BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 718: BiggerNews: The State of Real Estate in 2023 and 3 Ways to Beat a Bear Market
Episode Date: January 24, 2023Most 2023 housing market predictions sound like this, “The sky is falling! Sell everything! Houses will be worth $1 next year! This is just like 2008!” Look at the track record of those who shill ...predictions like this. These are the same forecasters who have been predicting a crash will happen at some point over the last ten years. Now, with a whiff of fear in the air, mainstream real estate journalists will do anything they can to convince you we’re having a repeat of 2008. However, this is far from the truth. But how could we forecast the 2023 housing market without data? And where there’s data, there’s Dave Meyer, VP of Data and Analytics at BiggerPockets and host of the On the Market podcast. Dave and his team have recently released “The 2023 State of Real Estate Investing Report,” which gives all the housing market data you need to invest successfully in 2023. In it, Dave shares how the 2022 housing market flipped once the Fed raised rates, how supply and demand have been affected, and what we can expect for 2023. Dave will also go over the three investing strategies he feels are more appropriate for investing in 2023, including a completely passive way to invest, a cash flow and appreciation combo, and how buyers can take advantage of this market to get deals at a steep discount. While we can’t predict the future, we can give you our best insight into what you can do to build wealth in 2023. So turn off the mainstream fear forecasting and tune into real news designed to make you richer! In This Episode We Cover: Why 2023 is not a “normal” housing market and the details leading up to today’s state The “levers” that affect home prices and why 2023 is NOT the same as 2008 Seller’s vs. buyer’s markets and where prices are most expected to dip Homebuyer demand and how unaffordability has caused most buyers to sit on their hands Mortgage rate increases and how the Fed is using high rates to combat inflation The three strategies that work in today’s housing market and how to invest while others sit on the sidelines 2023 housing market predictions and when we could potentially see home prices bottom And So Much More! Links from the Show Find an Investor-Friendly Real Estate Agent BiggerPockets Youtube Channel BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Pro Membership BiggerPockets Bookstore BiggerPockets Bootcamps BiggerPockets Podcast BiggerPockets Merch Listen to All Your Favorite BiggerPockets Podcasts in One Place Learn About Real Estate, The Housing Market, and Money Management with The BiggerPockets Podcasts Get More Deals Done with The BiggerPockets Investing Tools Find a BiggerPockets Real Estate Meetup in Your Area David's BiggerPockets Profile David's Instagram David’s YouTube Channel Books Mentioned in this Episode Real Estate by the Numbers by J Scott and Dave Meyer Real Estate Note Investing by Dave Van Horn Connect with Dave: Dave's BiggerPockets Profile Dave's Instagram “On the Market” Podcast “On The Market” YouTube Channel Click here to check the full show notes: https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-718 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Check out our sponsor page! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
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This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show 718.
If you're in a market where wages are not going up, there is just a psychological limit to what
people are going to pay for rent.
And, you know, it can only be X percentage.
Usually it's like 30% of their income can go for rent.
And so I totally agree that in a hybrid or an appreciating city, rent growth will go up.
I don't know if that necessarily needs to ever reach the cash flow that these cash
flowing cities tend to support.
But personally, I think that that's the better bet because you're not betting on just
cash flow or just appreciation or just rent growth.
You're getting a little bit of everything.
And you don't know which of the three might perform the best.
But whatever happens, you sort of benefit.
What's going on, everyone?
This is David Green, your host of the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast here today with one of
my favorite co-hosts, none other than Bigger Pocket's own VP of Analytics, Dave
Meyer with a fantastic show for you. First off, Dave, how are you today? I'm doing great. I, you know,
had a real fun time recording this episode. I think people have a lot to look forward to.
Yeah, you are doing great because if you guys listen all the way to the end of the show,
you're going to see exactly why. This was a fantastic show about a very difficult topic that
all of our competition is avoiding because they don't want to talk about what's going to happen
in 2023 other than screaming. The sky is falling or pretend like nothing's happening and just give
me your money so I can teach you how to invest in real estate.
Here, we're not about that life.
Absolutely not.
And maybe we should have talked about this to show.
But I think people are avoiding the concept of risk, and they see there is risk in the market.
And that's true.
I believe there is risk in the market.
But risk is the counterbalance to reward, right?
And so you have to understand risks so that you can reap the reward and opportunities that are out there.
And I think of the show, we really talk about that.
We talk very specifically about what the risks are.
And some of the ways that you can mitigate risks and take advantage of opportunities that might
present themselves over the coming year. That's exactly right. So if you've been curious,
if you've been frustrated, if you've been just wanting to understand what the heck is going on
in the housing market right now, this is a show that will bring a ton of clarity to you. And if you
listen all the way to the end, we're actually going to get into three strategies that we both believe
will work, regardless of what the market does in these uncertain times in 2023. Before we get into
today's show, I have a quick tip for you. Go to biggerpox.com slash report and do you. And
Download the report, Dave Rowe.
A lot of the information from today's show is coming out of that,
and you can get it for free if you're a bigger pockets member.
Dave, anything you want to say before we jump in?
No, go check out the report.
I spent a lot of time on it.
Go support Dave.
And leave us a comment in the YouTube video telling us what you thought of this report.
Show him some love.
And if you like this show, please leave us a five-star review wherever you're listening to podcast.
Guys, honestly, this is very, very important.
We are currently the top real estate show in the entire world, and we want to stay that way.
but we cannot do without your help.
So whether it's Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you listen to podcast,
please take a quick second and let the world know how much you like this podcast so we can stay number one.
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All right.
Let's get into the interview.
So Dave, you wrote a report about the real estate market.
Tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah, I did.
It's a full comprehensive state of real estate investing for 2023.
And I wrote it because there's just.
so much going on right now. We're not and haven't been in a normal housing market for the last
several years. So I start the report by going through all the different factors and variables that
are going to impact the housing market right now and then talk about some of the best strategies
that you can use in 20203 to take advantage of what I personally think are going to be opportunities
in the coming year and just pose some questions about the 20203 market because we all obviously
like to, you know, make forecasts and guess what's going to happen. But there are some just
unanswered questions that I think are sort of going to be the X factor for the 2023 housing
market that we just don't really know how it's going to play out just yet. Yeah, I'd say in my
short career investing in real estate, well, I say short, like compared to some people, it's long.
But I'm not an old man yet. This is the most complicated market, I would say, that I've ever
seen. It's got a lot more competing factors that influence what we're seeing.
Is that similar to what you've noticed and as some of that covered in the report?
Yeah, absolutely.
When you look at the housing market back in time for the last like 80 years or wherever
we have pretty good, reliable data for, the housing market is usually fairly predictable.
