it a lot harder to part with when you do have those big expenses that come up throughout the lifeline of your property.

Tony:
It’s a great, great explanation nationally, just like around the psychology of money and reserves and how different money serves a different purpose, and you got to kind of take that money out of your mind once it starts to stack up a little bit. Just a few questions to ask yourself around the financial piece. First is what’s your credit score? Are you at, I dunno, 400 or are you at 800? Obviously the higher your credit score, the easier it’ll be for you to go out there and get favorable debt and the lower the harder it’ll be. But even if you have maybe better credit, like what’s your DTI? What’s your debt to income ratio? If you are maxed out, it’s also going to be more difficult for you to go out there and get approved for a loan if at all. So you could still have a decent credit score but have a poor DTI or potentially vice versa, right?
Maybe you’ve got no debt, but it’s because no one will give it to you. So you want to get the combination of both of those things together to get a better idea of how is that going to impact your loan options. I think another one is how much debt are you comfortable taking on? I was scrolling through Instagram and I saw, who was it? It was Robert Kiyosaki and Mick Elroy. They were on a private jet and the opening part of their post was like, we have billions of dollars worth of real estate debt. And obviously they’ve done it very successfully, but are you comfortable going on and taking on that amount of debt?
Are you okay if someone offers you a loan with only 3.5% down, meaning you’re leveraging almost 97% of what that property’s worth? Or do you want to say, Hey, I’m always going to put down 25% because I just want to make sure I can sleep at night. So you got to ask yourself, what kind of debt load are you comfortable taking on? And if for whatever reason between your DTI, your cash on hand, your ability to get approved for a loan, maybe you can’t do it by yourself, well, are you comfortable bringing on maybe a partner, someone who maybe can fill in that gap, someone who can compliment what it is that you’re lacking, whether it be capital, whether it be the loan, or are you comfortable doing that? And if not, then do you have access to other funding options? Do you have maybe a self-directed IRA or actually that only work in some situations? Do you have maybe a 401k that you’re willing to cash out? Do you have a heloc? Are there private money lenders? Maybe? So you’ve just got to ask yourself in some way, shape or form cash need to be involved in some sort of real estate transaction, whether it’s yours, whether it’s the sellers, whoever it may be, there has to be some sort of cash. You got to identify where it’s coming from.

Ashley:
And then the fourth step is understanding your local market. So what is the budget that you have available to yourself after you’ve went and evaluated your finances, knowing what you’re able to afford. And maybe that even starts with getting pre-approved by lender. You need a lender, you can go to biggerpockets.com/lender finder to be matched with an investor friendly lender in your area. But when you are deciding on a market, you need to understand is it an expensive city where you’re actually not going to be able to afford it? Or even if you can’t afford it, the rents just don’t justify the cost to actually purchase the property? Or are you in an affordable market? So starting with your budget and kind of narrowing down as to what are the markets that fit within your budget. Some strategies work better in different places, so you need to have your strategy defined before you actually go and start looking for markets. Because short-term rentals are great and tourists are areas, but long-term rentals are great and good school districts. So knowing your market saves you from picking the wrong strategy.

Tony:
So a couple of questions to ask yourself here is what type of is just in demand in your area? Like Ashley, where she lives? There’s a lot of small multifamily, and Ashley’s gotten really good at buying small multifamily. Where I live, there’s virtually no small multifamily, right? It’s like suburban sprawl. So I couldn’t really do a lot of small multifamily where I live. So what type of housing is in demand in your area as is your backyard landlord friendly? I think Ash and I both live in states that are definitely more tenant friendly, which makes it a little bit more difficult for us. But you got to ask yourself, Hey, where you live? Which way does it lean? But even still, and just as an example, even if I’m, I’m in California, Ashley’s in New York, both states that are definitely lean more so towards the tenant, but we’ve both been able to build successful portfolios in these markets still.
So it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t do it, you just got to kind of know how to navigate it. Vacancy rates, average rents, all things that you can go do research on to help you get some of those insights. And then obviously if where you live doesn’t work, are you comfortable going long distance? And long distance doesn’t necessarily mean out of state. It could just mean two hours down the road. It could mean six hours, it could mean 6,000 miles, but just ask yourself, are you comfortable going long distance? If for whatever reason you’re in, backyard doesn’t work. So those are the four steps, right? And I think as you, again, Ashley and I can’t tell you without knowing you, hey, do this exact strategy, but the goal is that by going through those four steps, you get a better sense of where you’re at.
And now that we’ve covered those four steps and you kind of know what it is you want out of real estate investing, we want to hit some of the more common strategies that we see rookie investors take as they get started. Ash and I have done several hundred episodes of the rookie podcast. We’ve seen some of the tried and true methods that work no matter where you start, no matter how much money you start with, no matter what city you live in, these are some of the strategies that we’ve seen work time and time again. So the first one up and one that Ash and I both probably think is potentially the best way for a Ricky to get started is house hacking. And house hacking is basically the concept of you going out and buying a property, living in one portion of that property and then renting out the other portion of that property.
It could be done with a single family home where you live in one bedroom and you rent out the other bedrooms to other tenants. It could be done in a small multifamily, maybe you go out and you buy a triplex. You live in one unit, you rent out the other units. It could be buying a single family home when you renting out the basement. It could be a single family home and you have an A DU, doesn’t matter what the extra space is, but the idea is that you subsidize the cost of owning that home by renting out your excess space. The benefits of house hacking are that typically you can get into it for less than a traditional rental property. So if you’re someone who’s maybe light on cash, you can get into a house hack for if you go FHA 3.5% down. There are other loan programs out there like naco, which I’ve talked about a lot on this podcast where you can get ’em for zero. So really if you want to make sure that you’re getting the best kind of bang for your buck house, sacking is I think one of the best strategies.

Ashley:
So another great strategy for building wealth is to do a burr. So this can kind of go two ways where you finding a property that needs to be rehabbed or needs to add value, but you can also find properties below market value and then add the rehab value to it too. So starting off, this is a great way to build wealth by not having to infuse a lot of capital long term. For Burr, it is you buy a property, you rehab it, so you need the funds to purchase it, you need the funds to do the rehab, then you rent the property out and you get that rental income. But then you go and refinance and you pull your money back out of the deal to be able to go for the last R to repeat it, to purchase the property. There’s many different ways to actually purchase a bird deal.
You could use all cash, you could use a heloc, you could from your primary residence, you could use a hard money lender, you could purchase it with bank financing. You just have to be careful of what their seasoning period is before they let you go ahead and refinance. But with this strategy, even if you’re not able to pull out all of your funds, this could be less money you leave into the deal than if you were to go and just put 20% down on a property. I think we’ve definitely seen that it’s harder to do a perfect burr where you’re getting all of your money back out, but this is still a great way to generate wealth so that you can reuse any of the capital that you investing into the deal. So one of the cons I will say for doing a bur is that you’re going to be doing a rehab.
And a rehab project comes with many things, project management of your contractor, having some idea of what goes into a rehab or what needs to be rehabbed. So if you have no experience at all in construction rehab, you don’t know what a two by four is, all of these things. There’s YouTube University to gain some knowledge, but you can also find properties that just need cosmetic updating. And that’s where I started, where it was just flooring, ripping out carpets, putting in vinyl plank. That added tremendous value painting, added tremendous value. Then I got a little more savvy and was changing out cabinets, but still it was a while before I worked my way up into gutting and doing full guts and replacing all the electric and things like that. So with a burr, you have to have a little bit of knowledge of what you’re getting into and look at your comparables of the property to understand what is going to actually add value.
If you are purchasing a property that’s in a C class neighborhood and the property values are probably capped at some amount where nobody is going to pay more than X amount to live in that neighborhood, if you’re going in and putting in granite countertops a luxury bathtub, you’re probably not going to get the return, even if it becomes the nicest house in the neighborhood, there’s usually some cop as to how much somebody will pay, but also how much somebody would rent that property for. So looking at your comparables is really, really important when doing a bird two. So this is great for investors with some capital or access to capital with a line of credit, a HELOC, and who want to be able to grow and scale quickly by recycling this burr over and over again.

Tony:
And Ashley, you make a lot of good points around some of the challenges around burrs, but my very first deal was a burr, and the way I think that I navigated some of those challenges was that I had a really strong team around me. I had a lender, I had a lender who had lent on a lot of other burb properties in this exact market. I had a contractor who had been in the market for a long time, came well recommended for multiple people, and it was really the people that I put around me that gave me the ability to do it the right way. Now obviously I educated myself and I was on the BiggerPockets forum and I was reading the books and I was listening to the podcast, but I think having a good team around you makes a world of a difference. So if you are a Ricky that’s listening, biggerpockets.com/agent finder, biggerpockets.com/lender, those are the ways you go out there and start building the right team of people to support you with the strategy.

Ashley:
And you had a great property manager too.

Tony:
I did, yeah. Yeah. Also had someone, because I was working a full-time job, lives several states away and found a great PM to help rent it for me as well. Third strategy, short-term rentals, obviously, right? This is kind of my jam, my niche, but basically it’s the Airbnbs of the world. So you get someone who comes in, saves for a couple of days and they go home, then someone else comes in, saves for a couple of days and they go home and you charge on a per night basis as opposed to having someone sign a long-term fixed lease. The general pros of short-term are that typically if you do it the right way, you should be able to generate more cashflow, right? A same house rented on a nightly basis will typically generate more than that same house rented on a long-term basis. The other benefit, which is the reason that it got a lot of people in the short term are the tax benefits.
I won’t go into it in extreme detail, but just know that there’s something called the short-term rental tax loophole. And there are a lot of people who want what’s called the real estate professional status, but it is very difficult to get when you have a W2 job, but through short-term rentals in the short-term rental tax loophole, there’s something called material participation, which basically allows you to take all of the paper losses from your day job, I’m sorry, from your real estate investment and apply it against things like your W2 income and your day job. So definitely a big benefit. Look up the shortterm rental tax loop poll. But some of the cons I think are that there’s definitely been an increase in competition and I think the properties that were just okay a few years ago are now mediocre, and the properties that were great a few years ago are now just okay, and it’s really only the ones that are the cream of the crop where people are really running this like a business that are doing incredibly well.
So you got to make sure that you’re stepping in with the right training, with the right resources. But overall, I still think there’s a lot of opportunity here and it’s really best for people that are willing to actively participate. I mean, you could passively do this if you just give it out to your property manager, but if your goal is to really juice your cashflow, usually you’re going to want to do that yourself. So you got to be able to actively participate and then you need a certain degree of creativity or at least being able to hire out the creativity because you do want to be able to provide experiences for your guests, and I think you got to have a little bit of imagination to make that a possibility.

Ashley:
Tony, what is the going rate right now for a short-term rental manager?

Tony:
Most short-term rental property managers charge somewhere between, I’d say 10% of gross revenue on the low end. I’ve seen it as high as 35 or 40%.

Ashley:
I was just curious. I remember when Airbnb was super big and 20 21, 30 to 40% really seemed like very, very common. Do you see that coming down now is there’s more short term rental management companies in co-hosting becoming a big thing? Has that really driven down the price

Tony:
It has, and you hit on a big piece. There is a slight difference between full short-term rental management and just the co-hosting model. And I think the co-hosting model, you’re maybe just handling some of the guest communication, but then the owner’s still handling, hey, the cleans, the maintenance, the supplies, all of the other parts of running the business. Whereas if it’s full service, they’re doing everything soup to nuts. So yeah, I think we’ve definitely seen a shift in cheaper managers coming on board, but it doesn’t necessarily always mean better.

Ashley:
So now onto our fourth one, which is my bread and butter, the long-term rentals. So this is definitely more passive, I would say, than short-term rentals, but it’s, it’s definitely not a passive investment. You can hire a property management company to take on the boatload of the actual active management, but you still have to do some kind of asset management. So you still need to review everything that the property management company sends you. Sometimes they’ll need your approval for repairs that are over $500 or whatever their limit is. Most property management companies aren’t going to quote out your property insurance for you every year. They’re not going to go and fight your property taxes to get them decreased. So there still is an element of having to be that asset manager on your property. So kind of some pros is the less involvement than short-term rentals.
It’s also more predictable cash flow. So it’s not as, usually it’s not as high as a short-term rental, but it’s steadier income. And then this is really best for someone who doesn’t have a lot of time. So especially if you’re getting into a turnkey property or even if you did a burr and this property is well the rehab that you’re not having to deal with repairs and maintenance constantly on the property, there can be way less interaction with a resident. There’s lower risk. So definitely with smaller multifamily like duplexes and then single family because you can always sell that property as an investment or to a family or to a person. So I really do like that with single family homes is that you have the option to sell it as a rental or depending on the market, sell it so somebody can purchase it for their primary residence.
Doing that right now with the property, I bought it in 2020 I believe, and then it’s been a rental property since 2020, and now I am just fixing a few things on it. The carpets got destroyed by the last tenant putting new carpets in. We did some structural work to it and we’re actually going to sell it, and I think there’s going to be a really great pool of primary homeowners that will actually want to purchase this and not actually use it as a rental property. So I do like that option of turning a long-term rental into a potential flip, I guess over the course of five years. This is also easier barrier of entry to purchase a rental than some of the other strategies too. Then there are some ways to get into long-term rentals and to be truly passive. So first one is you can be the private money lender on the deal.
You’re not going to get the tax benefits of being invested in an actual rental property, but you can lend to somebody that could really be on any property type, not just long-term rentals, syndications, whereas somebody else is the operator, someone else’s finding the deal, they’re managing the deal, they’re operating the deal, and you are just the limited partner. You have no say you can’t do anything, but you give them their money and you hopefully get your return. The last piece that I would add to a passive investment is real bricks. So this is fractional ownership of a property. And so what you do is you basically can take a hundred dollars and you can go and invest it at real bricks and you pick your property you want to invest in and you own a small ownership of that property. I think the minimum’s a hundred, but you could really invest as much as you wanted up to a certain amount too. That’s another way to passively invest your money. Also,

Tony:
Ricky’s, obviously Ash and I didn’t cover every single potential real estate strategy that’s out there, right? There’s far too many to cover. I think we just wanted to hit some of the more common ones that we see specifically for folks that are looking for cashflow, right? I mean, if you just want big chunks of cash, there’s flipping, there’s wholesaling, there’s other activities. But in terms of like, Hey, we just want some money coming in every month. We want to build long-term wealth. These are some of the main strategies that we see. Now we want to kind of fill in the last piece of the puzzle here, which is for all of you rookies to understand some of the big mistakes that we see as folks look to get started in real estate investing. So we’re going to cover that right afterward from today’s show sponsors.
Alright guys, so we’re back. We want to finish off by talking about some of the big mistakes that we see Rickeys make when it comes to getting started. And I think the first one is analysis paralysis. I think there’s something to be said about doing your homework, about educating yourself, about being responsible as you make decisions, but there’s also a point where all of that quote, education and all of that preparation just really turns into, I don’t know, I guess analysis paralysis, right? Where you’re just not doing anything and you’ve got to really be able to draw that line in the sand and say, I am now ready to take action. And my general advice here is that if you are at the point where you are listening to the podcast and you’re reading the books, and you’re watching the YouTube videos and you’re nodding your head because you already know 90% of what we’re talking about, you probably need to go do something now. Otherwise, you are just going to keep kicking the can down the road. You’ll never know anything. Don’t wait for that to happen. You just need to know enough that you can confidently take that next step

Ashley:
Hand. It might take longer to get that first deal than you think. So if you’re not taking action, whether that’s analyzing a deal every day or putting in offers, that could be something like we have a lot of people that come on and talk about door knocking, how they’ve door knocked for a year before they even got their first deal. So imagine if you wait until you knew everything and then it’s still a whole nother year before your offer is actually accepted on a property too. So I think creating a mix for yourself is where you’re taking action, but you’re also still engaging in informing yourself on what’s going on in the real estate market right now. What else can you learn about or actually sitting down and writing out, what don’t you feel confident about? I had somebody message me on biggerpockets.com yesterday and said, Ashley, I’m having trouble with market analysis.
Do you have any resources or links to try to help me with that? They identified what their struggle is, they were confident in other things. So I compiled a whole bunch of things and I said, start here and then let’s talk again. But we, there’s just so many things that can be overwhelming that it’s hard to know where to start, but you first have to identify what is the thing you don’t feel confident in, and then tackle that, then move on to the next thing. Don’t try and consume everything at once because that definitely will put you in analysis paralysis because it will be overwhelming.

