BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - Data Says It’s a Buyer’s Market: Here’s Where the Most Opportunity Is w/Michael Zuber
Episode Date: May 7, 2025The buyer’s market is back, and opportunities are growing. Inventory is rising, demand is shrinking, and sellers are more motivated to give you a price cut, concession, or repair. This is the time i...nvestors have been waiting for, and much of the housing market is already on discount. But which areas are the deepest buyer’s markets, and how are we investing today to capitalize? BiggerPockets CEO Scott Trench and Michael Zuber from One Rental at a Time join the show to share about deals they recently bought to take advantage of 2025’s housing market conditions. Plus, we give away free data on the markets with the most buyer control. Buyer’s market conditions don’t show up often—and they won’t last long. Finally, we’re unveiling a brand new, free tool from BiggerPockets that makes it easier than ever to find cash-flowing real estate deals in your area—BiggerDeals! No more scrolling through hundreds of listings. You can see estimated cash flow, cap rate, cash-on-cash return numbers, and more with BiggerDeals! In This Episode We Cover: The free, easy way to find cash-flowing rental properties in your area How to take advantage of the growing “buyer’s market” and which areas buyers have the most control Two real deals Scott and Michael are investing in right now How to get massive discounts (and interest rate buydowns) on new construction homes The four factors that make up a buyer’s market and free data to see if your market is one And So Much More! Links from the Show Join BiggerPockets for FREE Let Us Know What You Thought of the Show! Ask Your Question on the BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets YouTube Apply to Be a BiggerPockets Real Estate Guest BiggerDeals Data from Today’s Episode BiggerPockets Real Estate 1095 - Scott Trench: How I’m Protecting My Money From “Irrational Exuberance” One Rental at a Time YouTube Channel One Rental at a Time Book Earn 10-12% Without Landlord Headaches with Ignite Funding Maximize Your Real Estate Investing with a Self-Directed IRA from Equity Trust Try BiggerDeals Today and Find Your Next Rental Grab “The Book on Rental Property Investing” Sign Up for the BiggerPockets Real Estate Newsletter Find an Investor-Friendly Agent in Your Area Connect with Michael Connect with Scott Check out more resources from this show on BiggerPockets.com and https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-1118 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email advertise@biggerpockets.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Congratulations. The data says it's a buyer's market for U.S. real estate.
Welcome to the Bigger Pockets podcast. I'm Scott Trench, CEO of Bigger Pockets and co-host of the
Bigger Pockets Money Podcast. I'm filling in for Dave Meyer. Today's a guest host of the
Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast. And that wonderful gentleman congratulating you for
entering into a real estate buyer's market is Michael Zuber, who hosts and leads and builds.
the brand one rental at a time. He's got it in a fantastic YouTube channel. One rental at a time. He's got a fantastic book called one rental at a time. Pretty easy to find him around the internet. Been a guest on his show a few times, had a lot of fun. He's going to be co-hosting today here on the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast. Michael, it's such a privilege to have you here guest hosting the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast. Thanks. I appreciate the opportunity. I look forward to this. Lots of stuff to discuss. On this episode, we're going to discuss if the seller's market of the last few years has changed.
And whether buyers now have more power. Spoiler alert, Michael Aruroo and the surprise.
We're going to talk about briefly what's going on in the macro economic environment because
obviously that does influence people's perceptions about whether it's a good time to buy
real estate or not. It's certainly a buyer's market, but that could be or not be a good time
to buy real estate. And then we're going to talk about deals that we've done. We've both made
major transactions in our personal portfolios in the recent past. We're going to look at the
broader data across the United States for most major metro regions and we'll provide some free links
for you guys to check out those resources. And then we're going to talk about a very special
project that Bicker Pockets has recently launched that should save you a lot of time in finding
good deals. So we'll save that surprise for the end here. But Michael, I do have to ask,
what's your take on the current situation going on in stock markets, interest rates,
all those kinds of things, tariffs? Yeah. So when you step back and look at the macro picture
of the investing world, the macro picture of the U.S. economy, you have to take a pause, right? The world
changed on what was called Liberation Day, right? The tariffs came out. They were much larger than
anybody had expected. And that has caused a reaction. But I think a bigger picture for real estate
investors, we have to keep our head. Because I think a couple of things are obvious. If you just
step back, you know, one step. What's happening in the buyer's
market is just homeowner demand is falling. Frankly, homeowners are canceling contracts because they
didn't lock rates. Also, we're seeing in this environment, sellers, sellers start to get nervous.
So as a real estate investor, I hold a couple of things to be 100% certain. One, I like less
competition. Congratulations, you're getting less competition. Number two, I like more supply.
that too is also happening. Supply is up by, you know, depending on who you talk to, 35, 37% year on year and going
higher. And then finally, I want more motivated sellers. This is the thing that a lot of new or real
estate investors, certainly of the last four or five years don't appreciate. You don't have to pay
list price. You can get a 10, a 20, a 30% reduction off list price if you find a motivated seller.
And then the final point that I hold true, Scott, and again, a lot of new investors won't get this, but I truly mean it.
I don't care what the cost of capital is.