You know, it moves in cycles.
But for, you know, let's say seven or eight out of every 10 years, it goes up two to four percent,
you know, somewhat just above the pace of inflation.
And it's pretty steady state and not that exciting.
For the last 15 years or so, things have gotten a little more interesting, and it's been a little bit more boom or bust over the last couple of years.
And for the last three years in particular, as everyone listening to this probably knows, it's become insane.
And it doesn't mean that people are necessarily acting irrationally or that were totally unhinged from fundamentals.
In my mind, what's happened over the last couple years is the variables and the factors that always,
impact the housing market have all sort of aligned in this perfect storm to push housing prices
up. And now we're sort of starting to see that unwind and go back to a more balanced and
honestly more normal housing market. Yeah. And that seems crazy. It seems really negative.
Like we're having this overcorrection. But I think when you consider the insanity we had over the
last eight years in how hot the market was. And you put it within context of that. I don't think
this is as big of an overcorrection as people are saying. But it certainly feels like it when you
compare it to 20% increases in price being the norm in certain cities. Now, you mentioned that there
are some levers of the housing market that affect the way that it performs. Can you tell me what you
mean by that? Sure. Yeah. I think generally there are different variables and these are mostly macroeconomic
indicators that impact housing prices more than others. And there's, you know, there's thousands of
things. And every individual housing market does perform differently. But when you talk about the
national level housing market, it really all comes down to a few things. And people often want to
honestly even oversimplify it and say, like, mortgage rates are going up, so prices go down.
Fortunately, it's not that simple. There are more indicators. There are more things that really matter.
And it shouldn't be surprising.
These levers are things like supply and demand.
Obviously, pricing always in an economic sense come down to supply and demand.
But if you extrapolate that out a little bit more, we need to really look at things like
affordability, inventory, the housing shortage in the United States, inflation, of course,
and things like mortgage rates.
So those to me were the major things that were impacting the market in 22.
and we'll continue to impact in 23, but just in a slightly different way, because the way these
variables are sort of interacting with each other has changed.
Now, we came out of one of the biggest recessions in our country's history right before we
had this explosion.
So from your take, what impact did that great recession play in the home builder space over
the last 10 years?
Yeah, I mean, from pretty much everyone's estimation, the U.S. has a huge shortage in housing units.
And the predictions vary kind of significantly, somewhere between three and a half and seven million housing units.
And when you talk about economics, this just means a shortage of supply, right?
There isn't enough housing units in the United States for people.
And this is largely attributed to what happened during and in the aftermath of the great financial recession.
Basically, tons of builders just went out of business in 2008.
You know, like it was rough out there.
And people were looking for jobs, businesses closed, people who worked in construction wound up going into other industries.
And so we see if you look at the graph and I put this in the report, it's pretty startling the graph.
You could just see that construction just fell off a cliff from 2008 to 2010.
And we've sort of slowly been building our way back up.
And it's now at a pretty good level.
But that eight years, like you said, from like 2010 to 2018, we were well below.
the building rates that we should be at. And so that created these conditions where there weren't
enough homes. And that sort of coincided with the time, you know, starting around 2020,
when millennials, which are now the biggest demographic group in the entire United States,
hit their peak home buying age, right? So we have these confluence of factors where there's a ton
of people who want homes and millennials who are starting families, starting to have kids, and then
not enough homes. That is a perfect scenario for prices to go up. So that's just an example of how
these different macroeconomic forces sort of work together or did through the pandemic work together
to push prices up. Yeah, now, if you want to hear more about the stuff Dave's talking about and like
the nitty, greedy details that make this so exciting, you can download the report for free at
biggerpockets.com slash report and see this data for yourself. Now, we're going to continue to talk
about what's in the report, but if you actually want to stop the podcast and check this out or get it
after the podcast is over, please head over to biggerpockes.com slash report. Now, I think what you're mentioning
about supply and the issues in supply plays, in my opinion, maybe it's the biggest lever in this
whole drama of real estate prices and trying to understand them. I was just talking about this
yesterday when someone said, well, David, if rates keep going up, do you see prices plummeting?
And I said, I don't see them plummeting because there's such a constricted supply. If you're a
homeowner and you've got a 3% interest rate and you could sell your house and get a 7% interest
rate, unless you have to move, you're probably not going to do it, especially with your
house being worth less now than what it was before. You're going to wait. So because we're not seeing
a bunch of supply flood the market, we're not seeing this crash and prices. And that's what we saw
during the last time we had a crash. There was so much supply. There was way more properties than
people could afford to buy or even wanted to buy, which is what led to the big decrease in prices.
And that's, I think, was confusing the people that are like, what we're going into recession?
Shouldn't prices be dropping like they did last time? What's your take on comparing the environment?
we're in now to the last time we saw a real estate crash. Yeah, there's, there's, that's a great point.
And there's a lot to that. I'll just say about supply first, that there are two good indicators of
supply. And one is sort of this long term indicator. And it's what I mentioned before that there just
aren't enough housing units in the U.S. And to me, I am biased because I am a real estate investor.
That's like the thing that, you know, points to long term appreciation for real estate, right?
Like that, you know, regardless of what happens in 2023 or 2024, because we don't know what's
going to happen. To me, the fact that there are a lot of people who want houses and there aren't a lot of
houses, that bodes well for real estate pricing over the next five to 10 years. When you're talking about
what's happening sort of in the short term, I like to look at a metric called inventory,
which is basically how many homes are on the market right now. And to your point, it's not exploding.
It's definitely up from where we were in 2020 and 2021, but not in the way where it's signaling a crash.
And just to explain this to everyone listening, inventory, I think is one of if not the best
indicator of the short-term performance of the housing market because it measures supply and demand.
It's not just how many houses are put up for sale.
That's something known as like new listings.
Inventory is a measure of how many homes are put up for sale and how quickly they're
coming off the market.
And so when you see inventory start to spike, that signals a significant shift towards a buyer's
market where prices are probably going to go down.
We have seen that in the last six months that inventory is going up.
But actually, David, I was just looking this week.
I don't know if you know this guy, Mike Simonson.
He's from Altos Research.
He's a big, you know, real estate guy.
Inventory fell last week.
It's going down now, you know?
So it's not like inventory is skyrocketing and all of a sudden we're seeing things, you know,
stay on market way longer than they were pre-pendemic.
They're sort of just going back to pre-pendemic levels.