Tony:
I think the next big mistake that we see often is shiny object syndrome. This is where you keep jumping from one idea to the next. And oftentimes we see this from people before they ever actually even get started. You talk to ’em on month one, they’re like, yeah, I think I want to be a flipper. You talk to ’em on one two. Yeah, I think I want to be self storage. Talk to him. Oh yeah, I think I’m actually going to do ground of construction. And you talk to ’em six months later and they haven’t done anything. And I think, again, there’s something to be said about committing and looking to build excellence in one specific area. Ashley has become incredibly gifted at small multifamily in and around the Buffalo, New York area at Buring properties in those markets. I’ve become incredibly gifted at short-term rentals. That’s where we put a lot of our energy. So I think if you can really narrow in on one asset class when strategy, not only do you start to build your confidence faster, but the speed at which you find success also increases because all of your effort is going into this one thing. So I think that’s one big, big mistake I see from Ricky is that they jump around a little bit too much.

Ashley:
And then you can build your foundation for if you do want to chase that shiny object syndrome and try something new if you foul or it doesn’t go the way you think, you still have that strong foundation of your original strategy that is working for you. And that happened to me. I did long-term rentals and then I pivoted to doing my first short-term rental. That wasn’t an arbitrage, and it was an A-frame cabin I bought for $49,000. I went $40,000 over budget, and it took me almost one full year to do the rehab on this property. If that would’ve been my first deal I ever did, that would’ve killed me. That would’ve killed me. I definitely did not have an extra $40,000 to infuse into that property. And I definitely, maybe if that was my first deal, I would’ve done more research. I would’ve taken more time, but I was like, oh God, I can do rehabs.
I’ve done burrs and all this stuff, but it was just a very different property. And then it took us a couple months to actually get it furnished and get it listed and get it up and running as our first full short-term rental, which added on to the time that we weren’t occupied. So there definitely was those learning experiences there. So I think if you have an opportunity and one strategy that I did it because I was a property manager, so I knew how to manage a property, that was my step above that was my advantage into going into long-term rentals. So if you do have an advantage, think about if there’s a strategy like we talked about in the beginning that fits your why. If maybe there’s two you’re deciding on, but one you have an advantage in, take that one. Build your foundation first.

Tony:
I think the last one, and this is a big one, it’s taking advice from the wrong people. We all in our lives have well-intentioned yet super ill-informed people when it comes to investing in real estate. We’ve all got the Uncle Joe, the Aunt Jane, who says, oh, don’t buy real estate. We’re going to wait for the market to crash. And I literally know people in my life who’ve been saying that since 2018 and the crash has not materialized. But guess what has happened since 2018? One of the biggest runs of real estate investing ever. And all those people missed out on that because they were sitting on the sidelines. So even if your parents, even if you’re best friends, even if maybe your spouse is saying like, Hey, I’m not sure if you should invest in real estate. You’ve got to take advice from people who have actually done it. You’ve got to understand when to filter information out, when to filter out advice from people who haven’t necessarily achieved what it’s you want to achieve. So I think the biggest thing that you can do as a rookie is commit to politely saying thanks, but no thanks. When someone gives you advice, when they don’t necessarily have the pedigree to be giving you that advice.

Ashley:
Well, thank you guys so much for joining us today. We hope you learn something and we hope you don’t get stuck in analysis paralysis. If you’re watching this on YouTube, make sure to comment below what your why is and what you want out of real estate investing, and then what strategy you have chose. We would love to hear from you. I’m Ashley. And he’s Tony, and we’ll see you guys on the next episode of Real Estate Ricky.

 

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Are we headed right for a recession, or are stocks on sale? We don’t own a crystal ball, but Ricky Mulvey from The Motley Fool is capitalizing on the recent stock market swing by loading up on some of his favorite equities. Stay tuned to find out if now is an ideal time for YOU to “stock up,” too!

Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Money podcast! In light of the recent market pullback, Ricky is going to share why he thinks it’s the right time to take advantage of low stock prices. He’ll discuss some of his best bargain buys, his biggest portfolio wins and losses in recent years, and, most importantly, the four-step approach you can use to identify stocks that could be set to soar in 2025.

If you’re a regular listener, you know that Scott and Mindy are partial to stashing their money in index funds, sitting back, and watching their wealth snowball over the long haul. You might say that Ricky has a slightly larger appetite for risk, as he isn’t opposed to picking stocks, timing the market, and getting out after three to five years. Stick around to find out if his strategy works!

Mindy:
As of the time of recording, the stock market is down, and this is either bad news because maybe there’s a recession coming or it’s good news because stocks are on sale. It’s time to stock up. Today’s guest is Ricky Mulvey, host of the Motley Fool Money Podcast, and he’s joining us to talk about ways to still find great investments even in this current market. Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me as always is my still investing in the stock market co-host Scott Trench.

Scott:
Thanks, Mindy. Great to be here. Dow you doing, oh God, whatever. We’ll try again later. BiggerPockets is a goal of creating 1 million millionaires. You’re in the right place if you want to get your financial house in order because we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for everyone no matter when or where you’re starting or even if you are one of those stock picking types today, we could not be more excited to have Ricky Moy from the Motley Fool here on BiggerPockets money to talk about stocks in a general sense and things that you can look for as you attempt to find great value in the stock market. Ricky, welcome to BiggerPockets Money.

Ricky:
Thanks for having me. What a time to talk about stock investing.

Scott:
Yeah, maybe we start there and just get your reaction at a high level to how you feel about the pullback we’ve had here of 10 ish percent as of March 11th from the peak in February, and most major indexes.

Ricky:
I don’t want to give you too much credit, Scott, but this is something I know you were worried about on the show for a little bit now, even in February when you’re looking at, what was it, the forward PE of the broader market at 29, stock market corrections are a good and healthy thing, and in fact is someone who is investing for decades and trying to make a lifetime out of this. This is something that I’m excited for and in a weird way also rooting for,

Mindy:
Oh, explain how you’re rooting for this

Ricky:
Because it’s like if you go to the store and you see your favorite shoes on sale for 20%, you get a little bit happier to buy them. There are companies that I’ve been looking at that I’ve had on a watch list that have become from a metric sense more affordable is people become increasingly pessimistic about the economic outlook for the next we’ll say, we’ll say year with the trade war that’s going on. People are worried about a recession, but I’m in this game for decades, and so as a younger investor, this is something I’ve become increasingly excited for when I think about that long time horizon.

Mindy:
Okay. Two things. I love that you said I’m in this for decades. Yes, absolutely. If you are investing for decades long returns, this is going to be a drop in the bucket. I truly believe, of course, past performance is not a ticket of a future gain and I cannot guarantee that the stock market is ever going to go up again, but I have faith that it will. Second Ricky, you mentioned that Scott was looking at the forward projections of the stock market and that’s why he sold. Would you categorize these recent market drops as PE related?

Ricky:
Not entirely, and I also want to be, I mean Scott, I know you were buying a rental, so it wasn’t just your feelings about the market. You don’t want to say, oh, the market’s too hot, too cold, I’m in and I’m out. But I think that it’s a combination of things. You look at a brewing tariff war, which is becoming increasingly in reality. We’re recording this on March 11th, but this is something that economists have warned about. If you shut down global commerce through more taxes or I shouldn’t say shut down, but rather impede global commerce through 25% ish taxes, that slows down the economy. And then the other thing is that I think you had investors when things get priced up like that, they look for reasons to sell. And when you give a strong bear case like that, which I don’t want to dismiss the reality of it, it leads crowds to head for the exits.

Scott:
I kind of summarized it as, and I think you have to incorporate the political element into it at this point, even though we love to stay away entirely from it. But I think the way to phrase the political element is I think hundreds of millions of Americans are asking themselves, am I comfortable leaving the majority of my financial portfolio in US stocks given the activity side of the Trump administration and for a large and potentially growing percentage of those people? The answer that is no. I think that’s the best way to frame the problem without really getting into the politics of the situation too deeply. Do you agree with that?

Ricky:
I think that’s fair. There used to be this, I have a background, I worked for a financial advisor on there radio show before I got started at the Motley Fool. This was widespread among the financial advising industry is people would bring out a chart where they’d prove basically that the stock market returns have basically no correlation to who’s in office, but I think it’s increasingly difficult to make that case. And what I would say now is a lot of this does seem to be self-inflicted and I would also consider the fact that this is a more violent market, good and bad. I think there’s going to be stronger ups and downs is things change based on a headline, a new tariff, a response to the tariff, all of that kind of thing.

Scott:
Just a couple of clarifying points on my position from a few weeks ago, which I think is largely unchanged despite the pullback here. One is I was just uncomfortable with the Schiller PE ratio rather than the forward PE ratio. The forward PE issue or change in a heartbeat as we saw in 2008 in terms of things I was afraid is the word I would use of the fact that price to earnings in real terms over the last 10 years adjusted for inflation in real terms for the s and p 500 and other US index funds were priced at close to their 1999 levels. And that was my primary fear. And then on top of that I was like, the market that’s priced that way needs a lot of things to go right and anything that goes wrong could potentially put that and create a problem.
It’s like kindling and any spark connect, ignite a fire. That was my thesis. I didn’t have much more to it than that and I’m like, I just can’t, can’t handle the heat I’m getting out of the kitchen and I’m putting it into real estate, which I’m more comfortable with and feel like even if there’s a massive general downturn, I will lose less badly than I would with equities in terms with a paid off property and in the event that things and I’ll also be able to refinance even at a lower value at that point and use those dollars for something else. And if things go well and I’m completely off my rocker with this, I’ll still earn a six 7% cap rate and some appreciation on the property, which is not going to be too far off the index long-term average. So that was more my thought process just for the record there. In addition, do you see the same risks that I’m talking about in there and what is your reaction to that play as a stock market guy?

Ricky:
Two things. One, I think you did something incredibly wise. You moved to your circle of competence way more about the real estate market than I do, and you saw an opportunity there where you said, this is a better use of my capital. The thing that I would be a little more cautious about is anytime you’re getting in and out of the market, you have to be right twice, it’s very easy to say that the market is overheated. What becomes increasingly difficult is deciding when to get back in. I remember stories of investors where they saw 2008 coming and they pulled out their money, but when do you decide that you have an all clear signal to get back into the market? And there’s research from JP Morgan that I’ll bring up basically seven of the stock markets, 10 best days occurred within 15 days of one of the market’s worst days. So I think it’s incredibly difficult to be right twice.

Scott:
I completely agree. That’s why I’m not saying, oh, I’m going to go back in. I’m saying I permanently reallocated to real estate and if I see a generational opportunity, maybe I’ll refinance, but it’s more mostly just this is a paid off property that I’d be happy to hold for 20, 30 years on this run. I just have that option. Should I ever want to refinance it? It’s kind of more the way I think about it.

Ricky:
There are still pockets of the market that are cheaper than the broader market that I think are worth looking at. And there’s also parts too with interest rates being a little higher for someone like you Scott, if you look at broad baskets of corporate debt, there’s one ETF I’m thinking of in particular that has more than a 7% yield on it. So you don’t get the appreciation you may get from a rental property, but you trade that off with not doing a whole heck of a lot of work. I’ll pay the fine folks at BlackRock to do the diversification for me and I’ll take the 7% checks on that ticker, USHY. So high yield corporate bonds.

Scott:
Well love it. So what is your kind of thesis? Where are you looking as an expert in the stock market and analyst for Alpha for value in today’s world?

Ricky:
The thing I’m really looking at right now more than I think I have before is insider buying activity. So I’m trying to look for companies that have good three to five year holds for them. And then also I like seeing insiders buying gobs of stock with their own money because to me that’s an indication that they believe that their company is undervalued.

Scott:
How do I even begin? Let’s say I like that idea. How do I even begin to do research to see which insiders are buying stock? And what are some interesting observations you’ve had recently that you’re exploring whether or not you’re actually going to pull the trigger and invest?

Ricky:
I’ll talk about a stock that I own, but there’s a couple, there’s sources on one account I like is called insider radar that basically tells people when there’s large purchases of insider stock, but also when insiders in companies go to purchase shares or sell, they report it with the SEC. So when you’re looking at a company, one of the filters I do is to see what insiders have been doing with their own personal stakes in the company. And that’s a form you can find on the NASDAQ website. They have to report it if they sell or buy shares.

Scott:
Yeah, shout out to Randy Trench, my father who has said to me in the past, there’s a lot of reasons people will sell stock. You want to buy a house, pay for college, all those kinds of things, but there’s only one reason you buy stock

Ricky:
And especially on the open market, these are people that know how to value their company and if they think the market is wrong, let ’em put their money where their mouth is.

Scott:
Now we need to take a quick ad break, but listeners, I am so excited to announce that you can now buy your ticket for BP Con 2025, which is October 5th through seventh in Las Vegas. Score the early bird pricing for a hundred bucks or go to biggerpockets.com/conference. While we’re away, we will have a BiggerPockets money track where we will be discussing in particular ways to actually fire with these one to 2 million, two and a half million portfolios with a particular emphasis on the middle class trap. And yes, after a few beers, I do love a good round of craps in the casino even though we host a money show touting personal financial responsibility here. Hope to see you there.

Mindy:
Welcome back to the show.

Scott:
Love it. Okay, so you look at those things and then what are some of the firms that you’re interested in that are where you’re seeing that?

Ricky:
One stock I’ve been buying lately is it’s TKO holdings, ticker, TKO, and this is one just kind of started making a profit. This is the parent company of the UFC. The WWE professional bull riding and soon a boxing league. And I’m actually, I’m glad to be here. I’m happy to talk about combat sports for as long as you’d like me to. But there’s something interesting going on with this, which is that the CEO Aria Emanuel has set up a automatic buying program for his company’s stock. And usually when you see company leaders, they set up automatic selling programs. So the market doesn’t take it as an indication. Oh, the CEO EO just sold a lot of stock. They want to diversify away, do the thousands of things that Randy trench referred to. But in this case you see a lot of insider buying and I think the company also has a couple of key catalysts that make it for me an attractive stock to purchase and one that I’ve been in my personal account over the past few weeks, months.

Scott:
So your thought is in the current environment it’s kind of wacky out there, but insiders are buy-in. What intrigues me? How do you then do the next level of diligence or thought process on an investment like A TKO?

Ricky:
Everything comes down to what are the earnings this company can do and what is the sentiment going to be because that’s what the market values. What are your earnings and then you put a multiplier on that in order to create a value, you’re doing an equation. So for with TKO, I’m thinking of a few things. One, I think they have a pretty tremendous value driver and I got to credit my colleagues Nick Sippel and Jim Gilley’s in their work on this, but this year they are the only company with a major media rights deal that’s coming up, so that’s the UFC. And if you look at a few moves that ESPN has been making lately, they’ve been getting rid of baseball, they ended their contract with professional baseball and this has been something that I think they’re basically creating room to invest in a big media rights deal for the UFC also, you have the wwe, which just premiered on Netflix in the United States and also Netflix has the international broadcast rights for the WWE E.
So I think they can significantly grow their global audience for that. And the third factor you have in this is the money from Saudi Arabia. So the UFC is going to start basically a boxing league and this is being done in conjunction with the fine folks in Saudi Arabia to compete with the current system in boxing. The other thing I would consider for a value driver is there is a political element, right? Dana White is the CEO of the UFC, not the organization. He has a long and deep loyal relationship with President Donald Trump. So you have to think if this guy wants to get a deal done, he’s going to have less resistance than he would’ve had in the past four years. I think that’s just kind of icing on the cake. So those are the value drivers that I’m really thinking of a growing sport audience, money coming in from the outside and then you look at the valuation, it’s at about 34 times forward earnings when I checked Y charts this morning. To me that’s not bad for something that’s essentially a monopoly in two areas already in professional wrestling and in mixed martial arts.