As long as the cost of capital is the same for everyone or roughly the same, I don't care if the cost of capital is 18% or 20% like in Paul Volker.
If everybody is paying that, I will run my numbers with 30-year fixed rate debt and I will only buy great deals at cash flow day one.
And if nothing does, guess what? I don't buy anything. So what I would tell real estate investors and
anybody on bigger pockets is 2025 is going to be the year of investors. This is our time. We are waiting
for an environment of less competition, more supply, and creating great deal. So I'm excited for
real estate investors. It's going to hurt for homebuyers. It's going to hurt for real estate agents.
It's going to hurt for mortgage brokers. But real estate investors, we're in a unique spot to find
motivated sellers. And frankly, it's getting easier and easier the crazier the world get. So I'm excited.
Yeah, I think that if you're looking for leverage as a buyer in a real estate market, the recent
events can only be helping that situation. Correct. That said, I'll couch your analysis with a
couple of butts on there. One is you are defining supply as the number of total active listings
increasing year over year. Another way I like to look at supply is the amount of new
construction units being delivered. And those, I believe, are peaking right now here in Q2,
2025. Sure. Um, here. And those will begin to slow dramatically in the back half of this year
on that front. And when as a real estate investor, when you think about the returns of a real
estate investment portfolio over the near term, right, they are dictated, I think, by three
factors, right? One is supply, which is new construction, right? The amount of new construction
hanging the market. The second is going to be interest rates. And the third is going to be demand.
It's very simple.
These are econ 101 concepts here.
Supply is very high in the near term, and that should all else equal push prices and
rents down.
Interest rates are a wildcard.
You've got to have an opinion on these.
Whatever your opinion is, it's going to embarrass you.
My opinion, which you can come back and laugh at me at in six months or a year from
now, is that there's a lot of real threat to near term rises in interest rates.
A normalized yield curve with the federal funds rate at 4%, 4ish, 4 and a quarter.
could trade at five and three quarters.
So the market is betting that the Fed will lower rates five, six, seven times to keep
the 10-year, which is a very clear correlate to 30-year mortgage rates where it is.
And you've got the added factor of whether foreign investors like China, Japan, Germany,
parts of the EU are going to continue lending money to the United States government at low interest rates.
So I think there's some real risks that rates can go up in the near terms.
You've got a three to five year horizon here.
The first year of that horizon is going to have some scary stuff in it.
And the last piece is going to be demand.
And I think demand is a wild card that you can spend 30 years trying to master and you're going to mess it up.
And my favorite example of that is Austin, Texas, right?
Because people move from California where Michael's located to Austin, Texas.
And they realize that there are bugs and snakes and humidity and all the nasty stuff that go in there.
they move right back to California two or three years later. Yeah, the boomerang. So I think that
that's, you know, but that's hard to predict, right? And I think that the headline for demand is that it's
actually been stronger than many people, myself included, would have anticipated in Q1 with most
of that new supply getting absorbed in most markets. So those are headwinds. And I think that that
dynamic is creating. It is, you know, I don't think most people can articulate it that way.
But I think that that dynamic is contributing to the buyer's market that we're starting to see in many
places around the country. First thing I think I want to highlight, again, you and I have, you know,
years in this game. Buyers markets don't actually come around that often, right? You know, over the last
20 years, you know, I've been doing this 25 years. We've probably seen two legitimate buyers markets,
the Great Recession being the most obvious example of that. But there was also examples in 2001 and 2002
when I got started. It was leaning definitely towards a buyer's market. And all the new investors
today, they've never seen a buyer's market, right? If you started in the last four or five years,
we've seen some of the most extreme sellers markets that I've seen in 25 years.
So this change to a buyer's market is going to feel unusual.
And my fear for a new real estate investors, they don't take advantage of it.
I think a lot of real estate investors started to feel like you had to pay list price
or you had to waive contingencies.
None of those things you have to do in a true buyer's market.
In fact, you can ask for seller credits.
You know, you can ask for rate buy downs.
If you're going to write a deal in this environment, your job is to get a great deal that cash flows day one.
It's hard, but not impossible.
Well, let's translate that to practical reality.
What have you bought?
Can you give us an example of something you bought recently and what that experience was like?
A lot of people think you can't get deals from home builders.
And maybe on an environment that's an extreme sellers market, that's true.
I happened to be shopping for a second home in Las Vegas last year, year and a half ago.
And my budget was between $500 and $750,000.
That was where my wife and I were comfortable.
And this was at the time where interest rates were 8%, just so we could put context around
when this was going on.
And, you know, we weren't finding anything that kind of met our needs in the existing
home market, back to the point about existing versus new.
So we ran into a builder that was building up in the hills, and the price points, just for, you know, to put it out there, was $1.3 million.
So way above what we were looking at for existing homes.
But what we stumbled across was a house that was complete, was finished, all done, right in the middle of their development because somebody canceled, right?
They took the deposit, they kept it, but now they had this almost albatross out there.
So what we were able to do by talking with them is frankly negotiate. My first offer to them
was a million bucks. Also, I wanted them to buy the rate down to sub five percent. And I asked for
some seller credits. So taking a long story a little bit short, a lot of negotiations with them.