And as of right now, you know, things could change over the next six months.
as of right now, we're recording this in January of 2023, things are pretty stable in terms of
inventory. And that is a big difference from what happened in 2008. I'll also mention that the
main biggest difference between now in 2008 is credit standards. Like you just, this is not my
area of expertise, but I read a lot about this. And basically, banks are not allowed to give out the
kind of crazy, risky loans that they did back in 2008. People are not defaulting right now. People
are paying their mortgages on time. And that really puts a backstop in prices because what really
causes a market to just bottom out like crazy is for selling. When people are forced to sell
because they cannot make their payments, that's what sends the market into a tailspin. Right now,
there is no sign that that is happening. That's important to note. I was using the analogy yesterday
when I was talking to my sales leaders that were asking the same questions. And my take on it is like,
we're a semi-truck coming down a hill. Now, everyone knows you're not supposed to just use your brakes
when you're driving down a hill because your brake pads get worn out. You're supposed to shift to a lower gear.
But if this was a real recession, we wouldn't be going downhill. Okay, like we would be going flat.
And if the economy was struggling, people could not buy houses. They could not make their payments.
They were suffering with the job market. You'd see forced selling. We're in a market where we are
artificially slowing things down by raising rates. It's like using your breaks when you're going down
this hill. And if we take our foot off of that break, you'd see home prices go up. You'd see transactions
happening in greater numbers. You'd see days on market start to go back down. And it's important to
note this is not a recession based on fundamental problems in our economy right now, at least.
Like, who knows if chat GDP changes all that? We all lose our jobs. But absent something crazy,
this is absolutely something that the government has chosen to do for the sake of trying to slow down the
inflation and rising home prices. Now, that is something that real estate investors need to be aware of. The
decision the Fed makes, the decision the government makes, these macroeconomic factors play a huge role in what
your investment is worth or what the cash flow numbers are going to look like when you buy it. So tell me a little bit
about what types of markets are created as a result of the swings of low or high inventory that
you mentioned. Yeah. So basically,
inventory, I think, is really good to look at in your local market because it's behaving
really different in different markets. So I often, in the report, I use different examples,
but I think generally speaking, like places in the Midwest and in the Northeast are doing
relatively well, quote unquote, and everyone has a different definition of well. Some people
want to see the housing market crash. I'll just say that, like, prices are stable in sort of
the, you know, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Indianapolis. If you look at them and you want to
understand what's happening in your market. If inventory is, uh, you know,
staying flat and is still below pre-pandemic levels, you could probably expect that the housing
market in that area is going to either be relatively flat or maybe modestly even grow over the
next year. When you start to see inventory levels spike above pre-pandemic levels,
that to me is a signal that prices are probably going to go down in that market. And you see
this, frankly, in a lot of the boomtown.
from the pandemic, right?
You know, like Boise, Reno, Austin, Denver, where I invest.
You know, these markets are seeing more of a correction because they just went up too high.
And so they've just reached a level, and this is another important indicator of affordability,
that is just not sustainable, right?
People who, you know, their salaries, their wages cannot sustain the prices that we've seen
in some of these boom towns.
So I really recommend if people want to look at their individual markets,
and figure out what's happening, looking at inventory and days on market are two really easy
ways that you can start to understand, like, are you in a seller's market? Are you in a buyer's
market? And just for clarity, because I think people actually confuse this a lot, buyers market
means often that it's a good time to buy. And I know that's confusing because people see prices
going down, but that means you have more leverage traditionally. Buyers market means buyers have the power.
Sellers market means sellers have the power. And so we are leaving a time on a national scale.
sellers had all of the power, right? We sell this every. I mean, you'd probably deal with this every day,
David. It's like, sellers could basically be like, I want everything, no concessions, your firstborn
child, give me your car and your wedding ring, and people were doing it. And now it's a different
scenario where buyers can, you know, be a little bit more selective and negotiate. So again,
days on market, inventory, good ways to tell if your market's in a balanced market, a seller's market,
or a buyer's market. That is a great point. And I think something that sets our podcast,
apart from other ones is we don't just rely on the fear factor to get clicks. Now, it's easy to
tell people during a seller's market, you shouldn't buy because the seller has all the power.
Just don't buy. But the reason it's a seller's market is usually because prices are increasing so
fast or rents are increasing so fast or your alternative options to real estate are so bleak that this
is clearly the best option. So more of your competition floods there that creates the seller's
market. And then conversely, it's easy to jump in and say, well, it's a buyer's market. So,
or sorry, prices are dropping so you shouldn't be buying. You should wait for the bottom,
even though it's a buyer's market. And this could be a better time to buy. And so you have to
be aware of both markets. There's a strategy that works in either one, and there's pros and cons.
Buying in a seller's market is very difficult. You're going to give up a lot of things that you
like sometimes an inspection you have to give up. However, you're getting the upside of the asset
exploding in price. And in a buyer's market, you may.
be buying into a time where prices could go lower.
Theoretically, we never know where the bottom is, but you're gaining due diligence periods,
sellers paying a lot of closing costs, getting cream of the crop inventory that you couldn't
even get your hands on before unless you had $1.2 million in cash to go compete.
There are pluses and minuses to both, and we really are trying to bring like the full picture
here rather than just making some title that says, buy now or wait, the crash of the century
is coming.
And then we've seen that stuff for eight years.
It never came.
They'll be right one day.
if they keep saying it.
That's a good point, right?
A broken clock is right.
Twice a day, is not how it goes?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Your take on this is what I think people should be looking at.
As opposed to just tell me what to do.
Is this buyer, is this sell?
It's understand the factors that are influencing price.
And then the right decision will usually make itself known.
So we've sort of covered the supply side talking about inventory, monitoring inventory,
understanding this is why prices aren't plummeting right now, is there isn't a lot of supply.
but the demand side's important too and real estate is interesting because the demand is a little more
complicated than it would be in something else like maybe Pokemon cards can you tell me a little bit
about demand and how that works within real estate specifically so demand and real estate is composed
of two things i think people often think demand is just like how many people want to buy a home
it's not it's how many people want to buy a home and how many people can afford to buy a home so those
are two, you know, they both influence demand, but they behave in different ways. And so I think the
biggest example, David, we are both millennials. I think for years, you know, you see these pundits on TV
being like, millennials don't want to buy homes. They're not buying homes. And it's like, you know,
their data doesn't show that. It shows that they couldn't afford to buy homes. And then the second,
they could afford to buy homes brought on by low interest rates in the pandemic, they jumped into
the housing market like crazy. So their demand is not as simple as people don't want to buy homes. And
And I think that the major things that are driving demand and will is I said it already is that millennials are reaching peak family formation years.
And this is a strong thing.
People really underestimate, I think, the impact of demographics.
But it's super, super important.
We're seeing the largest generation in the country enter their peak home buying age.
So that is going to increase demand.