Scott:
Awesome. So I love that. So there’s not a value play. It’s not like this has a great price to earnings multiple or super strong balance sheet. This is a growth story and you’re looking for companies that are going big in the current context and have potential major strategic needle movers here. And there’s a very rational argument for why this company could really dramatically expand and has really huge tailwinds behind it,

Ricky:
Has tailwinds and has a moat.

Scott:
Yeah, moat’s perfect. So

Mindy:
I like this insider buying thing. I never even thought to look at that, although that has definitely been something that I have thought was a good thing when I was interested in a stock and then, oh, the CEO of the company is buying oodles and oodles of this stock. Oh, that makes me feel even better about my choice.

Ricky:
Yeah, you want to find CEOs and co-founders that have basically themselves tied to the mast of this ship. And the second level of this is it’s not just the insider buying activity, but it’s also good to see what insider stakes that they have in the company. Does this CEO own a lot of stock? Because if this is 90, 95% of their personal portfolio, even if they think the stock’s going to go up, they may not be buying on the open market for diversification reasons. But I think this is a pretty important check for me when I’m looking at buying a stock, especially right now.

Scott:
So let’s go into that because I think that the same thing is true in the syndication space. We have these guys who raise money to buy an apartment building and they put nothing into the deal. It’s what I call a free spin on it. They can go up on around there and look, I think there’s going to be a weak correlation frankly for some of these things. I think that the math would prove that out of our history, there is a correlation between insider buying and better returns over time, but it’s fairly weak. Is that right Ricky?

Ricky:
I don’t have the data on it. I would say look for strong insider buying and that’s up to you as an investor what’s strong to you. So two examples that I think of in the past. One is just a few months ago, Calvin McDonald, she’s the CEO of Lululemon stock got crushed. He bought a million dollars worth of stock for the CEO of Lululemon. Is a million dollars significant? It’s kind of hard to tell. For me it was significant enough and the stock’s done okay since then. We’re having a cool down in sort of apparel sales, but that was something that was important to me. And then the other one that I found significant was Ted Sarandos. He’s the former CEO of Netflix co-founder of Netflix. A few years back in 2022 when the stock was just absolutely getting hammered when everybody was pessimistic about the future of Netflix because they had lost subscribers on an earnings call, he went out and with more than a million dollars of his own money, went and bought Netflix stock on the open market. I think it was below 200. And since then the stock has beaten the market since then. To me that a strong indication and it’s one I look for, not just the head fake, not just a few thousand dollars, but once we’re getting into supercar money, that’s when I start to get excited is a lower stock investor. Scott,

Scott:
When I think about good alignment with the executive of the chief executive of a company or one of these syndicators, it’s somewhere reasonably close to half of their personal wealth is in that investment and great if they’re taking additional dollars to buy into that. But that to me is what meaningful really looks like. Now many people won’t do that. A quarter is still good, less than 5% of the individual’s wealth in the asset that they’re running in terms of what the capital they have at risk. That would be a concern to me on it and that’s what framework you’re getting at here is you have to guess in order to understand strong insider buying, it sounds like you have to kind of guess at what the personal wealth of some of these individuals is external to the company and make sure that the company is their number one or very close to their number one, the most meaningful single placement that they’ve got in their personal portfolio.

Ricky:
There are other important things when you’re looking at a mature company, does this company, does it produce positive earnings? Does it produce positive cash flow? What is it doing with that cashflow? What is the market’s price tag and expectations that it puts onto this company? Those are also very key and important that I want to make sure I’m not brushing aside as we have this conversation.

Scott:
Oh, absolutely. I just love that this is the starting point and this is a great, we cannot spend hours and hours going through all these different things. That’s what you do full time at the Motley Fool. You have such a body of wealth and information on there over long period. I just love the insight into this, Hey, this is the first thing I look for. It’s the first thing that gets me piqued, my interest piqued about doing more research. Is it? Awesome.

Mindy:
So Ricky, let’s look at your personal holdings. How would you categorize your split between index funds and individual stocks in a percentage basis?

Ricky:
I lean toward individual stocks if we’re counting, so we’ll count my 401k in that I’m probably, I’m probably 60 40 index funds to individual stocks.

Mindy:
And do you have any bonds or any other non-stock holdings?

Ricky:
I hold a bond fund USHY that I mentioned previously. It’s not super major position, but it’s to me a little bit of a cushion and I’ll take 7% for sitting here and playing on the computer with y’all.

Mindy:
I like 7%, I like 15% better.

Ricky:
Yeah, nothing wrong

Mindy:
With that

Scott:
15% being the index fund return for the last couple of years, right? Is that’s what you’re referring

Mindy:
To? Actually I’m guessing at my returns for the last couple of years, I haven’t really looked at that. I haven’t, what a terrible thing to say. I haven’t really looked at it but I haven’t. I mean Carl looks at it every day so I don’t have to. Ricky do you a that has changed the makeup of your portfolio like you picked a winner or you picked a non winner?

Ricky:
My best ideas and my worst ideas, let’s get into it because if we’re talking about a winner, I also want to talk about times that I’ve been absolutely fundamentally wrong and lost money.

Scott:
Chinese fruit juice company,

Ricky:
That’s Scott. The two that have been big winners for me have been meta platforms in Spotify by a dollar basis. Those have driven a lot of returns from my portfolio and that was a time where both of those I think were times where I saw long-term trends where the bears were hammering down on very pessimistic points where I was able to go, I think you all may be wrong about this, we can start with meta. So meta back in 2022 ish, we’ll say it was no longer Facebook. We’re a metaverse company now and we’re going to spend lots of money on reality labs and everybody’s going to go around wearing these goggles to play video games to meet online and to watch movies. And the investors at the time were very concerned about the amount of spending that was going on and in my view, they kind of missed the fact that this is still a platform with billions of people spending their time and attention on it, an incredible ad platform. And so I took a stake in the company and that has been a good winner for me. The flip side of that I’ll also say is that’s also one where I sold too early where I sold some of my shares because I’m like, okay, good. I’ve made a good game gain, let’s reallocate this elsewhere. I price anchored and I made a mistake.

Scott:
Love it. I remember that time period and I don’t participate in this, but I remember the back of my mind, I was thinking about Man meta’s in this and there was some Reddit post or something that was to the effect of, man, look how much better grand theft Auto Fives virtual world is from five years before the billion dollar spent by meta on this, the META’S 3D virtual reality world. And that was tanking their stock. I remember that. And that’s when you bought that was a smart buy because it’s like okay, we’re going to get up on that and go back to our core business of dominating the world and from social media perspective and the traditional business and that’s exactly what they did.

Ricky:
They did. And there’s a couple of things that, one thing you said there is you had an observation about that and I know you don’t like individual stocks as much, but the thing that I want to communicate is that you as a retail investor, you as a regular investor, you actually have tremendous, you have some tremendous advantages over institutional investors if you’re a long-term buy and hold investor and there’s a famous investor named Peter Lynch and one of his ideas is that the observations that you have about the world aren’t always valuable but can be valuable. And this is especially true for people who live between the coasts that are able to see some economic trends that may not be as visible outside of places like New York City.

Scott:
Yeah, it’s funny because his book one Up on Wall Street is a wonderful read for folks. I always tell folks who are, they don’t really know they’re just getting started, especially in high school or college, it’s really hard to convince someone in that area just index fund for the next 50 years for it. So I tell ’em to read both the simple Path to wealth and a book like One up on Wall Street to get kind of the different perspectives of those and make their own decisions and let ’em know I chose the index fund approach there. But I will say over the years, there have been a couple of times when I’ve been like, this is an absurd situation. I really want bet on it and I haven’t, don’t know what my record would be. I have to go back and actually write ’em down in the future and kind of look at one of the ones that is most memorable for me on this is Kodak.
So Kodak is a company, obviously a camera company, declining for a very long period of time, less than half a billion dollars in market cap now. And in 2020 they came out with Kodak coin, their crypto for photographers and their market capitalization increased from 250 million to 750 million overnight. And I remember thinking, I have never been so sure in my life that this company’s going to come crashing right back down. And sure enough, within a few weeks they did that and I just regret to this day I never bought a put option with is a small amount of money on that one it it’s like Warren, there’s 10 times in your life when the market will hand you something just so extraordinarily absurd that you got to act on it in there. I dunno, is that kind what you’re referring to in

Ricky:
These situations? I’m generally a long only investor. I’ve tried shorting stocks before. You said put option, which is good because that can bite you a lot less than shorting a stock. But I’m a long-term optimist and there a part of, there are times I’ve wanted to short stocks. I don’t love rooting for companies to go down in flames. The case of Kodak is a special example. Anytime you start seeing a coin that’s associated with the company, something that just seems weird and off that gets your spidey senses up. Yeah, I think you made a good observation on it and I wish you made a profit.

Mindy:
We have to take one final ad break, but we will be back with more with Ricky MoVI right after this.

Scott:
Thanks for sticking with us.

Mindy:
Let’s talk about holding periods because Ricky, you said I sold meta too early. My favorite best friend Warren Buffet has said my favorite holding period is forever. What is your typical holding period?

Ricky:
Yeah, Warren Buffet says that in their stocks that he has owned for fabulously long period of times, but anytime you look at Berkshire’s 13 f, you see some buys and sell in there. He gets, he could sometimes get a little traity with it.

Scott:
I agree. There’s a big difference between what he says and what he does. Frankly in a lot of areas right now he’s got 300 billion in cash. He exited every huge chunks of the portfolio in the last couple of months. So I agree that there’s a lot of people quote him and there’s a big difference between the two.

Ricky:
You could find a Warren Buffett quote that suits what you want to do sometimes. The thing I would also say to Berkshire, they’re an entirely different investing category than us folks here and listening. They have to shoot with an elephant gun. This is one of the largest companies on the open market. They’re not even able to buy small cap companies. They have to look at stakes in very large cap companies. You just talked about how a lot of large cap companies were overvalued so they’re not able to play in the parts of the market that someone on the retail side is as well. Now to actually answer Mindy’s question, what’s my holding period? I think three to five years is a proper one. I like to find companies though that think in terms of generations when possible, not all of them do. They’re a couple that come to mind, but I think three to five years is a good amount of time to test the thesis and that also puts you ahead of the pack in a lot of ways. I found according to the New York Stock Exchange as this was in 2020, the average holding period of shares was five and a half months, which is a decrease of a late 1950s peak of eight years. So investing is a very strange thing. If you’re willing to sit on your hands and do nothing, I think that can give you a large advantage over a lot of the crowd.

Mindy:
Okay, that’s really interesting because my favorite holding period is a really long time, I’m not going to say forever, but I’ve been in, I think Apple iPhone was introduced in 2003 and I’ve been in Apple since then. I got into Google on their IPO in I want to say 1998. I’ve been in Tesla since 2012. I hold for a really long term and I might sell a little bit. I did a full disclosure. I just sold a hundred thousand dollars in V, what did I sell a hundred thousand dollars in VGT because, not because I think the market is bad, but because I’m building a house and I needed some extra cash, but for the most part I hold for a really, really, really long time. And Ricky, you said you are investing for decades. Why are you only holding for half a decade?

Scott:
Also, I want to pile along with that question with a part two to Mindy’s question here, which is tax drag. So if I have a hundred thousand dollars invested today, and let’s say I have a gain of a hundred thousand dollars and I realized that gain and let’s say it’s close to the marginal tax bracket, right? That could be very little, but it could be at a high tax bracket, 15% for long-term capital gain in one bracket or up to 20% plus we live in Colorado, all three of us, so there’s a four point a half percent state tax on both long-term capital gains, short-term capital gains and income here. So let’s say that we sell a hundred thousand dollars in stock now we have roughly $75,000 rounding to 25% that we invest and we put it right back in the market. Well, it’s not like after tax in 30 years we’re left with the same amount. Well actually have materially less after tax wealth when we go to sell portfolio B that’s invested a lower after tax basis than the previous one. So how you think through that concept of tax drag on the returns of your portfolio with that three to five year hold period? It’s a fair criticism of my decision recently as well. I will go through that and that’s the first time I’ve ever sold stocks.

Ricky:
Oh, you real estate investors with your tax thoughts, how could you, so to be clear, the three to five years, that’s the amount of time you want a thesis to play out. If a stock is performing well, you want to continue to hold it as long as possible. The three to five years is when I’m basically signing up to buy shares. That’s what I get in my head. These are the fundamentals that I’m thinking about and I want to see this play out over three to five years, so I’m not itching to sell. With that said, there can be thesis altering events. You want to be careful about recognizing those and making a decision based on that happening. But that’s when I’m buying a stock, I’m thinking, okay, this is my three to five year sort of thesis on this and then after that you can revisit it and you can continue to hold. I’m not looking to necessarily sell in three to five years, but those are the sort of amount of time chunks that I’m thinking in. And then I do a lot of my investing within Roth accounts, so I’m taking after tax money, no gains on sales, that kind of thing. Yeah, we love the Roth account.

Scott:
Perfect. Awesome. So we do that in the retirement account. You don’t have this problem out there to a large degree either. It can be tax deferred or the post tax account in the Roth. What about does that change for a specific companies? So for example, I imagine that meta, you had a clear several year thesis in that particular example, but I imagine if I was looking at the market as a layman, I would not imagine that would apply to say Costco, right? Costco, my belief is they should just keep doing what they’re doing in perpetuity with few changes because I want to continue going there to fund a modestly luxurious lifestyle on the cheap for many decades to come. But does that change for you with any specific plays like a Costco?

Ricky:
I don’t own Costco stock. I wish I owned Costco stock. Perhaps I should go out and buy some. That’s something I’m a customer of and that’s the type of thing where you’re seeing the thesis play out every time you visit, you go to a Costco, maybe the thesis changes and you go and you realize, you know what, maybe they’ve just hiked my membership a lot. Maybe I feel like I’m not getting quite the value on Costco steaks that I once did or those, I forget what they’re called exactly, those figi bars. I have ’em as a snack once a day. Every time I go to Costco I get them. Maybe I’m noticing that the stores are a little bit dirtier that the freezers are out of stock. So you’re saying that as long as Costco keeps doing what they’re doing, if you own shares in Costco, you would be an intensely active observer in how the company is doing. And it is the type of company where I think about what would it take for me to stop shopping at Costco. It’s a lot. Every time I go there, you spend a few hundred dollars and you feel like you just got a great deal,

Scott:
But then it comes down to what’s the price to earnings ratio? And I looked it up and Costco’s trading at 54 times price to earnings. And so okay, a lot has to go right to meet those expectations and that’s where this all gets really complex again.

Ricky:
Yeah, you’re not the first person to realize that Costco is a great place to go buy goods and a good place to work. The way that I might consider reframing that though is you’re talking about Costco, like a store, like it’s a store. What if I told you it was a real estate company with a subscription component attached to it? Because a lot of the ways that it makes money is that subscription revenue and as long as they keep people happy, that’s what I think the street is saying is that that’s pretty safe. Additionally, right now, given the market uncertainty that we talked about at the top of the show, you’re seeing a lot of investors that say, I want to go to something that seems safe and what seems safer than Costco.

Scott:
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Although I pushed back on the real estate piece, you wonder what else could possibly go into the Costco building in the event that they had to liquidate the real estate at some future date,

Ricky:
They could put an Amazon warehouse there. The part with that is they own a lot of their real estate where you see a lot of stores that are leasing their space. So they are a real estate owner is I guess more of the point that I was trying to make rather than them being a reit.

Scott:
Let’s wrap up with a couple of more tidbits here. So you start your approach with, hey, the market pullback is an opportunity that presents at least a little better buying chance than maybe it was than there was a few weeks ago. In some areas you then look for insider buying in particular to start your story. Go ahead. You’re about to say something. So react to these.

Ricky:
Yeah, that’s one component. I think more broadly the thing that I would encourage that I do that I would encourage folks to think about, where are you spending your time and your money? And that can be a good place to start looking for stocks as well. What do you see that’s becoming popular with your friends? And then you use that as an opportunity to research more. If we use the time, the time and attention thing, you’d be looking at companies like Facebook, Costco, maybe Visa, MasterCard. You look at some of the big tech stocks that enable the internet to happen. You could look for worse places than that, but one of the things I try to look for what’s happening in the world around me and then I use that as an investigation to look into the company. Sometimes I end up buying shares in the company and then sometimes I don’t.

Scott:
Got it. And that’s very much aligned with the Peter Lynch one up on Wall Street approach. So if that is appealing to you or even worth considering, would you agree that people should definitely pick up a copy of that book to get something that’s fairly close to the starting point that you use to investigate opportunities?

Ricky:
Yeah, I think it’s a great way to see how people have historically beaten the market. It was written years ago, so there are a few things you’ll look at that seem a little dated. There’s no cost of trading anymore. I think the market is a bit more violent than it used to be. I think the ups and downs are significantly larger, but I think it’s a great starting point and also is good to give you the confidence that you think of a lot of games in professions and activities where the professionals have a tremendous advantage over you. And I think one up on Wall Street is a good antidote to that to say no, you actually have tremendous advantages is an individual investor who’s able to be patient and also move freely.

Scott:
Okay, so we have that as the starting point. Zooming back out, the market pullback is at least an incrementally better opportunity to go hunting for bargains. We start with where are we spending our time and attention here and what are our friends doing? What are things that we’re starting to notice that we on the ground can see as individual investors? Then we look for insider buying. And those are kind the very beginning points of how you at least begin the thought process of looking for investment opportunities after that. There’s a large amount, I’m sure, of due diligence and research that you do on these companies that would take us much longer. But are there any kind of key additional points that you’d say are downstream, they’re like, Hey, we like the insider buying. I’m starting to spend a lot of time and attention to all my friends are watching MMA fights. What would be a gotcha, what would’ve been something that could come up in diligence but didn’t that would’ve scared you away from it?

Ricky:
From TKO specifically?

Scott:
Yes.

Ricky:
What would come up that I really wouldn’t have liked there if I saw no path for them to be able to make a profit. So from there, you want to look at, I like looking at operating profit because there’s sort of nowhere that’s basically fewer places for a company to hide. If you can’t make an operating profit, you have some splaining to do. Maybe you’re a young company with a big growth story and you can set that aside. But from there I’m looking at what are these companies pathways basically pathway or pathways to being profitable? And if I thought that, so for instance, with TKO, if I saw a ton of dilution, that’s something that would give me pause If I didn’t see insiders taking stakes in the company or if I were seeing things like people suddenly becoming disinterested in mixed martial arts in the WE or if they were getting way outside of their circle of competence.
So one of the things is that they’re making a play on the boxing side that makes sense for a combat sports organization. Sometimes you’ll see companies that get a little too expansive for themselves. Maybe they want to go buy an online marketplace or an energy drink. I would start asking questions about why they’re doing that. But after you go through that, you say, what is the market assuming about this company? And then what has to be true for this to be right? What has to be true for it to be wrong? And then I’m thinking about the fundamental value drivers that could increase earnings or change sentiment about the company.

Scott:
I would love talking about this stuff. I read the books too early and not too early, but I read the books early on about how you can’t beat the market and stayed away completely from this. But you can tell I always have a little part of me that wants to go into this. And I know Mindy and Carl talk about index funds and then our bajillionaire because of their Tesla and Google investments,

Mindy:
But we have moved into index funds. We had never heard of them until, I don’t know, when did Jail Collins write that book?

Ricky:
Most truths I think are somewhere in the middle for people who are focused on stock investing. I think index funds are wonderful and can make a lot of sense. I own a lot of them myself. For those who are interested in investing, I think investing in stocks and companies is a great way to make hypotheses about the world, to be a curious participant in society and also have a scorecard of how right you are or how wrong you are. And this is, yeah, it’s something I personally enjoy. And I’m not just saying that as an employee of the Motley Fool,

Mindy:
Ricky, where can people find you online

Ricky:
At Twitter? On Rick, at Rick, so slick or it’s X now at Rick, so slick on X. That’s two S’s between the K and the O. And also if you’re interested in stock investing, we have a podcast, it’s called Motley Fool Money. I host it. We put out six shows a week. It’s a fun time. I’d invite you to check it out.

Scott:
Yeah, you do a great job over there. And you have a couple of different hosts on that show as well that have the expertise in different areas, right?

Ricky:
Yeah, I’m one of three. So I co-hosted along with Dylan Lewis and Mary Long. We also are very lucky to be assisted by a wonderful roster of Motley Fool analysts who are even more of an experts or even more of experts in the stock market than I am just a lowly host of the Motley Fool Money podcast. But yeah, there’s a ton of folks on it and we try our best with it.

Scott:
Awesome. And I just want to say we’ve had a wonderful experience in the overlap that we’ve had with everyone from the Motley Fool over the years, including what was supposed to be very bloody battle between real estate and stocks with two experts from Moley Fool on the BiggerPockets Real Estate podcast. Mary has been wonderful to work with, you’ve been wonderful to work with, and we look forward to meeting Dylan someday as well. So thank you for all you guys do over there and the free sharing of your expertise here on BiggerPockets.

Ricky:
My pleasure. And I’ve enjoyed basically every interaction. Not basically, I can say every interaction I’ve had with an employee of BiggerPockets has been pleasant, and I’ve always been impressed by everyone I’ve talked to has just seemed competent, which has always impressed me and I’ve been grateful for in my experiences with BiggerPockets.

Scott:
I would love talking about this stuff. I read the books too early and not too early, but I read the books early on about how you can’t beat the market and stayed away completely from this. But you can tell I always have a little part of me that wants to go into this. And I know Mindy and Carl talk about index funds and then our bajillionaire because of their Tesla and Google investments,

Mindy:
But we have moved into index funds. We had never heard of them until, I don’t know, when did Jail Collins write that book?

Ricky:
Most truths I think are somewhere in the middle for people who are focused on stock investing. I think index funds are wonderful and can make a lot of sense. I own a lot of them myself. For those who are interested in investing, I think investing in stocks and companies is a great way to make hypotheses about the world, to be a curious participant in society, and also have a scorecard of how right you are or how wrong you are. And this is, yeah, it’s something I personally enjoy. And I’m not just saying that as an employee of the Motley Fool,

Scott:
Well, we can tell you’re passionate about it. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom here with us. We really appreciate it. Thanks for everything that you guys all do at the Motley Fool. We look forward to learning more from you over the years here. And best of luck this year

Ricky:
With TKO. My pleasure. Thanks for letting me on the show.

Mindy:
Thank you, Ricky. This is a lot of fun, and we’ll talk to you soon. Alright, Scott, that was Ricky Mulvey and that was a really, really fun conversation. What did you think?

Scott:
You can tell I love this stuff and I’ve had to force myself to not do any stock picking essentially for the last 10 years because I’ve read the research and that suggests that passively manage index funds tend to overwhelmingly outperform active investing. And yet the Motley Fool and that community, there are plenty of exceptions to that that are out there that have clearly outperformed the market over time and plenty of people who try it and do it honestly and to the best of their abilities and believe that, and Ricky is one of those people out there, and you can tell it’s just so, it’s fun. It’s fun to talk about these things and to place these ideas out there. So I think that hopefully that conversation, what it does for Full is it says, look, we are not changing our core beliefs and index funds.
And Ricky, even at Motley Fool Guy is in 60% of his stock marketing positions are an index funds out there. There’s a best practice component to that, and it shouldn’t be a taboo thing in a general sense to spend some time doing this if that’s something that you’re interested in, a general sense, maybe not with the majority of your portfolio, but it’s, it’s not like you’re breaking with a religious doctrine here to invest in individual stocks from time to time. And it’s something that a lot of people have done and been very successful with. And there’s also good research to say that the index fund tends to be a little better for the average, if not the majority of investors out there.

Mindy:
I would say if you are thinking about investing in individual stocks, you should have a reason, not just, oh, my best brother’s girlfriend told me about this one stock, so I should totally put money into it. No, if you don’t want to do the research to figure it out, or if you’ve heard of a stock and you’re like, oh, that sounds great. I’m totally going to put my money in there. You would be better off with index funds. But if you want to do the research, if you have an unfair advantage, if you have insider information, and I don’t mean that in a illegal sense. I mean, your brother works at GM and he keeps talking about this car and how it’s doing great things with test audiences or whatever. Clearly, I dunno what I’m talking about there, but if you know somebody who is really excited about a product and can tell you more about it, and then you start doing your own research and you dive down that little rabbit hole and you’re like, oh, you know what?
This seems like a great idea. I would definitely not suggest putting all of your money into it. Definitely don’t get a mortgage on your house. Oh my goodness. The meme stocks, when people were taking out mortgages on their house so that they could put money in meme stocks that ultimately did not perform the way that they thought they would, that’s not a good idea. If you’re going to invest in individual stocks, you should have a reason. But if you have a reason, dabble Scott, I would love to see you buy Costco stock. It’s like $800 a share an hour at $900 a share.

Scott:
I can’t buy. But here’s the thing, if I’m going to dabble, I’m going to dabble. But coming out of today’s conversation, I would be more inclined to begin my research with Peloton than with Costco because of that value dynamic. I can love Costco all I want and then say, in order for Costco, I need to do more research. Of course, I don’t really know what I’m talking about, but the 54 times price to earnings ratio scares the heck out of me for Costco versus the very low revenue to price ratio, to enterprise value ratio for Peloton, for example, is really interesting. And so I could not do the TKO style investment that’s predicated on these big deals and relationship with Trump and those types of things. My mind doesn’t work that way. Oh, there is clear value to be produced in this area and we can scale up from there. In this particular business, I would be totally, I would approach him from a totally different angle than even than Ricky does here. That’s just the way I’m wired.

Mindy:
I like that point of view though, Scott, Ricky invests in one way because of his experiences and his knowledge base, and you invest in a different way because of your experiences and your knowledge base. And if somebody’s investment strategy makes you feel uncomfortable, then don’t use it. There are so many other different investment strategies out there. I would hope that nobody is listening to this show and saying, oh, well Mindy does this, therefore I’m going to do that too. Or Scott did that, so therefore I’m going to do that too. No, have a reason for what you’re doing. Do your research.

Scott:
And again, I probably won’t do any particular individual stock investing, or if I do, it’ll be, well, less than 1% of my position because I’m an index funder, right? If I’m an index funder, even though I’m out because of the current market as I put more into index funds or into stock market, it’ll almost certainly be via passively managed low cost index funds over the most of my life. If there’s ever a sharp break, I reserve the right to make that and go into a different direction at some point in the future. I’ll let everybody know.

Mindy:
Okay, great. Well, that’s awesome, Scott. And that wraps up this episode of the BiggerPockets Money podcast. But before we go, I want to let you know that we have a newsletter that you can subscribe to. We can deliver it directly to your inbox, nothing for you to do except go to biggerpockets.com/money newsletter and subscribe today. You will hear information from me, information from Scott. Scott had his very own column called Scott’s Thoughts, so we would love to have you subscribe. We would love to share our information with you. So again, biggerpockets.com/money newsletter. And with that, he is Scott Trench. I am Eddie Jensen saying, do caribou.

 

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Traditionally, young people have been desperate to leave their small towns and strike out for high-paying jobs in the big city. However, the exorbitant cost of city living has resulted in the opposite now being true. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, younger Americans aged 25 to 44 have been moving to smaller towns in alarming numbers, changing the landscape for real estate investors in the process.

According to Hamilton Lombard, estimates program manager of the Demographics Research Group at the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Research, the migration toward rural America has been so great that small towns have been enjoying a revival.

Rural Regions See a Population Spike

Based on population estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau, the findings show that between 2020 and spring 2024, two-thirds of population growth for those aged 25 to 44 occurred in areas with fewer than 1 million residents or rural counties. 

“Perhaps the most striking statistic within the 2023 age estimates is the fact that since 2020, the country’s small towns and rural areas have been attracting younger adults at the highest rate in nearly a century,” writes Lombard.

Also fascinating is that despite major corporations issuing return-to-office mandates, the migration to small-town America amongst a younger demographic increased in 2023, upending the previous decade’s stats that saw 90% of this growth was concentrated in the largest metro areas with more than 4 million residents.

The loss of residents from smaller towns and cities from the 1990s onward made rural areas economically blighted, with a loss of businesses, communities, and vacant buildings and an unbalanced demographic of largely older residents. Ironically, some of these rural towns and small cities are now seeing residents flood in, making these prime spots for real estate investors to kick-start their wealth-building journey by buying up affordable houses.

Choosing Which Small Town to Move To or Invest In

Being strategic makes sense when choosing which small town to move to, especially if you want to coordinate it with real estate investing. However, even if you don’t plan to invest immediately, small-town living could also be a good idea to help you lower your expenses to save and be better positioned to invest in the future.

Additionally, according to Worth.com, office occupancy and downtown recovery figures look much better in smaller cities than in the biggest markets, a statistic that favors lower living costs in these areas.

Commutable to a Larger City 

Hybrid work has put small towns in play for employees who need to be in larger towns and cities three days a week. According to Lombard’s study, Arlington County, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., saw its population of young adults grow faster than any other county within the nation’s 20 largest metros during the 2010s. It had six times as many younger residents as those over age 65. However, the pandemic and remote work reversed this in the 2020s, which went against the idea of younger people moving to larger metro areas. 

Natural Beauty for Short-Term Rentals 

According to AirDNA, small cities and rural areas saw a 16% year-over-year increase in listings in 2024, while midsized cities only grew by 10.3%. The short-term rental data website stated,  “These gains reflect an influx of new investment properties entering the market as active vacation rentals.”

The website added that high interest rates and high prices have factored into short-term rental investing.

Realtor and investor John Walker and his wife, Jade, purchased a short-term rental in the small town of Boston, Pennsylvania, on the Great Allegheny Passage, known as the GAP Trail, a popular biking and walking trail, near McKeesport, Pennsylvania, about 20 miles outside of Pittsburgh. He picked it up for just over $50,000 and put around $100,000 into renovations. 

“We’ve had visitors come from everywhere because of the popularity of the GAP trail,” he told BiggerPockets. “The town itself is affordable and easily commutable into the city. Some weekends when it’s not booked, we’ll come here ourselves and ride our bikes. It’s been a great investment.” 

Data Center and Tech Development Plans Spur Investment 

The tech boom has also been a boom for rural America, particularly where data centers to support artificial intelligence (AI) are being built, which require vast expanses of cheap land with access to natural power sources. Demand for construction crews, particularly electricians, is matched only by the demand for accommodation in which to house them.

A New York Times article reveals that four of the largest internet and software companies spent more than $200 billion in capital expenditures last year, mainly on building new data centers. They’re expected to spend just as much or more next year. 

According to Entrepreneur.com, booming tech corridors nationwide are transforming housing sectors. The article says:

“Smaller cities like Abilene, Texas, are experiencing economic revitalization as businesses, housing developments, and local services expand to support AI operations. This increase in job creation means higher demand for housing, commercial spaces, and retail businesses. As AI data centers continue to grow, surrounding communities will need to expand rapidly to accommodate their workforce—creating long-term investment opportunities in both residential and commercial real estate.”

Researching and anticipating tech growth and development throughout the U.S. is a great way to turbocharge your real estate investing career.  Larger developers will buy land and construct housing for long-term employees, but that takes time to coordinate and implement. There’s a gap for smaller investors to buy and renovate existing housing to flip or rent to the scores of workers needed to get data centers and fabs off the ground as the AI boom continues to unfold.