And like I just said, with low interest rates from 2020 to like mid-2020, people are going like crazy into the.
market. Now, that demographic demand will probably last another three to five years if you just
look at the demographics of the U.S. But what has changed and sort of the biggest factor that has
changed from, you know, mid-2020 until now is that affordability factor, right? The second half of
demand is how many people can afford to buy home. And with mortgage rates going up as quickly as
they have, that is just completely eroded affordability. And we have seen basically the,
the housing market react to this single factor more than anything else because if people can't
abide afford to buy a home that pulls all the demand out of the market and that really tempers
prices or can even send prices going down backwards. So that's really what's happening with demand.
And frankly, my opinion, maybe I'm getting ahead here, my opinion about what's going to happen
in the housing market over the next year, two years, three years is all about affordability. And if it
recovers, you know, it really comes down to, in my opinion, will affordability improve? That's when
the housing market will bottom and start to grow again. Yeah, this is such a powerful
nuance point that you're making, that demand has two heads when it comes to real estate. You got to be
willing and you have to be able. And conventionally, able has been the problem. Even if you wanted
to buy a house, you just couldn't because the prices were going up faster than you could keep up,
or you didn't want to be competing with 11 other offers or waiving your contingency. So you just
said, hey, I'm out. I'm not going to do this. When you're in a really, really bad market is when the
willing side is gone. People don't want to buy a house, right? Like, that was what we saw in 2010.
A lot of people were unable to buy a house, but many of them could. They just didn't want to.
I remember in 2010, no one actually looked at real estate like buying an asset. This is hard if
someone wasn't around back then. They looked at it like tying themselves to a 30-year anchor
called a mortgage. Like, if you said I bought a house, be like, oh, my God, you have to make
that payment for the next 30 years. Why would you do that, right? And I, this is funny, Dave,
because my first house, my mortgage was like $900.
And like that was still considered like a death sentence.
Like why would you ever want to just tie yourself to $900?
Nobody was willing to buy homes and there was so much supply that caused that plummet and prices.
So this is what we're monitoring when we're looking at what's the market doing is how much supply is out there, which we've covered.
And then how much demand is out there.
And there's two components to it.
It's you got to be willing to buy a house and you got to be able to buy a house as opposed to many other things that don't involve financing like
the Pokemon card example I gave. It's just, are you willing to buy it? Right? Like, most people can afford
to pay $30. I don't really know much about Pokemon cards or that. I bought my nephew some for Christmas,
and he was super excited about it. But it's not a thing where you have to be able to buy them,
like with real estate. Yeah. And like so much of being able to buy real estate is out of our control,
right? Because most people use leverage, use debt to finance real estate, right? And so the rate on a
mortgage really impacts what you can afford. And that was positively impacting people during the
pandemic because people could all of a sudden afford way more. Now that we're back to, you know,
actually it's high compared to where we were, but we're right about the historical average of
mortgage rates. Now that we're back to a more normal mortgage rate in historical terms,
you know, that's negatively impacted affordability. When you talk about like, you know,
buying a Pokemon card or fine wine or whatever else, you know, you're just using
equity. You're not usually leveraging those, those purchases. So it's really up to you. Like,
do you have that money in your bank account? Then you can go buy it. This, you know, there are other
examples of leveraged assets. But real estate is probably the biggest example of a leveraged
asset. And it really is, that's why real estate is really sensitive to interest rates is because
it really, really impacts how able you are to buy investment properties or primary residence.
Yeah. Now, when it comes to rates and the Fed, can you tell us a little bit about how these
decisions are made and then how that ultimately ends up affecting affordability. Oh, boy, my favorite
topic. Okay. So basically, as we all know, inflation is really high. That is a huge problem for
the economy. It erodes our spending power. Everyone hates it. And, you know, real estate investors
hate it a little bit less because real estate is a fantastic hedge against inflation, but it still
sucks for everyone. And the Fed is basically making decisions to try and combat inflation. They
do that by increasing the federal funds rate. That's the only thing that they can control.
And it's kind of wonky, but it's basically the rate at which banks lend to each other.
And the idea behind raising the federal funds rate is that if it becomes more expensive to borrow
money, less people do it. And when there's less people borrowing money, less money is circulating
around the economy, right? And so that's also known as the monetary supply. And so they were
trying to reduce the monetary supply because we've seen it go crazy. Over the last couple
years, there's a measure of monetary supply called the M2. And basically, we've seen that explode. And that
happened for a few reasons. One was because of low interest rates, but the other was because of money
printing. You know, we have introduced a lot of new money into the system. And so they're not
able to pull that money out of the system. What they can do is raise interest rates and try and get it
from circulating around the economy less, right? People, you know, if less people are borrowing
money, the money kind of stays in the bank or it stays in your savings account or you do less with it.
And that helps cool down inflation, at least in traditional terms.
So that's what the Fed is trying to do.
Obviously, as of early January, you know, 2023, inflation is still super high, but the trend
looks like it's starting to come down.
Now, the federal funds rate does not directly control mortgage rates, but it does, you know,
influence mortgage rates.
And so we've seen mortgage rates go from, you know, the beginning of 2022.
They're, I think, below, right around 3%.
Now, as of this recording, they're at about 6.2%.
So they've more than doubled.
And that significantly increases the amount of, that significantly decreases
affordability, I should say.
And so we've seen a time when at the beginning of the pandemic, affordability was
at almost record highs, like people could afford anything, to a point where now affordability
is at a 40-year low.
This is the least affordable real estate has been since the 1980s.
And the implications of that are sort of obvious, right?
Like, if you can't afford it, you're not going to buy.
And so there's less demand in the market.
That is really, really good.
Now, to kind of recap here, so far, we have covered the housing market levers, what makes
prices go up or down, supply and inventory and how you can be tracking those, demand and
ability, kind of the nuance of what affects demand as well as mortgage rates and inflation,
which are all sort of ingredients in the cake of real estate, of the real estate market, I should
say, that you monitor, right?
You add more flour.
You add more eggs.
You add more sugar.
You're going to get a different tasting cake.
And this is what we're all kind of trying to understand when we're trying to predict how things are going.
Now, before we move on to what works in an uncertain market like this one, my last question for you is that what needs to happen for affordability to sort of become rebalanced again to where investing in real estate is something that people can be excited about and actually possible.
Yeah.
So first of all, I still think real estate investing is possible and excited.
You have to be a little creative, which we'll talk about in just a second.
But I think what's happened is basically for two years, every single variable, all the levers that we've talked about were just pointing one direction for prices.
And that was up.
Now we're at a point where we've sort of need to rebalance and things have changed.
Affordability has declined to the point where, you know, prices are likely, in my opinion, going to go down a little bit in 2020.
What needs to change for affordability is one of three things.