Final Thoughts

While many jobs will remain in big cities, as the New York Times‘ Ezra Klein recently pointed out, big cities like New York City, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. are too expensive for middle-class Americans. Compare salaries to the cost of living in these places, and it’s no wonder that there has been a dramatic shift to smaller, more affordable towns and cities. 

Couple this with the technology boom centered around AI and the need for vast swathes of cheap land, and an ideal opportunity has presented itself for savvy real estate investors to capitalize on this generational shift.



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Buyers are finally funneling back to the housing market thanks to recently lower mortgage rates. But, we’ve still got a BIG housing problem to fix—undersupply. What’s President Trump’s plan to put more houses on the map? Freedom cities! By turning federal lands into high-tech hubs for workers, we may be able to solve our housing shortage. Is this possible, or are “freedom cities” just a far-off developer dream? We’re getting into this headline and all the others filling your newsfeed in today’s episode!

Home prices are about to PLUMMET…says one article for a select few property types. While much of this might be clickbait, James does think it’s time to scoop up some sweet property deals on second homes in hot vacation markets. With good value, economic weakness putting pressure on sellers, and long-term upside, this could be a solid move to make!

Want to pay even LESS to a real estate agent? That’s what everyone says, but it doesn’t seem like that’s what everyone wants as Redfin gets bought out by Rocket Companies. Is the low-cost real estate agent model finally about to bite the dust, or could Rocket turn things around, bringing buyers a whole new suite of low-cost services? Stick around; we’re sharing our thoughts!

Click here to listen on Apple Podcasts.

Listen to the Podcast Here

Read the Transcript Here

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In This Episode We Cover

  • Trump’s plan to trade federal lands for “freedom cities” that could increase housing inventory
  • Fed rate cut update: Should we still expect rate cuts sometime in 2025?
  • Great news for real estate agents and lenders as sales accelerate thanks to lower interest rates 
  • One type of rental property that could be a killer deal in 2025 (in SOME markets)
  • The end (or beginning) of Redfin as Rocket Companies buys out the low-cost-agent brokerage
  • And So Much More!

Links from the Show

Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email [email protected].



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When uncertainty looms over the economy, investors face a difficult choice: stick with volatile markets or move toward stability. Stocks experience unpredictable swings, cryptocurrency remains speculative, and inflation erodes the value of cash sitting in the bank. 

In these moments, many investors seek safe havens—assets that hold their value, generate income and offer long-term appreciation. American real estate has historically provided all three.

Despite market cycles, U.S. real estate remains one of the most resilient and profitable asset classes. Whether you’re an experienced investor or just starting out, owning rental properties provides a hedge against inflation, a steady income stream, and the opportunity to build lasting wealth. Even in uncertain times, real estate remains a winning investment

Our partners at Dominion Financial Services are here to help you win—more on them later.

Uncertainty Makes Riskier Investments Less Appealing

In times of economic instability, investors tend to flee from high-risk assets. Stocks and cryptocurrency markets can experience massive daily fluctuations, making it challenging to preserve wealth. However, with its tangible and income-generating nature, real estate remains a stable asset class.

Unlike stocks, which can be affected by global events, company performance, and speculation, real estate follows a fundamental principle: People always need places to live. This constant demand provides a level of security most other asset classes simply cannot match.

While stock markets can crash overnight, real estate values rarely experience sharp declines, and rental income continues to flow regardless of market conditions. This makes U.S. real estate one of the safest, most reliable investments, even when the broader economy faces turbulence. 

Dominion Financial has specialized in financing for real estate for over 20+ years and has the expertise you need to push your investing journey forward.

Limited Supply, Lasting Value

One of the most significant advantages of real estate investing is its long-term appreciation. Unlike assets that can be endlessly produced (such as stocks or cryptocurrencies), land and housing are finite resources. 

Historically, U.S. real estate has consistently increased in value, even through recessions. While short-term market fluctuations occur, home prices and rental rates tend to rise over time due to:

  • Population growth and housing demand
  • Land scarcity in desirable areas
  • Increasing construction costs

A well-located property bought today will likely be worth significantly more in the coming years. Even during economic downturns, home prices tend to recover and continue their upward trajectory, making real estate a reliable asset for long-term wealth preservation.

Stable Cash Flow

Stocks and bonds may increase in value over time, but they don’t provide monthly passive income like rental properties. No matter what happens in the financial markets, tenants still pay rent—providing investors with a consistent income stream.

This is especially valuable during economic downturns, where stock dividends may be reduced and businesses struggle. Rental demand remains strong, particularly in uncertain times, as more people turn to renting rather than buying homes.

Cash flow from rental properties not only covers mortgage payments, but can also:

  • Fund other investments
  • Provide financial security
  • Serve as a hedge against inflation

Even if property values temporarily decline, monthly rental income keeps flowing, making real estate an excellent choice for those seeking financial stability.

A Recession-Resistant Asset

During economic downturns, many investments lose value rapidly. However, real estate has proven to withstand recessions better than most other asset classes.

During the 2008 financial crisis, home values took a hit due to widespread lending issues, but those who held on to their properties saw significant appreciation in the following decade. Similarly, in 2020, the pandemic caused stock markets to plummet, yet the housing market surged due to low interest rates and strong demand.

Why? Because housing remains a necessity, people will always need places to live, and rental demand often increases during uncertain times as people delay homeownership.

Even if property values dip temporarily, they tend to bounce back faster than stock markets, making real estate a resilient long-term asset.

Interest Rate Cycles Create Buying Opportunities

Economic uncertainty often leads investors to shift to bonds, which affects five-year Treasury yields. These yields are crucial in determining mortgage rates, including those for DSCR rental loans

Dominion Financial Services helps investors take advantage of these opportunities by providing loans tailored for rental property financing, allowing them to secure competitive rates and expand their portfolios strategically.

As bond demand increases, yields drop, often resulting in lower borrowing costs for real estate investors. This creates an opportunity to secure financing at better terms—a significant advantage for investors looking to scale their portfolios.

For those using DSCR loans—which allow investors to qualify based on a property’s income rather than personal income—this can be a perfect time to lock in favorable financing. Investors who take advantage of these moments can maximize buying power, lower their interest rates, and increase overall returns.

The Power of Leverage

Another reason real estate continues to outperform other asset classes is leverage. Unlike stocks, where you typically buy shares outright, real estate allows investors to use other people’s money (the bank’s) to build wealth.

For example:

  • If you invest $50,000 in stocks, you own $50,000 worth of stock.
  • If you invest $50,000 as a 20% down payment on a $250,000 property, you control a $250,000 appreciating asset.

If that property appreciates 10%, you gain $25,000 in equity—a 50% return on your initial investment, compared to just 10% in stocks.

Leverage allows real estate investors to:

  • Buy more properties with less capital
  • Scale their portfolio faster
  • Achieve higher returns compared to unleveraged investments

And with rental income covering mortgage payments, tenants essentially pay down your loan while you build equity.

Final Thoughts

No matter what happens in the economy, real estate remains one of the best investments due to its stability and long-term value. As a tangible asset, it holds intrinsic worth and tends to appreciate over time, even after market downturns. Rental properties provide consistent cash flow, ensuring steady income regardless of economic conditions. 

During periods of uncertainty, financing opportunities often improve, allowing investors to secure favorable loan terms. Additionally, real estate offers the ability to leverage capital, enabling investors to scale their portfolios faster and build lasting wealth. Whether you’re a first-time investor or looking to expand your portfolio, now is the time to position yourself for long-term success.

Explore DSCR rental loans today

If you’re ready to take advantage of today’s favorable financing conditions, Dominion Financial Services offers DSCR rental loans backed by a DSCR Price-Beat guarantee, designed to help investors scale efficiently.

With no personal income verification required, these loans allow you to qualify based on a property’s rental income—making investing and building lasting wealth easier.

Get started today and secure your next investment property with Dominion Financial Services.



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This investor built a multimillion-dollar real estate portfolio with low-money-down loans and little cash-to-close. Thanks to his smart “rinse and repeat” strategy, he’s quickly scaled from zero to 13 rental units in just four years, all while collecting thousands of dollars of cash flow a month. He would have never been able to get to this place if he hadn’t followed a strategy many investors are too scared to try.

Mike Johnson knew the best way to take bigger career risks was to have a backup plan. The ultimate passive income plan? Rental properties. But he didn’t want to put 20% to 25% down on each property he bought, so he started where many investors do—house hacking. Four years later, he’s continued his repeatable house hacking strategy, purchasing a new property every year, living in one unit, and renting out the others.

This has allowed Mike to build a portfolio worth $3.4 million in just four years while buying in B+ or A-class neighborhoods and taking home a healthy amount of cash flow. But he has dealt with his fair share of headaches—squatters, non-paying tenants, and a lot of purple paint. Mike still says investing has been a massive win for him, and you can repeat his same strategy!

Dave Meyer:
This investor bought a property worth one and a half million dollars in a great neighborhood in a major US city with only $35,000 cash in 2024. It is actually possible. Hey friends, welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. I’m Dave Meyer, head of real estate investing here at BiggerPockets. And today on the show we’re talking with Mike Johnson, an investor in Chicago. Mike started his investing journey with a $13,000 down payment on a duplex in 2021, and he has house hacked his way into 13 units in just four years now. He’s living in one of Chicago’s most desirable neighborhoods with thousands of dollars in monthly cashflow and the potential for millions in appreciation over the next couple of years. And Mike isn’t doing anything that the vast majority of people can’t do. He’s found deals on the market, he’s putting down as little as possible. He’s done relatively hands-off renovation and now he’s sitting on this incredible portfolio. Just a couple of years later, Mike today is going to tell us how his deep analysis of investing options has led to real estate in the first place. How one of the more extreme problem tenants I’ve ever heard of led to a free rehab for him and why he’s a fan of the extremely long close. So here we go. This is me talking with investor Mike Johnson. Mike, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for being here.

Mike Johnson:
Nice to meet you Dave. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Dave Meyer:
Yeah, so give us a little bit of background. What were you doing when you first got into real estate and how long ago was that?

Mike Johnson:
So I got into real estate four years ago during Covid in 2020, and I was a medical device sales rep that sold devices in the operating room. So once Covid happened, we were restricted access to hospitals, which was a major part of my day. Ironically. This was about the same time where I had no student debt anymore and I had this nest egg that was building. So naturally I started looking at investment vehicles on where do I park my money for the best return long term? And that’s when I stumbled upon real estate and kind of started edging my way to my first deal.

Dave Meyer:
Great. Congrats on paying off your student debt, by the way. That’s always a really good feeling and an important step on anyone’s early retirement or financial freedom journey.

Mike Johnson:
Yeah.

Dave Meyer:
So tell me a little bit about the types of investments you’re interested in because I think people get to this point where you have a little bit of capital, it’s a great place to be. You could choose to go into flipping, you could do long-term rentals, short-term rentals. What appealed to you first about real estate?

Mike Johnson:
I know when some people invest in real estate, they use it as a means to an end to get out the daily grind, quit their W2 and kind do this full time. I have the kind contrary approach to that where I enjoy my W2 job. So I am a long-term buy andhold investor. I’ve done four house hacks essentially at this point in my investment journey. So up to 13 units across four buildings. And for me it’s really just to build that passive income and it gives me security in my W2 job so that I can take more career risks with positions to get new experiences that may entail a pay cut. Whereas if I didn’t have this as a fallback, maybe I would be less prone to taking those risks in my W2, where long-term I think that’s going to pay dividends for higher level roles that require that you have some diversified experiences. And so it’s actually helped progress me in my W2 career and it’s a fun side hustle. It’s your own business, it’s yours, and it’s fun to see it grow.

Dave Meyer:
So set the seed. Where do you live and is that where you chose to invest as well?

Mike Johnson:
It is. So I was born and raised in Wisconsin, small town of 5,000 people, but I moved to Chicago about seven and a half years ago. So I’ve been here ever since I took the medical device sales job. But interestingly enough, my first deal was actually in Milwaukee. We can kind of get into the reason why I chose Milwaukee Market, but then the other three deals have been in Chicago where I currently reside.

Dave Meyer:
Alright, yeah, let’s get into it. I mean if you listen to the show, Henry has, I love the term he dubbed of Lake Effect cashflow, which is just that anywhere in the Great Lakes region, the Midwest there is high potential for cashflow. I think Chicago falls into that, but Milwaukee is always kind of one of those standouts. When you look at lists of places that do offer cashflow, Milwaukee’s always up there. So is that why you targeted it?

Mike Johnson:
It is. So for me, actually, once I got into the BiggerPockets podcast, the books did the free webinars on how to underwrite after I kind of took that in. I looked at the markets, right, a duplex two to four unit in Chicago versus Milwaukee, dramatic difference in the cash that you need to invest. So for me, in my geography, for my medical device sales job, I covered Milwaukee, a lot of rural Illinois and parts of Chicago. So I could technically move and live in Milwaukee and still do my day job, but I would’ve to invest far less cash. And so for me, Milwaukee is one of the most heavily concentrated duplex cities in the country. And so there’s a lot of options. And so that’s why I decided that if there’s any fires that I have to put out in person for some reason I could drive there and be there in an hour 20. So just having that comfort of my first investment property, that’s kind of all the reasons why I chose Milwaukee.

Dave Meyer:
Oh, cool. And did you house hack? Did you actually live there?

Mike Johnson:
So I did a 10% down owner occupancy loan. And it’s kind of funny. So right around when we closed, my geography changed from, they took away all my Wisconsin and they gave me Iowa. So I called my lender because I called my lender and I said, Hey, I got to just be honest with you. Here’s my geography and when it’s shifting in the new fiscal year, I can’t move Milwaukee, but what do I do? And he just said, as long as you change your insurance, he’s like, you had intent when we closed to live there, we’re okay with it, but obviously confirm with us, write us a letter telling us what happened. And I had the documentation right with my GI changes every year, and so I never ended up moving into that property, but I did do a 10% down owner occupancy loan. So that was November of 2020 and the duplex was 128,000 in Milwaukee. To give some context,

Dave Meyer:
All right, nice. 128 grand, you put 10% down. So I assume with closing costs and everything, somewhere around 17, 18, maybe up to 20 grand was kind of like what you needed to get into that deal.

Mike Johnson:
Yeah, 19,000 is essentially what I put into the deal itself had a 2.8% rate. So of course we all know that the rates were very low at that point.

Dave Meyer:
Do you remember what it took to carry that? What was your monthly expense all in?

Mike Johnson:
So my PIT, I mean right now is it’s 9 22, so principal insurance, taxes and interest, the building’s bringing in 1700 a month.

Dave Meyer:
Wow, that’s awesome.

Mike Johnson:
There’s a nice spread on there, and I’ve had the same tenants all four years.

Dave Meyer:
Wow.

Mike Johnson:
Zero vacancy. They’re happy to live there. The units were recently redone when I bought the place, and so it’s been very low lift to kind of maintain that property.

Dave Meyer:
That’s amazing. Wow. Very cool. I just want to re-emphasize what Mike just said to everyone listening is that Mike was able to get into his first duplex for under $20,000 total. And of course prices have changed, but this type of strategy where you’re getting an owner occupant loan with 10% down, even if that went up to two 50, maybe it’s goes from 19 grand to 25 grand, but just demonstrates that these types of lower money down options are still available. I love hearing that your PITI is under a thousand dollars. That three digit monthly payment is a rare thing. Probably pretty hard to find these days. Hold onto that for dear life.

Mike Johnson:
Yeah, nothing’s really come close to that sense that, but it was a great first step into real estate investing and no regrets with the first property at all up to this point.

Dave Meyer:
Why do you think that you’ve had tenants for four years? Is there anything you did in the screening, anything that you looked for that you attribute that success to? Because as we all know, vacancy kills zeal.

Mike Johnson:
So for me, first and foremost, yes, I am the landlord, but I try to just be a human. So I have conversations with them. If there’s any issues, I just say, just text me directly. They didn’t have a very good property management company managing the building before. So I introduced myself and I just kind of talk to ’em and say, Hey, is there anything that you basically want fixed right off the bat? Can we take care of that? And then anytime there’s an issue, I get it taken care of right away. So they trust me. There’s open communication. And so when it comes to resigning the lease, I’ve increased rent two to four years, but I always provide comps. I always give them under market rent, but then they have justification of, alright, if I move, I’m going to pay more per month and then it’s moving costs. And so they’ve just decided to stay every year. And so it’s worked out. It’s just funny because sometimes when you’re looking at getting into real estate investing, you think that there’s all these special things you need to do. It’s just you do the same things again and again. You’re a good person, you take care of issues when they occur, and most of the times over time, the investment’s going to work out just fine.

Dave Meyer:
I love your approach to this. I feel kind of the same way. I’m just don’t overthink this. Just be a good human being, underwrite deals, it’s going to work out, be patient. I think patience is another big one that some people have a challenge with, but hopefully listening to this podcast, preaching to you, real estate’s a long game. Just be patient. It’s going to work out. All right. We do have to take a quick break, but we’ll be back with Mike right after this. Hey everyone. Welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. I’m here with investor Mike Johnson. All right. So that was your first deal. What came next for you?

Mike Johnson:
Actually, I closed on the next house hack in Chicago and Northside of the city. This was my FHA loan that I used. So three and 5% down, it was a $750,000 four unit brick building, which is great.

Dave Meyer:
Oh wow.

Mike Johnson:
I got a 2.75% rate on this building, and the cash I invested who acquired the building was only 27,000.

Dave Meyer:
Oh, okay. I was about to say that you really must have gone up in out-of-pocket expenses because you paid 19 grand out of pocket for the first one. If you put 25% down on a $750,000, you’re talking something closer to 200 grand. How did you pull that one off?

Mike Johnson:
Yeah, so this one inherently with the 3.5% down, you’re not putting a lot of cash into the deal for a $750,000 four unit, but I always try to maximize seller credits. So maybe they’re willing to do the repairs beforehand. Sure, you’re capped out, I believe for a two to four units, a 3% of the purchase price is how much seller credit you can do. So I always try to advise that, try to maximize that. That can bring your cash to close as low as possible, and that helps push up your return metrics. So I always try to do that. I don’t know if this is common in every state, but here in Illinois we pay taxes and arrears for property tax. So if I close six months into the year, you get six months of the prorated tax amount at closing. So if you pay 20,000 in annual taxes, you’re going to get $10,000 credit and you don’t actually feel that until you sell the building. So you get all the benefits of lower money down. Oh, that’s awesome. Time value of money and getting return on that money all just because they haven’t paid the current year’s tax bill. And so you just address that so that all those things combined ended up me bringing only $27,000 to the table. And there’s some very interesting stories with this building, and I had some rehabs I also did along the way. But yeah, all in all, it’s performing well year to

Dave Meyer:
Date. Is that one of the reasons you chose to invest in Chicago rather than Milwaukee? Or were you just living there? Why switch markets?

Mike Johnson:
So for me, it’s comfortable with real estate investing at this point. I kind of got my feet wet in Milwaukee. I understand this. I’ve had some tenant interactions. It’s not the first time anymore. And so now I think for me, I don’t like to do out-state investing. I like to do it in my backyard house. Hacking money is finite. So for me, I only have so much of it. So I want to maximize and my money. And even when I did the FHA loan, I always try to go to the maximum loan limit for these. So the building that I have, the units are huge. They’re four bed, two bath, 18 hundreds for a feet. Cool. So a little bit harder to place tenants, but you can ration higher rents. And so for a four unit, you you’re maximizing the rental income. And the reason why I chose Chicago or just the Midwest in general is I always kind of use an analogy with the stock market.
So you have the tech stocks if you invest in Colorado, California, some of these maybe sexier states, appreciation wise, I think of that as a tech stock. You’re going to get a lot of appreciation, but cashflow is hard. In the Midwest, I feel like it’s a bit of both. It’s like a dividend stock, a little bit of cashflow, maybe a lot, but it’s Chicago, you’re paying more for the property, but you get a mix, you get a little bit of appreciation. I’ve had cashflow in all my properties, and so I’ve had success here and I live here, so if there’s any issues, I have eyes on the property, I have all the contacts for maintenance repairs, and it makes it a pretty seamless transition from one property to the next.

Dave Meyer:
What about tenants? Have you had similar ability to retain tenants in the same way we did in Milwaukee?

Mike Johnson:
Interesting enough. So ran into some issues at closing, and this was a hard lesson learned, but essentially for this building, I did my final walkthrough the day before closing, and the top floor tenants were all moving out, right? There’s barely anything in the unit. The seller’s agents, there again, I see them physically moving things out. I believe the best in people good to go. They did the repairs they said they were going to do. Fast forward, I close the next day I come back and the door is locked, like, well, this door shouldn’t be locked. So I tried to open it and I see a piece of paper on the door and it’s a signed eviction moratorium. So during covid you couldn’t evict. And long story short, it wasn’t even one of the tenants that was on the lease. It was a guy that was paying them a few bucks a month to crash on their couch. He’s who ended up squatting in the unit.

Dave Meyer:
And

Mike Johnson:
It took me nine months to go through eviction court. I actually lost the case, by the way. Did everything by the books. I lost the case professional tenant. And moral story is he ended up vacating on his own accord, thank the Lord. But he completely vandalized the unit. He painted everything purple, hardwood floors, tiles, cabinets, appliances what broken windows, crazy vandalism. And at this point I’m like, I’m just happy to get the unit back, but I haven’t gotten any rental income for nine months. And now I see the whole unit’s trash. And like I mentioned, this is a 1800 square foot, four bed, two bath unit, so it’s not like a two one rehab. It’s everything. So that was a wonderful experience, but it was covered by insurance.

Dave Meyer:
Oh my God. Well, I’m sorry to hear that. I have a couple questions. I do think when people think about investing in real estate and get nervous about it, it’s exactly this that people get nervous about. So can you just tell us a little bit how this happened? Did you interact with this person at any point and talk to them about what their intentions were or how did this whole unfortunate situation unfold?

Mike Johnson:
Yeah, so I mean, in retrospect, don’t ever close unless you verify the tenants are out, right? That’s a hard lesson learned in retrospect is 2020. But once we got to the point where somebody’s living in the unit, I don’t know who it is at this point, I eventually reach out to the previous owner of the building and I said, Hey, do you have any idea? Can you reach out to the tenants and see who’s maybe still staying there? Do you have any insights? And it was through actually the seller and the seller’s agent where I found out that it was somebody that was paying the previous tenants to crash there essentially. And so I found out his name, I got his contact information, and so I made contact, and of course you want to try to solve things without involving an attorney. So I tried offering him cash to move. I tried to find him subsidized housing. I talked to people in Chicago and is there any place that we can help kind of relocate him? I even offered money to the previous tenants to see if I could pay them to have them move in with them for a few months. He wasn’t interested in any of this. And that’s when I kind of decided that I’m going to have to go the legal

Dave Meyer:
Route. And so you were just going back and forth with him being like, what about this? What about this? And he was just like, nah, I’m cool. I’m staying here.

Mike Johnson:
Yeah. I even offered to say, Hey, you can’t afford to live here alone, right? It’s a four bedroom unit, but what can you afford? And so I even offered, I will place tenants in the other bedrooms so that you can stay there, you don’t have to move, you can afford it. And then it’s rented by the bedroom. I’m getting the full rental income. And I thought that was maybe a good solution, just wasn’t interested. He led me along to make it seem like he was thinking about it, but I found out at the end of the day, this isn’t the first time this guy’s done this. It’s funny how they can afford a really good attorney, but they can’t afford any of the rent. So from what

Dave Meyer:
I’m hearing, you were clearly sort of the victim in this situation. How did you lose that case?

Mike Johnson:
So accepting money was the first mistake. He said, Hey, I can afford to pay you partially right now, I accepted the partial payment, but the moment you accept money from him, it’s no longer a squadron. He’s a paid tenant, right? Regardless of if they’re paid in full or not. Essentially I did everything with serving him the notice given the court date, et cetera, correct. Did everything correctly. The reason why I lost the case is because he had a good attorney that brought up case law.

Dave Meyer:
That is rough.

Mike Johnson:
Eventually in my mind, I’m like, well, this is vandalism. It’s not really covered under my policy. But since it was so bad, obviously it was more than just wear and tear. So they ended up covering the entire rehab, which was around $55,000. Now the unit, I pretty much replaced everything. So now I’m getting $750 more a month in rent. I get better tenants because it’s completely rehabbed. And those tenants have been there for two years now. And so it was a crazy experience. It worked out in the end, but not knowing if it was going to work out, that was probably one of the most stressful times in my life, to be honest.

Dave Meyer:
I’m sorry to hear that. That’s crazy. Well, I’m glad it worked out long term. I always ask people this because inevitably every real estate investor has, maybe not to this extreme, but a story where they lost money, something unfortunate happened, it was a pain in the butt, and oftentimes it happens earlier in your career, still learning like this. So were you ever considering giving up or sort of thrown in the towel?

Mike Johnson:
It crossed my mind because once I lost the eviction case, that’s where it kind of started to sinking that this could be another nine months. And with Covid, nobody really knew at this point what it was and how long it was going to last, how infectious things were. And so in my mind, I’m like, if this drags on another nine months, I mean, I’m paying out of pocket for stuff. But retrospect, it’s my most profitable building now at this point where the PITI think is 5,300 a month, and it’s bringing in 91 50 a month.

Dave Meyer:
Oh my God. 91 50.

Mike Johnson:
Very nice spread.

Dave Meyer:
Okay. That’s

Mike Johnson:
Awesome. And I rehabbed the one other unit where I put $50,000 into our unit. So one year I didn’t buy a property, and so I, nothing penciled out. So I spent 50,000 on a rehab for one of the units, but now I have all newly rehab units, slow repairs, great tenants, and the spread is really nice. Okay, wow.

Dave Meyer:
Well, you mentioned at the beginning of the episode that you had four deals. We’ve talked about two at Duplex in Milwaukee, and next we talked about your fourplex in Chicago. We do have to take a quick break, but I want to hear about what you’ve been up to more recently right after this. Hey everyone. Welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. I’m here with investor Mike Johnson talking about his portfolio between Milwaukee and Chicago. We’ve talked about two of the deals so far, but the third one, what did you do after that four unit with the unfortunate squatter situation?

Mike Johnson:
So at this point, I had the bug and I’m into real estate investing and won a house hack. Again, I’m starting to look at different neighborhoods. And so I end up landing on a three unit property in a west side neighborhood of Chicago. So this one wasn’t a brick building, but ultimately ended up doing a 10% down loan owner occupancy. I moved into the top floor unit and I got a 3.87% rate. Nice. So rates are starting to go up at this point, right? Still competitive market. And for this deal, I ended up putting about $51,000 into this

Dave Meyer:
Deal.

Mike Johnson:
So by far the most I’ve put into a deal at this point, but I better understand underwriting kind of the little tricks you can do to minimize cash to close. And so that was deal number three.

Dave Meyer:
Nice. Okay. And it worked out hopefully. No squatters.

Mike Johnson:
No squatters, but I will tell you there’s been tenant a issues. No. Oh

Dave Meyer:
Gosh.

Mike Johnson:
I had a litigious tenant fix some injuries. Whoa.

Dave Meyer:
And

Mike Johnson:
It was making threats. And so at that point I said, I am not well equipped and suited for this. I don’t want to make any errors. And so I just decided, I hired a property management company that is well known in the Chicago land area. Him and his team has done a great job, and they have attorneys, they have people that are going to do things the correct way and document things. And so ever since they took over, the relationship is good. There’s no issues. But I think they see a private landlord and they think that they kind of take advantage of the situation, and I was living in the unit so they could gain access to me at any point they see me. And so one thing that I just wanted to do is just separate myself from the tenants. I don’t want to interact and I don’t want to say or do anything incorrectly that’s going to affect me in the court of law in Chicago. And so I can still self-manage the other properties, again, have good tenants, very low vacancy. And so it doesn’t really require much work on my part, but very happy that I offloaded this one property.

Dave Meyer:
So the reason the other ones though is because you’re not living there and it’s just like you have sort of that physical separation from tenants that makes you better able to manage.

Mike Johnson:
Right? I am not quite ready to forego the seven, 8% of gross income. And I’ve also, I used to do all the showings myself, but now I use an agent. So I don’t pay property management, but I will pay an agent to do the showings for me. So my portfolio is honestly very, very hands-off a couple hours a month maybe. But I have contractors that I trust, plumbers, maintenance people. So that search is over in the beginning. You’re trying to find a reliable person, and that’s stressful. But now that I have a team, it’s very low stress, and so I’m willing to pay a little bit more the cashflow. And so I’m happy to pay the price to be hands off and focus my attention elsewhere.

Dave Meyer:
That’s great. I mean, I just want everyone to hear how this just methodical approach Mike is taking can build a portfolio that’s super exciting. I mean, no offense by this mike, but you’re not doing anything super flashy. No. It’s like you’d bought a duplex, you placed great tenants, you have no vacancy, you bought a fourplex, you dealt with a lot of the headache. Now you’re generating amazing cashflow, yet another one where you learn to adapt and rather than dealing it with yourself, you’re sort of offloading the stuff you don’t want to do. And now that’s going to cashflow. And this is over the course of what, three or four years at this point?

Mike Johnson:
Yeah. I mean, in less than four years, I acquired, I think it’s valued at 3.4 million in properties and yeah, I think it was in three years, in nine months. So it’s not like this took me a long time to do. And to your point, it’s rinse and repeat the same house hacking method, and as you gain experience and rates go up, my most recent deal was a few months ago and I had a 6.5% rate, but I still was able to close in a class neighborhood. And so it’s just kind of funny following the investment journey. It’s like, okay, COVID interest rates, everything, pencils, and then as rates go up, I’ve still managed to make things work and I haven’t done anything. To your point, really outside the box,

Dave Meyer:
I just want to point out to everyone that these types of deals that Mike’s doing do still work today. The numbers might be a little different. I don’t know if you’re going to make the same exact level of cashflow, but if you’re trying to inherently just improve your financial position, these types of house hacking strategies where you move from one to the other, this is just a time tested thing that works in pretty much every type of investment environment. Just a couple of weeks ago on the show, we were talking to an investor who started doing this in 2005 and did it through the 2010s during a totally different type of environment. This is just one of those types of approaches to real estate investing that works no matter where you’re coming from. So just want to encourage people, even if you’re thinking, Hey, yeah, these were low interest rate environments, that this is still something that’s possible. And it sounds like Mike, you can tell us about how it’s still possible with a deal you recently did within the last year or so.

Mike Johnson:
Yeah, within a few months ago, it closed on this one in August of 2024. This deal was a little bit different. This was a $1.5 million four unit brick building, three units in the front with the brick coach house in the back, but it’s in Wicker Park, which if you know anything about Chicago, this is a very nice neighborhood. So it’s an A class neighborhood, very nice buildings, very walkable. And I use the new Fannie Freddie 5% down loan, so very highly levered, but conventional loan. And so I got a 6.5% rate, but this one I had to get very creative because I only ended up putting $38,000 into this 1.5 million building, which is kind it crazy when you think about that. That’s less than I put in a building that I paid 6 94, which was the three unit. So for this one, again, with 5% down, of course you have that again, maximize seller credits. So 3% on about 1.5 is around $43,000 in seller credits. I got on top of that. I think this is another popular real estate strategy that people use, but I always close in the first or second of the month.

Dave Meyer:
Oh, I love this. Yes,

Mike Johnson:
Because this building brings in almost 13,000 a month in income. So if you have two months without a payment, you have a $26,000 cushion for future repairs, anything that maybe you need to do. And it’s lower cash to close. And just the last thing was the tax preparation. Expensive building, pay a lot of taxes close the middle of the year. So I got all that tax credit as well. That lowered my cash to close, which I only had to bring, I think $12,000 I think to the closing table. But my all in with earnest money was 38 on this building.