Affordability is a factor of three different things.
One is housing prices, of course.
And so if prices go down, that improves affordability.
The second thing is wage growth.
You know, if people make more money, things start to become more affordable.
You know, we're already seeing wage growth start to decline.
And I don't think that's going to be a major factor in the housing market.
And the third is mortgage rates, right?
You know, like if mortgage rates go down, affordability will go back up.
And so those are the major factors, at least I'm going to be looking at for the next couple of months.
Mortgage rates are already come down off their peak.
They could go back up again.
But back in October, November, they're in the low sevens.
Now they're in the low sixes.
And so affordability is already starting to improve a little bit.
And that's probably the thing.
If you're going to look at one thing to understand the housing market in 2023,
affordability is the thing I would recommend.
Yeah, and affordability is, as you mentioned, a combination of the price versus the mortgage
payment.
It's not as simple as just one or the other.
Exactly.
Just funny, because when rates were going down, everyone was complaining about how,
homes were unaffordable because people could afford to pay more for them.
So prices kept going.
And then when prices finally came down, people complained that interest rates are too high.
But like they're both sort of two sides of the same coin.
You can't usually have one with the other.
Just like supply and demand.
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Hiring Indeed is all you need. All right. Let's move on to three things that work in
an uncertain market like this one. So what's your first piece of advice for strategies that people
can take advantage of where they can make money even when we're not sure what's going to happen
with the market? Well, one of the things I'm most excited about, and I'm actually looking to
make an investment in the next couple of weeks here on, is private lending. You know, when you're
in a high interest rate environment, that's the bank who is charging those high interest rates.
And so if you can become the bank, that is a pretty exciting proposition. You know,
there are probably a lot of flippers out there who want money. There's probably
syndicators who need bridge loans. There's people who need mortgages. And so there are opportunities to
be a private lender. I am not an expert in this. David, I don't know if you know Dave Van Horn.
The third Dave, maybe we should have him on one time. But he's a real expert in this. I think,
I forget what his book's called, Node Investing, Bigger Pockets has a book. Check that out.
I think private lending is a really interesting option right now.
Because, you know, if debt is expensive, that's bad for the borrower, but it's sometimes good for the lender.
And so that's something I'm at least looking into in 2020.
Have you ever done private lending?
Yeah, I have a couple notes through Dave's company, actually, the PPR note company, I believe it's called.
And it's a similar concept like what you're saying.
And that principle applies for private lending, but it also goes into just saving.
Like, you got punished for saving the last eight years or so.
inflation was way higher than what you could get on your money in the bank.
That sort of helps fuel the rise in asset prices because you're like, well, I got 100 grand
sitting in the bank earning me half a percent while inflation is at God knows what it is,
probably like realistically 20 to 30 percent if you look at food prices and gas and real estate
and stuff like that.
So I got to put it somewhere.
Where am I going to put it?
Well, I probably going to put it into real estate because that's what's going up the most, right?
But when we see rates go higher, even though it does slow down the asset prices
going up, man, there was a time I remember when I was working in restaurants where I was making
six and a half percent of my money that I would put in the bank, and that wasn't even in a CD.
So strategies like private lending, like just saving your money at a certain point, become possible
when we finally get rates up to healthier levels.
Yeah, I actually just wrote a blog about this in bigger pockets that I think we're reaching
a point where savings rates are attractive again.
Like I, in my high yield savings account, I can get almost 4% right now.
And I know inflation, it comes out tomorrow, but as of last month, I think it was at like 7.1%
right?
People are like, okay, the 7.1% is higher than 4%.
Yes, that's true.
But 7.1% is backward looking.
You know, that's what happened last year.
Right.
And if you look at the monthly rate, it's averaging about 0.2% over the last five months.
So if you extrapolate that out, and no one knows what's going to happen.
But if you just extrapolate that out, you can imagine inflation a year from now might be somewhere
between 2 and 4, 3%. So if you're earning 4% on your money for the first time in years,
your savings rate can actually earn you, not a great return, but you know, like at least more
money than inflation is eating away. So personally, at least I'm putting the money. I'm,
you know, I'm looking for opportunities in real estate, but I'm taking the money I have,
putting them in either a money market or a high-yield savings account because at least you can
earn 1 to 2% real returns on your money as opposed to the last few years where if you put
your money in a savings account, you were losing six or seven percent at a minimum. You didn't even
have this as an option when rates were super low and it was fueling this big run that we had. Now,
with note investing specifically, you do make a profit on the interest that comes in from the note,
but it's negligible compared to how much money you make when the note pays off early. So typically
what you're doing is you're buying a discounted note in these cases. So I bought a note that's say,
maybe I paid 50 grand and the note balance was 75 or 80 grand, and I get my $300, $400, $400,000.
a month coming in from that note. So there's a return on the money that I paid. And it's amortized,
right? So you're going to get more than what you put out. But you really win when that person
sells or refinances their property and you get paid back the 80 grand when you only had spent
a smaller percentage for the note. Right. So the hard part is unlike real estate, you don't have
control. It's not like an asset I can go in there and I can buy and I can fix it up to make it
worth more. I choose at what point in the market I'm going to sell it. You're sort of at the
mercy of the other person. So the strategy is just to have all of these little notes that are out there
and like a jack in the box, like you don't know when it's going to pop, but at a certain point,
it's going to. And then boom, you know, you have a note pop off. You make a profit. You either go
buy a bigger note that gets more cash flow or you go invest into something different, which is something
that I had planned on doing a lot more of when I bought it. And then we saw what happened with the
housing market. And it was like, oh, no, all steam ahead, get as many, gives me irons in the fire as I
can as this market is increasing. So I think that.
that's great advice, different strategies in sort of surrounding real estate, but not necessarily
just owning it. The second thing I see that you mentioned are hybrid cities. Let's start with
what do you mean by hybrid? Yeah. So if you look back historically, different housing markets
perform really differently. And traditionally, you know, pre-pandemic, what you saw is that certain
markets were great for cash flow, but they didn't really appreciate much. Other markets were
great for appreciation, but they didn't cash flow that much. Those are sort of like the two ends of the
spectrum. But there are some that get modest appreciation and modest cash flow, which personally I'm
really just interested. And I think that's the best, you know, it's conservative in a way that
you have good cash flow, you know, solid cash flow, not amazing cash flow, but solid cash flow so that you
can always pay your your mortgage. There's no risk of default. You can hold on, you know, there's nothing,
you know, no risk there. But at the same time, it's a pretty, you know,
So you still get some of the upside opportunity that you get in markets like California or Seattle.
You know, it's not quite that much, but you get a little bit of each.