Dave Meyer:
Wow. Unbelievable. That’s super cool. I just wanted to explain the thing you said about doing the closing on the first or second of the month. This is just such an easy way to build a cash reserve and lower your expenses. But basically, when you take out a traditional mortgage, let’s say you close on May 1st, you’re not going to pay for May. You’re also not going to pay for June. Your first payment will be due July 1st, and that might not sound like a lot, but like Mike said, if he’s generating 13 grand a month in May and June, that’s $26,000 he has without his biggest expense, you’re still going to have other expenses. You’re going to probably still have financing. And depending on the state of the building, you might have some turnover costs or upgrades that you want to make, but you’re basically taking that profit that you’re just sending to the bank and never going to see again, and you’re pushing it off for two months.
And of course you’re still going to have to pay that money back. That’s how a loan works. Just the mechanics of running a business, this is a really fortunate way to do it. So anytime you have the option or some flexibility about when to close on a property, just do it as earliest in the month that you can. First is great, second is good. Even the first week, you’re really going to give yourself a big benefit there. Obviously when you close, it’s the same amount of capital, but you won’t need to, for example, set as much aside for a cash reserve.

Mike Johnson:
And the tenants here are people that are working professionals, good jobs, high income, and just no issues. I mean, so the tenant pool is great.

Dave Meyer:
I love it. You deserve it, man. After two rough ones with tenant situations that weren’t really of your own making. Good to hear that you got a relatively calm one, but it sounds like honestly this kind of deal, you did a lot of creative stuff and kudos to you for doing your research. You learned the tricks. You learned some of the little hustles that you could do on each deal to sort of reduce the amount of money that you’re putting into it, but realistically, this kind of deal, people could do this deal. This, I think serves as a model for people listening of a great deal that you could execute on today.

Mike Johnson:
A hundred percent. And there’s two good things too. So with an FHA, you have the self-sufficiency test, which makes it really hard sometimes to have enough rental income to pass that test and even do an FHA loan. The nice thing about this 5% down Fannie Freddie loan is it’s double the rate limit. So you can buy twice as expensive of a property and there’s no self-sufficiency test. So all of a sudden you can afford to buy in these A class neighborhoods where I’m in, whereas an FHE loan would never pass here because the buildings are just too expensive. So it actually opened up the neighborhoods that I was coming to because I think a lot of people don’t want to house hack, and they’re like, I don’t want to live in that neighborhood, which it’s valid, it’s personal preference, but this new fanny, Freddie 5% down loan, it gets you into the eight class neighborhoods in most cities. And so, yeah, I was able to capitalize on that pretty much right as that loan package came out. So maybe not as common knowledge and there wasn’t as many people utilizing it yet, but it’s a great option.

Dave Meyer:
That’s a great tip. Yeah, I didn’t even realize that They don’t have the self-sufficiency test. That’s a really cool tip.

Mike Johnson:
Yeah, it’s really nice.

Dave Meyer:
Awesome. So what’s next for you, Mike? It seems like you’re sort of doing this methodically. Are you just going to keep trying to do these kind of small every year, every two years?

Mike Johnson:
So the thing about me maximizing my leverage on these properties is my DTI is pretty capped out right now.
So I may need to cool it for a year or so, but so one of two things. I think I may do the live and flip strategy where I buy a condo kind of by the lake in Chicago, and then I live there two to five years, do a rehab, and then you can sell that within five and not pay taxes on it. So still kind of use the tax advantage method of real estate that I’m familiar with or look into maybe just renting because this unit that I’m in rents for more than what I’d be willing to live in myself. This is a three bed, two bath, and I’m by myself, so I’ll probably move into a smaller unit, rent this out, and then I could maybe get into a five plus multifamily and kind of start maybe scaling up a little bit, doing some larger deals.

Dave Meyer:
Awesome, man. Well, congratulations. And just want to reiterate, this is the example I always give where people say, is your primary residence an investment? Clearly, you’ve shown us, Mike, that yes, it can be you’ve managed to acquire millions of dollars worth of real estate just by using your primary residence and even going forward. I love your thinking because yes, at some point in almost every investor’s career, your debt to income ratio becomes a challenge. You have to cool off, and that’s okay. It’s totally fine. I’ve gone years without buying deals for sure. But also Mike, thinking of good ways to do it too. I love that you’re flexible enough to think about renting. I’ve also done that. When you do the math, sometimes it just makes sense to rent or do a live and flip. That’s what I’m doing right now. It’s just another good way to make money. Alright, I think that’s all we got for today. Mike, thanks so much for joining us. Congrats on all your success and for navigating some pretty tricky tenant situations. We appreciate you being here.

Mike Johnson:
Thanks for having me. This was fun.

Dave Meyer:
It really was. And everyone remember, we are always looking for more investors like Mike to feature on the show. If you’d like to tell your real estate story to the BiggerPockets audience, you can apply at biggerpockets.com/guest. Thanks again for listening. We’ll see you next time.

 

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Want the time-tested investing strategy that will make you rich 10, 20, or 30 years from now? Despite market uncertainty, buying rentals is still a savvy move if you’re playing the long game. That’s what today’s guest is doing—using a mix of steady cash flow and appreciation to reach financial freedom!

Welcome back to the Real Estate Rookie podcast! After a bad experience with a financial advisor, Anthony Finger decided to take control of his investments. He started with everyone’s favorite “boring” investment, index funds, and before long, he had brought his slow and steady approach over to real estate—buying seven long-term rentals over seven years. Today, his real estate portfolio brings in $2,400 in monthly cash flow, and Anthony has already built up over $600,000 in total equity!

The conservative approach might not be as “sexy” as Airbnb or as exciting as flipping houses, but it’s a surefire way to build wealth with real estate. Tune in as Anthony shares the perks of investing in your own backyard, the benefits of buying turnkey rentals, and the secret to buying new construction at a discount!

Ashley:
Investing out of state can be scary, but we will break down the steps to make your investment a confident one.

Tony:
We’ll also cover what exactly you need to account for when analyzing a deal, along with determining the best partnership for you.

Ashley:
Okay, so we got our first question on rookie reply today. This question is, when looking at the closing disclosure and you see that rent will only cover the taxes and mortgage, if the property management fee is waived for a year, is that worth it? That would mean that the next year after the property management fee is not waived, then you’re only getting about $50 in cashflow. Would that be worth it in a not so appreciating market? So here’s some things to consider for this question. The person row, absolutely nothing else is factored in such as Cap X improvements like roofs, HVACs, usually we like to save a percentage of that, so that’s great that they called that out. They also noted this is for a turnkey provider who is providing the property management who is saying they will waive one entire year for the rental, which could be increased by only a certain amount due upon the next lease renewal. This is also a single family home in the Midwest. The rent cannot be increased right away, so I would only receive $50 cashflow after the insurance taxes a mortgage. This would not include any maintenance. Pretty much the only reason why would be anything more than $50 is because the property management fee is waived, but that’s only within the first year. Okay, so to kind of sum up this question is, is it worth it? Should they purchase this property? Tony, should we start out with kind of explaining what a turnkey provider is?

Tony:
Yeah, it’s a great call. So turnkey providers, and I believe we recently did a reply specifically about turnkey, but turnkey providers are companies who go out there, they find distressed assets, they fix them up, they place sentence inside of them, and then they sell those fully leased up units to other investors. Those are called turnkey providers because basically on day one it’s turnkey. You don’t have to do anything to it, any work, and you can really just kind of get started cash flowing on day one, hopefully. So that’s what a turnkey is. But sometimes the downside with turnkey, which is what I think we’re seeing in this situation is that your cashflow, depending on the property, depending on the market, depending on the provider, can get a little squeezed, which is 50 bucks is I think is what we’re seeing here.

Ashley:
So the next kind of question here is, well, I guess we should kind of go over expenses. What other expenses should be considered? So they mentioned that any kind of savings for CapEx, such as roofs, avac, HVACs, anything like that is not included in their numbers. So for me, a general rule of thumb is how old the property is, or if it’s been recently remodeled, saving a certain percentage. So if I’m buying a home that was built in the early 19 hundreds, hasn’t had a lot of updates or remodeling, I’m saving at least 10% to cover those improvements on the property. If it was completely remodeled, I’m may be saving 5%. Some situations, like if I did the remodel and I updated a lot, then maybe it’s only going to be knocked down to 3% of whatever the rental income is each month. But you want to factor these things in along with the maintenance.
He had mentioned any maintenance cost would basically take away that $50 of cash flow. And if you have ever had a handyman or a service tech come out, usually just for them to come out to your property is more than $50. So yeah, the maintenance, maintaining the property, so this is a single family home, so most often you’re going to have the tenant take care of the lawn care, the snowplowing, things like that. But there could be pest removal that you may have to cover or pay for depending on what the lease agreement says too. Tony, is there any other expenses that you would add? I think the last thing I can think of is bookkeeping expenses. Unless your property management company is taking into account those expenses.

Tony:
Yeah, I feel like you kind of hit ’em all right. At a business level, I think you’re right, bookkeeping tax preparation and tax filing tax strategy, if you have an LLC, any fees associated with that. So there’s always going to be some additional cost. So I mean is $50 in cashflow a lot? Obviously not. I don’t think anyone’s going to retire or get super excited off of $50, but I think the one thing we don’t have from the person answering or asking this question is why are they doing this? They’re in the Midwest. So my assumption here is that they’re not hyper-focused on appreciation. Typically in most Midwestern states, those aren’t the states that are known for appreciating. They’re typically known for better cashflow. So if you’re going into the Midwest with the focus of getting cashflow, but yet you’re only getting $50, I can’t imagine what your investment into this property is, but it would has to be a pretty small investment for that 50 bucks per month to be any sort of reasonable return on your investment.
So just from that information, that doesn’t seem like a deal to me. And the other thing too actually that I’m curious about is for the PM two waive their property management fee in the first year, obviously it’s the turnkey provider, so they’re getting money upfront just from the sale of the property to this investor. So I get that piece, but I also wonder is there any sort of long-term contract that this investor is signing up for? Because I would assume that most pns probably aren’t just going to manage for free without any sort of security that they’ll have that second year, that third year potentially. So I would think I would really just review that to make sure, because what happens if you get into year two and that first year was kind of shaky and you’re like, man, I really did not like working with these guys, but now you’re locked in for another two or three or five years. So just a couple of things that are running through my mind as I hear this question.

Ashley:
Yeah, I definitely agree. I don’t think this sounds like a great deal, especially if you’re not getting appreciation. Maybe you need this property for the tax advantages and that’s all you care about is you want to be able to write it off, then maybe it could work for you. But I think if you’re not getting cashflow or you’re not getting appreciation, but definitely do your research on that and see if there is an appreciation play. Also, when can the rents be increased on the property or is there any kind of value add that you could do? For example, turning the dining room into another bedroom to actually increase the revenue that way? Could you rent out the garage for storage? So see if there’s any other revenue potentials, but I would say this probably isn’t an investment that I would want to do. One thing to keep in mind, if this is the only way that you can get started is by going through turnkey provider, I would go and talk to other turnkey providers and compare what their closing disclosures look like, compare what are the costs that are associated with using them, what are they charging, things like that.
So you can compare the different turnkey providers to, okay, we have to take our first ad break, but we will be back shortly.

Tony:
All right guys, welcome back. We are here with our next question in today’s rookie reply. So this question says, BP community, I’m entering the real estate investing world through partnerships. Ding, ding, ding. Alright, Ashley and I love talking about partnerships. Myself and my buddy, we’ve been friends for more than 15 years and we decided to get into real estate through a multifamily house hack. We plan on pooling our money for a down payment and closing costs. If one of us can qualify for the loan amount, then we’ll choose to only have one person apply for the mortgage. So the first question is, how does the other claim ownership on the property? My understanding is that this can be done by keeping the property in an LLC and being 50 50 partners in the LLC. Are there any other ways to claim ownership without the LLC?
What is a better way to go about this? Question number two, if we plan to buy a second property one or two years down the road, how would lenders approach the underwriting? And then question number three, do we need to watch out for any pitfalls in the future for scaling our portfolio together or separately? Lots of good questions here Before I think me and Ashley jump in. We got to give a nice plug here for our book on real estate partnerships. So for those that don’t know, Ash and I co-authored a book with BiggerPockets called Real Estate Partnerships, and you can head over to biggerpockets.com/partnerships to pick up a copy of that book. So Ashley, let’s hit the first question here, or first part of this question. If one person is on the mortgage, how the other person actually show ownership of the property?

Ashley:
So for this, I think there’s different ways that you can do it. We can kind of go into that as to how to structure is it should be in your personal name, should be in an LLC joint venture. But the way that you own the property is if you are on the deed. So you could not be on the mortgage, but you could still be on the deed. So whether you have ownership of an LLC or you have a joint venture agreement, or it’s your personal name, you need to have your name on the deed or that joint venture agreement saying that you are own part of the joint venture that owns the house. Okay, so that is how you claim ownership is having a right to the deed of the property, making sure that you’re on the deed. In this situation, this property is a house hack that they are doing together.
There’s one thing you should be cautious of. When my sister was doing her house hack, I couldn’t give her money for the down payment and say that she had to pay me back. You have to use your own funds or it has to be a gift from somebody and it has to be a family member usually. So just because you’ve been friends for 15 years, I’m not sure a standard FHA loan or conventional loan would allow if this is your primary residence for the funds to be provided by somebody else to actually close on the property, they’ll want to verify. Tony, do you know if that’s true for conventional or is that just an FHA rule that you have to use your own funds for a down payment or a gift from a family member?

Tony:
And guys, when we say conventional, we just mean anything that’s backed by Fannie and Freddie, right? The big, they’re not technically government entities, but the people that insure a lot of these mortgages that are going out to the general public. I think one of the things you made a phenomenal point ash about the mortgage and the deed being different, just one thing because they also said that, should we put this in an LLC? Just word of caution, or maybe not word of caution, but just something to think about. Typically when you’re doing a house act, the reason that people like to house act is because of the type of debt that you get access to. And Ashley just talked about that I like using an FHA, but with those types of debt, typically it’s got to be in your personal name. So even if you guys created this LLC, you can still a lot of times run the income and the expenses through that entity. But the actual deed would show Ashley and Tony, right title would be us jointly on that deed together. So I don’t know if the ownership in the LLC is necessarily going to impact the ownership claim on this property.

Ashley:
And I guess really you have to figure out how you want to finance the property because that’s going to really play into what you’re actually able to do. So if you’re both doing the house hack, if you both want this to be your primary residence, which I don’t remember, does it say they’re both to live in there?

Tony:
I believe so. It seems that way.

Ashley:
Yeah. So if you’re both living there, then I don’t see a problem with you both splitting the down payment, you both going onto the deed, you both being, you can have one person on the mortgage. So even with my sister’s house hack, I’m on the deed, but I’m not on the mortgage and I gifted her the down payment fund. So you can definitely do it where you’re on the deed and you’re not on the mortgage with one of you if one person qualifies. And I really like that strategy that you’re going to try and do it that way. Just make sure you have some kind of agreement where it states that you both are responsible for the mortgage because whether it’s you or the other person that’s putting the debt in their name, ultimately if someone doesn’t pay you, say the mortgage is in your name and your friend or whatever stops paying, it’s going to be you personally that the mortgage is going to go after and say they foreclose on the house. You’re both losing out on the house, but it’s going to affect your credit score and hurt your credit if mortgage payments are missed. So make sure you have some kind of protection or security against that too, or you really, really trust the person.

Tony:
And I think that kind of ties in nicely to the second part of this question. So it’s like if we plan to buy a second property one or two years down the road, how would lenders approach the underwriting? So like Ashley mentioned, if one person is on the mortgage, both of you’re on the deed, one person’s on the mortgage, both of you’re on the deed. When you go to get that next property, even though both of you’re on the deed, only the person who’s on the mortgage only their debt to income will be impacted by this first house S act. So if Ashley and Tony buy a duplex together, but it’s just Ashley who’s on the mortgage, we’re both on the deed. When we go to buy that second property, my DTI is going to show zero in terms of mortgages and Ashley will show the house act that we have together.
Now, say both of you go on the mortgage together because maybe you can’t qualify by yourselves when you go to buy that next property, since both of you’re on the mortgage, and actually check me if I’m wrong here, but since both of you’re on the mortgage, underwriting doesn’t split that in half. If the mortgage is 2000 bucks, it doesn’t say, okay, Ashley’s liable for a thousand bucks per month and Tony’s liable for a thousand bucks per month. It says Tony’s liable for 2000 bucks per month and Ashley’s liable for 2000 bucks per month, even though both of you are sharing that cost. And the reason why is because the lender who’s doing the underwriting, they’re like, well, we don’t know who this other person is, right? Even though both of you guys technically apply together, they’re like, we don’t know who this other person is. You are always responsible at the end of the day for making sure that mortgage payment is made. So that’s why it is very, it’s helpful if you guys can get approved individually, otherwise you’ll both get double dinged for those mortgages.

Ashley:
Yeah, that’s 100, correct. So it kind of stinks because now that’s being accounted against both of you. So if you do go and get another property, they’re looking at it as you both are responsible for $2,000 each instead of a thousand and a thousand. So it can affect your debt to income on the property. And then the last question here is do we need to watch for any pitfalls in future for scaling our portfolio together or separately? So the thing that I would want to have in place is some kind of operating agreement or joint venture agreement. Even if you are doing this in your personal name, have some kind of agreement in place where you are writing out what happens in the future. And Tony, I always use what you have done as an example, as in when you take on a partner, you put in there a five year exit plan. So do you want to explain to everyone what that is and how this person should use this to protect themselves from many falling outs or pitfalls?

Tony:
Yeah, the five year exit plan I think is one of the smartest things we’ve done in our real estate business in terms of partnering with other investors. Again, part of the way that we built our portfolio was finding really good deals and then soliciting those deals to folks that we felt might be good partners for us. And a lot of these people we’d never met before, these are people who we would meet in different places through different means. So even though we had a good initial conversation, who knows if down the road we would enjoy continuing to work together? So that was the genesis of the partnership kind of five-year clause. So basically what it states is that at the end of the fifth year of the partnership, the default option, the kind of default action that needs to be taken is that we sell the property. The only way that the cell is avoided is if both parties, both partners agree to extend for another year and then 12 months later the same thing happens. So every year, thereafterwards, we have another opportunity to reevaluate that partnership to see if it makes sense to move forward. We actually haven’t needed to leverage that at all yet. Most of our partners that we have are actually pretty solid people. But it is good to have just in case things do go south, there’s an easy exit for both of you.

Ashley:
Rookies, we want to thank you so much for being here and we are so close to hitting 100,000 subscribers on YouTube. We would love it if you aren’t subscribed already, if you would head over and find Real Estate Ricky on YouTube and follow us. We have to take one final ad break and we’ll be back after this. Alright, let’s jump back in. Okay, today’s last question is, Hey all I am just getting started and in my first deal I offered more than what the property appraised for. What should I be looking at when trying to consider an appropriate offer, especially if I can’t see the property since I’m investing out of state? Okay, making an offer. How do you figure out what the property is worth and then to find that disappointment of the property not appraising. So let’s kind of work through this process here.
You put an offer on a property, the offer is accepted. Usually there will be a contingency if you’re using financing that you can back out of the contract if the bank will not lend you the amount that you stated you’re borrowing. So if you put in your contract, you’re borrowing, you’re doing 80% conventional financing with the bank. If the bank says we’re only going to lend you 70%, that can be sometimes a way to get out of your contract and the contract falls apart. There’s also a spot too that your agent could fill an interest rate. So if the interest rate, if you put has to be below 6%, obviously it has to be something reasonable or else the seller is probably not going to sign it. But if all of a sudden overnight interest rates jump to 10%, you could say, look, the bank can no longer give me that rate.
I am going to get out of the deal. So this can also go for what the property appraises for. So the bank goes and does an appraisal on the property to see its value, and then it says, okay, it appraised for a hundred thousand dollars. We are doing a conventional loan of 80%, so we will lend you 80,000. Well, if the bank says, you know what? It only appraised for 90,000, so we can’t give you that 80,000, that’s when you have to make the decision, are you going to come up with the rest of the money? So make a bigger down payment on the property? Are you going to try to renegotiate with the sellers of the property or are you going to back out of the deal? So it looks like in this situation, they must have backed out of the deal because they’re wondering what to do going forward to actually figure out what an actual appropriate offer is. So Tony, the first thing that I would’ve done in this situation is dispute the appraisal. At least attempt to do that, dispute the appraisal, try to renegotiate with the sellers.

Tony:
Yeah, I agree with you 100%. And I think both of us have had experiences where appraisals came in lower than what we had anticipated. And yeah, if you believe that the appraisal was wrong, then yeah, it is very reasonable to go out and say like, Hey, here are some comps, some comparable sales that I found that I feel are better matched than the comparable sales that the arai found. Because sometimes you guys, appraisers are coming from, maybe they don’t know the area as well, right? Maybe they’re coming from somewhere a little bit further out. They just put this appraisal, they were still on work, whatever it may be, but they don’t know that area incredibly well. And sometimes you might know that area better than the appraiser does. So if you can point out, hey, you picked a comp that was three miles away that sold for less, but here’s one that sold more recently, that’s two miles away.
Now you’ve got some ammo to maybe to really contest that appraisal. And one other thing say that the appraiser says, Nope, my appraisal is perfect. Nothing here needs to change another route. You can always go down, and this is obviously a little bit more of a nuclear option, but if you change lenders, and I don’t know if this is law or maybe just best practice, but lenders can’t use the appraiser appraisal from a different lending institution. So if you change lenders immediately, there has to be another appraisal that gets ordered. Now if you’re working with the seller, typically sellers don’t want to push back closing, but if it’s, Hey, either we’re going to close a little bit later or we’re not going to close because the appraisal, they might be a little bit more willing to working with the different lender. So just another way to put some more pressure on the appraising process to make sure it gets done the right way.
Ashley, I think one other thing that you mentioned as well that’s super important is that sometimes a low appraisal can work in your favor. You just have to have the confidence to be able to leverage that as a bargaining chip with the seller because it sounds like maybe you did run your numbers and maybe it did make sense at the purchase price, so it was a good deal. So that doesn’t necessarily mean the value isn’t there, but if you ran the numbers, you liked the deal, everyone agreed, then maybe it is a good deal. But maybe it’s just the fact that the appraisal didn’t come back where you wanted it to. So I would go to the seller and say, look, Mr. And Mrs. Seller, I’m very motivated to buy your home. I love it, the numbers work. However, if I ran into this issue with my appraisal, chances are the next buyer is also going to run into this issue with their appraisal.
So what is in your best interest? Is it giving me the 10, 20, $30,000 discount on the purchase price so we can still close next week? Or do you want to go through the process again of taking the listing down, relisting it, having another buyer who can hopefully get the right appraisal? Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. And you’re in this exact same position, another 60 or 90 days from now. And a lot of times you can get sellers who, if they’re motivated enough, maybe they will come down and meet you at the price that you needed, or at least maybe give you, Hey, let’s meet in the middle. But I think you’ve got to be confident enough to ask that question. If you’ve got a good agent, I think they should be able to negotiate that conversation for you as well.

Ashley:
Yeah, and that kind of leads into the next thing I wanted to bring up is building a team. It mentioned this person is investing out of state, so they can’t actually go and see the property, whether it’s an agent or you need some kind of boots on the ground person that will actually go into the property and be your eyes, but also take a million pictures of the property, take video of the property. We’ve had Nate Robbins on before on the podcast, when he goes to a property, he takes the pictures like you’re walking through the house basically as he takes a step, he’s taking a picture and turns around, each room takes a picture of the doorframe, so you’re entering a different room and then all of that is collected and it’s sent to his partner and then his partner builds out the scope of work in the rehab from just the picture.
So it definitely can be done, but just kind of getting an idea of this is what we should offer on the property based on what you’re seeing. And he always likes to do photos because it’s easier to zoom in on things than it is on video. But they like to have the video too, to kind of get the flow of the house as you go through it. And they do that for the interior and the exterior of the property too. So whether that’s a property manager that you find in the area that you say, Hey, I want to find a property, I want to do this through you guys. Do you have someone on your team that could walk properties for me? Maybe you do it for free wanting your business, or maybe they’ll charge a flat fee, which is definitely worth it to have the boots on the ground.
You could go to the BiggerPockets forums, you could post hate anyone in this area. And it’s not like you really have to, I guess, say trust the person. It’s not like they’re entering into your property, they’re going with your agent or they’re going along and seeing these properties looking and taking pictures and giving you their feedback. And if it’s not super detailed, then hey, you can find someone else to do it too. But I think there’s a lot of people eager to learn who would love to just go and walk houses and work with another investor to see what they’re looking for, things like that. I guess, Tony, the last thing piece I would add to this is what is the cost of a plane ticket to go and see this property? Sometimes paying 200 bucks for a round trip, airfare could be worth it to go and set up a whole bunch of properties, showings in one day or one weekend or something to fly out there and to actually look at them.

Tony:
I couldn’t agree more. Right, and obviously there’s value in long distance investing and building that team, but if it makes sense, I think there’s always value in kind of getting eyes on it yourself as well. But I guess just one last thought for me as well actually, because the question says, what should I be looking at when trying to consider an appropriate offer? You can get a good guess of what you think the property will appraise for as you can go through the process of finding comparable sales yourself, but appraising a property is part art, part sign, so it’s virtually impossible to know down to the dollar what the appraisal will come back at. So as long as you, the investor, the buyer, do your due diligence upfront, you’re using tools like the BiggerPockets calculators, you’re getting quotes from insurance agents to make sure you know what your insurance is, you’re shopping around to get the best debt that you can. As long as you’re controlling all of those things, then I feel like you are following the right process to make an appropriate offer. But don’t feel like you did something wrong simply because the appraisal didn’t come back where you wanted it to. So just a bit of a mindset shift for the rookies that are maybe experiencing a similar issue.

Ashley:
And if you want help analyzing your deal better go to the BiggerPockets calculators because they show you exactly every single expense that you should need. So if you do think it is a deal analysis thing and not actually an appraisal thing, that’s just another resource that you can kind of go, because the numbers don’t lie. As long as you’re verifying what the numbers are, go by that, and that’s what you should be making your offer on, not what you expect the property to appraise for, unless you want to go and you want to add value and then you want to flip it or you want to refinance it. But just if you’re purchasing that property, like Tony said, the appraisal could not be correct and an appraisal, it’s an art form. You could have three different appraisers go to the property and each give you different numbers on it.

Tony:
Three different, yeah.

Ashley:
Okay. Well, we have a special announcement. We have a rookie newsletter that is being sent out every single week. Tony and I writing it ourselves, and we’re trying to give you guys so much value, some reading material and some fun things to learn about real estate investing and what’s going on in the news so you guys can stay up to date as real estate investors in today’s markets. You can head over to biggerpockets.com, hit the get started tab and you’ll see newsletters and it’s got a little new shiny button next to it, hit on newsletters, and you can subscribe right there to the Rookie Newsletter. We can’t wait to hear you guys feedback. Also, if you want to respond to that email, it gets sent right back to Tony and I. So any questions or any feedback you have on the newsletter or things you would love for us to write about, please let us know. Well, thank you so much for joining us on this week’s Rookie reply. If you have questions, head over to the BiggerPockets forums, submit your question there. I’m Ashley. And he’s Tony. And we’ll see you guys on the next Real Estate Rookie podcast.

 

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My BiggerPockets forum post got some buzz when I published data on whether blue states “appreciate” more than red. My intention here is to expand on the original idea: Do a state’s or city’s politics have any meaningful effect on home price appreciation?

While you can view the post, my data, and other investors’ opinions, here’s a brief summary of what I found.

Do Blue States Appreciate More Than Red States?

To begin, I looked at each state’s voting history over the past five elections (over the past 20 years). 

If certain states voted red in 2024 but voted blue the majority of the time, I show them as blue here—like Michigan, for example, which voted blue three times over the past five elections. 

Now, here’s a map of each state’s median price growth over the past 10 years using Zillow data.

It looks like the majority of states with the most growth were pandemic boom states like Idaho, Nevada, Tennessee, Georgia, Utah, and Florida. All these states voted red in the 2024 election. 

But it’s also worth pointing out that the blue states of Maine, New Hampshire, and Washington also saw solid growth.

So what about 20-year growth?

Zillow didn’t have 2005 data for Montana or North Dakota, but the states with the highest 20-year appreciation were Idaho, Utah, Washington, Tennessee, and Oregon.

Unfortunately, this still doesn’t tell us much. 

Is there a way to mathematically describe any relationship between 20-year voting history and 20-year price appreciation? Sort of.

I calculated the correlation between each state’s growth and the categorical red or blue variable. This result came as no surprise to me: The correlation coefficient came in at 0.03. 

In English: There doesn’t appear to be any relationship between a state’s voting history and its price growth.

However, you might be thinking: This is at the state level—what about the city level? 

City-Level Zoning Policies and Price Growth

How might a blue state’s policies affect its most popular cities? After all, a state’s median price can be dragged down by lower-priced rural areas, such as California.

Speaking of California, I grew up in Los Angeles, and I’ve been to quite a few real estate meetups out here. I heard local investors mention that blue state policies, such as zoning restrictions and rent control, actually benefit their investments because these policies can limit supply, which then forces appreciation. 

But is this even true? Well, yes.

A 2003 study co-sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York stated, “The bulk of the evidence marshaled in this paper suggests that zoning, and other land-use controls, are more responsible for high prices where we see them.”

And what about rent control? Well, as my economics teacher liked to say, there is no free lunch.

There are many papers published on the pros and cons of rent control, but the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis sums it up quite nicely: “Economists have found that following the introduction of these policies, rental stock typically declines through channels like the conversion of rental units to owner-occupied units and major unit renovations.”

But why would rent control actually decrease rental stock? I’d like to point to San Francisco as an example. A 2019 study published in the American Economic Review found, “Landlords treated by rent control reduce rental housing supplies by 15% by selling to owner-occupants and redeveloping buildings.”

Rent control aside, strict zoning regulations keeping supply artificially low seem to be a much bigger problem. We also know that local governments enact rent control when they deem housing too unaffordable. But why would housing become unaffordable in the first place? Because there’s more demand than supply. 

So, while we do have evidence that rent control may make affordability worse for future tenants, for my next analysis, I only looked at cities and their price growth and how strict their zoning regulations were. 

Take a look at the graph I made.

The yellow bubbles are cities with the least zoning regulations. Light blue is moderately strict, and dark blue is very strict. The size of the bubbles depends on how much prices grew over the 20-year period. The larger the bubble, the more prices increased. 

Look closely and see if you can determine a pattern. Notice anything? It’s a trick question—there is no discernable pattern here. Just because a city has strict zoning laws doesn’t mean price growth will outweigh a city with moderate zoning laws.

But you probably already know this inherently. Of course, there’s more to real estate appreciation than zoning laws. There needs to be strong demand as well. 

I’ve already researched the main factors that are most correlated with price growth in a previous post on tech job growth, and the winners were household income, office employment, and total employment, depending on the market.

Final Thoughts

Just because a city is in a blue state with strict zoning laws doesn’t mean it’s going to appreciate more than a city in a red state with less strict zoning laws. It’s simply not true. Allow me to beat the point home with the following bar chart.

What does appear to be true is that strict zoning laws artificially limit supply, which can force prices up. But it also appears the variables influencing home price growth most are income and the number of new people who demand housing in an area. These “demand variables” just matter a bit more.

If you have any disagreements, post them in the comments. My only request: Just be civil.

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