And I think those are those markets are going to do particularly well because a lot of these hybrid markets tend to be more affordable cities.
And sort of my theme in a lot of what I'm talking about today is affordability is sort of dominating the housing market.
And I think markets that are more affordable are going to perform well relative to other markets.
over the next couple of years. So I think some of these hybrid cities are really interesting.
And I just want to caution people who have gotten into real estate in the last few years that
what we've seen over the last few years is so atypical in so many ways. But in what I'm talking
about right now is appreciation. We've seen every market appreciation, big markets, small markets,
rural markets, urban markets, suburban markets, everything went up. That is not normal. Normally,
some markets go up, other markets stay flat, some markets go down. I personally believe we're going
to return to that dynamic over the long run. I don't know if it's going to be this month or,
you know, next year. But I think what that is normal for the housing market. I think we're going to
get back to that. And so I would look at, you know, markets that were seeing some cash show and some
appreciation pre-pandemic. These are sort of like tertiary cities like Birmingham, Alabama, or Madison,
Wisconsin or, you know, places like this that have strong demand, population growth, but still
offer cash flow.
I think they're going to outperform other markets for the next couple of years.
That's just my opinion.
But that's what I'm looking at.
So if somebody wants to identify cities like this, what data should they be looking for?
Yeah, I think that the number one thing is if you want to look at cash flow, you can look
at a metric called the rent to price ratio.
You just divide monthly rent by the purchase price.
If it's, you know, anywhere near 1% you're doing really well.
You've probably heard of the 1% rule.
I think it's a little outdated personally.
And that expecting a deal that meets the 1% rule is probably going to cause you more harm than good because you're going to wait around forever looking for a mythical unicorn.
Not that it can't exist, but like I was just talking about, those 1% deals often occur in markets that don't appreciate.
And so I think to me that's not worth it.
I would rather see something that's, you know, a rent to price ratio of 0.7 or 0.8, but
is an appreciating market.
That's what I mean by sort of like by a hybrid city.
So rent to price ratio is good.
And then for appreciation, it's difficult to predict, but the most important things are very simple.
Population growth.
Is there going to be demand or more people moving in and leaving?
And two, economic growth.
You can, you know, look at this in terms of wage growth or job growth.
But like, if people are moving there and they're getting paid more and more, asset prices are going to go up.
We often talk about appreciation and cash flow as if they're opposing forces like Ian and Yang.
Are you an appreciation investor or are you a cash flow investor?
But in practical terms, for those of us that own real estate, we realize that they're not actually mutually exclusive that many times you see cash flow appreciates as rents go up.
What are your thoughts on the idea that certain markets will have rent increases just like the value of the asset?
will increase. Yeah, I personally, I agree. I wouldn't, you know, there are great markets that have
1% cash flow. I wouldn't, I wouldn't invest in them because personally I work full time. I'm not
reliant on my cash flow for my lifestyle entirely. But also, it's just too risky to me,
because those markets tend to have, you know, declining populations or not great economic growth.
And that's, to me, risky. I know people say cash flow is a good hedge against
risk, but I think some, yeah, but like if your vast value is going down, then I don't think
cash flow is going to make up for that. So I think that's, that's super important. I personally
would caution people against assuming rents are going to go up at least this year or the next
year. I just think that we had what they call in like finance or economics, like a bit of a pull
forward where it's like, you know, rent prices, you know, usually go up a couple of
percentage points a year. They went crazy the last few years. And that might have just taken all the
rent growth for the next two or three years and just pulled it forward into 2021 or 2022, for example.
Very possible. So my recommendation is to underwrite a deal, assuming that cash flow is not
going to go up for the next year or two. And if it happens, which it might, that's just gravy on top.
But I think the conservative thing to do is to presume that cash flow is probably going to be pretty
mellow, I mean, rent growth, excuse me, is probably going to be pretty mellow for the next
couple of years. But if you're holding on to it for five years, seven years, then yeah, I would
probably forecast some rent growth for sure. Well, when you're making a decision on where to buy,
do you think it's reasonable to expect a hybrid city's rents to increase more than a
cash flow market Midwest, non-appreciating market? Oh, yeah, 100%. Yeah. I mean, if you're seeing a city that
has economic growth. I mean, like, just look at wage growth. If wages are going up, if job,
you know, good jobs are coming out to say those are some of the best indicators. People are
able to pay more because there's demand within the rental market just like there is within the
home ownership market. Same I. Exactly. If you, if you're in a market where wages are not going
up, there is just, there's no like legal limit, but there is just a psychological limit to what
people are going to pay for rent. Yeah. And, you know, it can only be X percentage. Usually it's like
like 30% of their income can go for rent. And if you're way above that, you know, and if wages aren't
growing, then it doesn't support rent growth. And so I totally agree that in a hybrid or an
appreciating city, rent growth will go up. I don't know if that necessarily means you'll ever
reach the cash flow that these cash flowing cities tend to support. But personally, I think that that's
the better bet because you're not betting on just cash flow or just appreciation or just
rent growth, you're getting a little bit of everything. And you don't know which of the three
might perform the best. But whatever happens, you sort of benefit from it. Well, that's what I wanted
to highlight for the people who are maybe newer investors that are inexperienced in some of these
cash flow markets where turnkey companies tend to operate. And the gurus that are selling you a course,
they're usually cash flow, quit your job, get a girlfriend, don't be a loser. You need cash flow and it'll
fix all your problems. And then they push you into some of those markets that rents hardly ever go
up for the last 10 years they've been the same versus if you had invested in maybe Denver 10 years ago
it might have been modest cash flow when you bought it but 10 years of rent growth it's doing really
really well so we don't want to say assume it's going to go up but you can absolutely put yourself
in a position where it's more likely to go up by going into one of these markets that is having
wage growth companies moving in population growth without completely going like betting the whole farm
on investing in some wild appreciating market that you're bleeding money. There is a responsible way
to do it. I think that's a really good sound advice that you're giving here. Yeah, I mean,
this is probably a whole other show, but like, God, man, you know how many rentals it takes
to become financially free? I know, like, a lot of real estate investors are like, oh, yeah,
like just quit your job, buy three rentals and you can be financial free. It's just absolute nonsense.
Like, the way to think about it is, like, the way you earn money and cash flow and investing is you
need like X dollars invested at Y rate of return to equals Z cash flow, right? Just like we look at
every other financial investment vehicle when we're like, how much do you need in your 401k at what
return to retire? Exactly. And so you can choose to be a cash flow investor and say, I'm going to have
a hundred grand invested at 11% cash on cash return. Great. That's making you 11 grand a year. I can't
live on that. If you want to build for the long term and you say, I'm going to make a 6% cash on
cash return, but through appreciation and working at a good job, I'm going to have $2 million
invested at a 6% cash on cash return. Then you're making $120,000 a year. So I think people just get
obsessed with this cash on cash return idea without thinking about the amount of principle you put into
your investments is equally, if not more important than the cash on cash return. But that's just my
rant. And we won't go too far down that road, but I will tease people, which is this little idea.
This is one of the reasons that I encourage people into things like the Burr method or buying
and appreciating markets because your property can create capital for you, much like you earned
at your job that you were working and you can have two sources of capital being created.
We just call it equity when it's within a property.
We call it capital when it's in our bank account, but it's the same energy, right?
And you start your career off using methods like that.
And then later in your career, you transition it into higher cash flowing markets that are a little bit more stable.
and then you do exactly what you just described.
So this is a pretty deep, cool stuff that we're getting into when we just plan on talking about the market.
Yeah, I like this conversation.
This is fun.
All right.
Last topic I want to ask you about is buying deep.
What do you mean by buying deep?
Yeah, I mean, buying deep just means buying below market value.
And I don't know about you, David, but like for the first eight years of my real estate investing career, I never even offered at the asking price.
Like, I would always offer less than the asking price.
only in recent years did it become normal for you to offer above asking price and like still pray so true
you hear agents say things like they paid full ask and I laugh like that's a deal out here like full
ask doesn't mean anything but they're operating from the old paradigm where like nobody paid asking
price totally in the beginning you would always try and you know nickel and dime the seller a little
bit see whatever you can get and I think we're back to an environment what that's possible not in every
market, not every asset class, but we are in a market where you can, you know, buy below asking.
And I think it's just a good way to hedge. You know, if you think your market might go down 5%,
try and find a property that's below, you know, 5% below. I invest in Denver and, you know,
it's already gone down like almost 10% in Denver. It's one of those sort of leaders of the market
in terms of price declines. And I think it might go down another 5%. So when I make an offer right now,
I'm going to offer 5% below asking.
And that way, if it goes down, I'm okay.
You know, it gives me a little bit of cushion.
And so that's what I mean by buying deep.
It's just kind of like going below asking price to give yourself a little bit of cushion.
I'll also say, like, I really think, you know, timing the market is hard.
And if it's between one and two percent, don't worry about it too much.
You know, I bought my first property in 2010.
The housing market, bottomed in 2011.
11, you know, 18 months after I bought or something like that. Do you think I've ever once thought
about that that like my property went down like 1% before it started to come back up? Not once.
People tell me how jealous they are that I bought in 2010. What they don't see is that my
property value actually went down one or two percent before it started growing like it did
over the last couple months. So I think buying deep is really important, but I wouldn't obsess
about like trying to get it exactly to the bottom of the market. It's literally impossible to do.
but, you know, if you think the market's going to go down five or 10 percent, try and get some concessions out of the seller to make yourself more comfortable.
That is incredibly sound advice. When I bought my first property, it was the end of 2009, so I wasn't even at 2010. And then it went down more. And I was like, oh, I'm so dumb. I should have waited. And everyone was like, yeah, why did you buy real estate? And in my head, I pictured it going all the way down to zero, right? And then, you know, a year later, it started going up and then it exploded. And it's funny, I paid $195 for that house that probably dropped to $1.80.
and I was kicking myself and now it's worth, you know, 525 or so.
It just doesn't matter.
This doesn't matter, right?
It's your ego trying to be smarter than you are.
And you're making it.
But that was a property that was under contract at 215 and I went in there to get some
seller concessions and got it at 195.
And that is exactly what people should be doing in this buyer's market.
If the house has been on the market three days, it's getting tons of interest.
Maybe you don't get to use this strategy.
But I look for houses with high days on market, poor listing photos.
I literally teach people how to target stuff in the MLS that's been passed up by other people,
write very aggressive offers and then gauge based on the counteroffer how serious that seller is
and like how we can put a deal together. And in the 1031 exchange that I wrapped up a couple
months ago, I think I bought, I think about like 17 or 18 properties, but only 12 or 13 of them
were through the exchange. From those 12 or 13, I made over a million dollars in equity based
on the appraised price versus what I paid. And it was just this strategy of I'm on the MLS.
I'm not doing anything crazy, but I'm not going after the house with the beautiful listing
photos professionally taken by a really good realtor. I'm looking for the people that paid a
1% commission to their realtor. They took some pictures with their iPhone 7. It looks terrible.
It's been sitting there for a long time. I mean, literally Dave, some of them had like upside down
uploads. Like the bathroom pictures were uploaded upside down that you can tell Zillow's like four
people have looked at this and no one has saved it. Those are the ones you want. That's exactly right.
So buying deep, I refer to that as buying equity. Same idea. Don't just think you have to pay asking
price like you used to. Explore, ride a really low offer and wait and see. I tell people it's an offer
should be like a jab. If they accept your first offer in this market, you probably wrote too high.
You shouldn't be knocking people out with an offer. It's a jab and you wait and see how did you
defend? Yeah. Are you weak? Like I won't go too deep into it, but one of the deals in particular was
listed for $1.6 million, had dropped his price all the way down to $1.2 million. I went in and wrote an
offer at $1,0.50 with about $50 grand in closing costs. It was about $1 million even.
And he countered me accepting my deal, but just he didn't agree to the $50,000 closing cost
difference. Okay. I knew if he counted me that hard, like he wants to sell this house. I've got all
the leverage here. I'm going to, I'm going to get this deal. And I ended up holding out and he still
came back and said, fine, I'll give you the closing cost too. Now, if he had,
had countered me at maybe 10 grand off of his 1.2, I would just let it go. That's not a motivated buyer.
And you could never use strategies like this the last eight years. They just did not exist. And so that's
a great point. If you're worried the market's going to keep dropping, just go in there and write a
more aggressive offer than you normally would have and cover yourself that way. You got nothing to
lose. I think people are like, oh my God, they're going to reject it. It's like, okay. Yeah. So what?
Like, yeah, just keep, you know, obviously you don't want to just be doing stuff that makes no sense.
But like if you think your offer is fair and reasonable and we might as well try, see if they agree.
And then the other thing, the piece of advice I'll give people is don't assume that one punch is going to knock someone out.
Many of these properties were talking about.
I wrote an offer.
They said, no, I had my realtor go back a week or two later.
And it was maybe.
And a week or two later after that, I was like, yeah, let's play ball.
And then that started the actual negotiation.
So sellers are freaking out, just like buyers are freaking out.
Kind of everybody's freaking out in this market.
And you just want to find the right kind of freak.
to match up with your interest.
So Dave, I'm going to lead us to wrap in this thing up by asking you for the one thing that
we're always hesitant to do.
But everybody wants to know, what are your predictions for 2020?
It's really hard.
But I do feel, the thing I feel confident about is that we're probably going to see a
continuation of the current market conditions through at least like the first half of
2020.
You know, I just think right now there's just still so much uncertainty.
we going to see a recession? How bad is it going to get? Is unemployment going to go up?
You know, what's the Fed going to do? There's just too many questions right now. And until there's
some, you know, confidence about those big economic questions, I think we're going to see, like you
said, people freaking out a little bit and not really having stability enough for the market to find
its footing. The second half of the year, I think, is really sort of the X factor. I think there are
different scenarios that can play out.
I'll give you three different scenarios.
The first is if there's a global recession, which most economists believe there will be,
I won't get into the details of this, but if there's a global recession that tends to put
downward pressure on mortgage rates, people, you know, flock to U.S. government bonds that
pushes down yields, mortgage rates track yields.
And so you see a scenario where mortgage rates could go down more than they are now.
If mortgage rates go down even more than they are now, I personally believe the housing market
is probably going to bottom like a year from now.
So at the end of 2023, beginning of 2024 and start to grow again.
The other scenario is, you know, the Fed miraculously achieves a soft landing and mortgage rates
could go down.
That's another scenario where I see the market bottoming, you know, towards the end of
2022, early 24.
Or inflation keeps going up.
Unemployment goes crazy, but the mortgage rates for some reason don't go down.
And then in that scenario, you know, if mortgage rates stay,
you know, above six and a half, above seven percent for a long time. I think we're probably in for
like a two-year correction. You know, all of 23 and 24 will be like this. And in that case,
we might see double-digit declines in the national housing market. But it's still hard to say.
So I think there's, you know, two of the three scenarios in my mind point to a one-year correction
where we're going to see single-digit price declines. You know, I've said I think it's going to
be somewhere between like three and eight percent negative on a national level. If mortgage rates
stay high, and I've said this, you know, it's all about affordability. So if affordability doesn't
improve a mortgage rates stay high, through the second half of this year, that's what I think
we'll see, you know, 10, 15% national declines and not bottoming to the end of 24, maybe even
early 25. That is a remarkably well thought out and articulated answer for someone who did not
want to give a prediction. So thank you. Thank you for that. I like how you providing your,
the information you're basing it off of rather just throwing something out there.
Because as the information changes, so will the prediction.
It's something people have to remember.
These things are not set in stone.
Totally.
Yeah.
People are like, you said this and like, you didn't factor in this.
Like, yeah, I'm not a fortune teller.
I'm just like, I'm looking at this information.
Here's how I'm interpreting it.
And, you know, I don't know what's going to happen.
But these are, I think those three scenarios, I don't know the probability of each of them.
But, you know, I think that it really,
really will come down to mortgage rates and affordability and when we see it bottom.
And I will just say, I'll kind of just say one more thing about it is that traditionally
in recessions, they say that housing is the first in and the first out, where because mortgage
rates go up and real estate is a leveraged asset, prices tend to decline first.
And that's like sort of what creates the recession.
We're sort of seeing that right now, right?
You know, like rates went up, housing is in a recession.
And so we're starting to see that start to ripple throughout the rest of the economy.
But like I said, when mortgage, when we enter official recession or whatever, mortgage rates tend to come down.
That gets people to jump back into the housing market.
That creates a huge amount of economic activity and it pulls us out of a recession.
So it's just kind of interesting to see that like, you know, recession is not good for anyone.
I'm not rooting for that.
But if you see it, it often is the first step in their housing market start to recover.
So it's another thing to just look at.
And it's why you can't time the bottom because you don't know when that's going to happen.
And by the time you see that show up in the data, it's already started and the bottom's already
on the way up.
It's already happened.
Yep.
Great point.
All right.
So we've got a pretty good market prediction for 2023.
We have a very solid understanding of the things that affect real estate prices.
So that would be the levers that people pull on to make prices go up and down.
Supply.
And you can measure that by inventory.
And then demand, which is a double-headed monster of both being willing to buy a property and
able to buy a property. We've talked about mortgage rates and inflation and all of the complexity
that that's created in this insane but beautiful market that we like to invest in. And we've also
talked about ways that you can make money in 2023, regardless of what the market does. So private
lending and buying notes is one way that people can expect to make money in real estate.
Looking for these hybrid cities where you're not, you don't have asymmetric risk in either direction
of a cash loan property that never increases in rent or in value, as well as a speculative market
that you're just hoping goes up and lose control over, and buying deep, understanding that this is a
buyer's market, and that means you have the control. So you're a fool if you don't use it.
Use the control to try to go out there and get the very best deal that you can, rather than just
worrying about things you cannot control, like when the market is going to bottom out. Dave,
thank you very much for joining me. I love it when you come for these things, and we can help
make some sense out of the emotional insanity that we typically feel when people don't know
what to expect. So is there any last words you'd like to leave our listeners with before I let you
get out of here? No, this has been a lot of fun. But if you want other recommendations about how to
make money in 2023 or to understand this in full detail, I encourage everyone to download the report
I wrote, it's free. You could just do that at biggerpockets.com.com slash report.
All right. Biggerpockes.com slash report. Check it out. If you thought,
Dave, sounded smart. Wait till you read them.
It looks even smarter when you're reading there.
And then you wrote a book with Jay Scott on a similar topic to this.
Can you plug that real quick before we go?
Sure, yeah. Jay and I, if you don't know Jay, is a prolific, excellent investor.
He and I wrote a book called Real Estate by the numbers.
It is all about the math and numbers and formulas that you need to become an excellent real estate investor.
And I know if people think that sounds intimidating, it's not.
The math behind real estate investing is not super.
hard. You just need to understand like some simple frameworks and that's sort of what we outline it. So
the whole point of it is to help you analyze deals like an expert. And so if you want to be able to
analyze deals conservatively, especially in 2023 and understand what assumptions to make that sort of
stuff, you should check it out. Yes, go check that out as well. If you're a nerd or you want to be
as smart as nerd without being a nerd, this is the book for you. All right, Dave, thank you very much
for joining me today. I'm going to let you get out of here and get about doing some more research to
help the Bigger Pockets community understanding what's going on in the market. This is David Green
for Dave the Gentleman's Renegade Meyer. Signing off. I'm a professional. Just watch. Watch how good
I am at saying things. He's Ron Burgundy. He'll read anything you put on the teleprompter.
Thank you all for listening to the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast. Make sure you get all our new
episodes by subscribing on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Our new episodes
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I'm the host and executive producer of the show, Dave Meyer.
The show is produced by Ian K,
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