We end up paying 1.05. So we get a quarter of a million dollar reduction. We end up paying zero for a lot
fee. If you don't know how Vegas works, typically you buy the home and then there's a lot fee on top of that.
Our lot fee was zero. The house that we bought had about $50,000 in upgrades because that's what the old
owner wanted. We paid zero for those. We got a 30-year mortgage at 4.99. So they bought us down from
eight and an eighth to 4.99. And we got 10,000 bucks in closing cost credit. So this is a story of
buying something that was frankly at the top of the market, what would that be, $500,000 more than we
wanted to pay? But I was payment constrained. So what we ended up buying for a million 50 at 4.99,
the payment is less than I would have paid for an existing home sales. And I'm hearing
more and more people in this environment to your point about rising supply get deals from
builders. So that's the first story that I want people to realize isn't an
environment of rising supply and new construction. You can negotiate with builders. What is something,
Scott, you have purchased recently? So, Michael, I talked about this purchase back in episode 1095,
and I don't think I negotiated nearly as well as you did. Frankly, I think you did a much better job
than me on that recent purchase here. But I had a similar-ish experience here where they listed
this property in 2024 at 1.2 mil. Then they dropped at 1, 2, 3,000.3,000.3.3.5. Then they dropped at 1, 3,000,
three, four, five, six, seven times over the course of a year.
Yeah.
And I closed on it for a million even.
And then from there, the negotiation is very eerily parallel to your situation.
I chose to use no debt and I financed this by selling out of my stock portfolio in February
because I felt that I was not able to handle the risk to reward ratio of stocks at that point.
So literally a decade and a half of piling money into the stock market, I exited that
position and use the proceeds from that to close on this purchase. And I did not use a loan,
but I probably should have negotiated that. I just was like, I don't know what's going to happen
in 2025. I don't know about all these things. For me, the best risk to reward ratio is to just
have the thing paid off. Sure. And then generate my, the seller says seven and a half percent,
I say six and a half percent cap rate on the 65,000 in net operating income, which I've so
far seemed to be achieving there. The property was, in a parallel to yours, it was not new, but it was a
flip. These folks had actually purchased it for 700,000 in 2020, I think 2023, early 2023, and put
$200,000 into it, new roof, all the units remodeled and upgraded, all the appliances and stuff
less than five years old. This is a property that should not need much work at all for the next
10 years, fully leased through the end of next year. So that's the deal there is I didn't have to
negotiate, I felt as much as you, I probably should have in some cases, because I was getting
exactly what I wanted. This is one of the best deals I've ever purchased in the city limits of
Denver in my career from a price to relative to income potential range. So I'm seeing the same
thing you're seeing. I think you did great. I mean, again, at the end of the day,
every single investor needs to figure out what their buybox is or what their criteria is for a
great deal. And if your criteria for a great deal is a six and a half cap, congratulations.
Awesome. Get the deal. Right. You know, just
because you hear some other investor do something a little wild and crazy, don't compare to others,
do what's right for you, know your numbers going in, don't guess. Oh, my goodness, don't guess.
But if you hit your bar, write the offer. So I would say nothing but congratulations.
You, you know, you did it. Congrats. Yeah. And I think also the cap rate consideration, you know,
that includes my assessment for property management fully loaded. I'm not managing this property myself.
Sure. That includes my assumptions for vacancy, maintenance, CAPX. That includes.
my assumptions, you know, for taxes and insurance on there. So I'm feeling pretty good at,
like, I'm feeling like there's a reasonable conservatism in there. So that's, but like those are
two examples here, I think, of what you and I are seeing as individuals. How about we go and
shift over to the data here and look at it from a market level perspective? Absolutely. Again,
that's, that's where you, that's where people need to focus. If you're, if you're out there starting
to look, you've got to get focused on the data, the buy box. You got to know what your area is doing.
So I look forward to seeing what you guys put together.
Michael, in prep for this recording, we'd agree that there were four metrics that were going to be of paramount importance to determining at an aggregate level whether a market is a buyer's market or a seller's market, whether it's likely to be one.
Those are the total change in active listings.
The percent change in active listings, right?
That percent change matters greatly if, you know, for example, Los Angeles is much larger than Kansas City.
we know what listing growth it looks like on a percentage basis.
The percentage of listings with price drops
and that year-over-year change in days on market.
Those are the four that we agreed on.
So I'm going to surprise you with that data after the break.
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services provided by Threadbank, member FDIC. And we're back. All right. Reminder, those four metrics that
we talked about are total change in the total number of active listings year over year, the percent
change in active listings, the percent of listings in a given market with price drops and
the year-over-year change in days on market. Michael, where are you located?
So my buy box is in Fresno, California, and I also have a second buy box in Vegas.
And you think that Fresno is a buyer-seller or somewhere in between?
I think it's slightly skewed to a buyer's market.
All right, let's take a look. Oh, wow. Look at this.
Again, huge credit to Austin Wolf for putting this together. The percentage of properties of price
dropped 6.7%. We've seen the medium price drop about 2%. We've seen the medium price drop about 2%.
We've seen days on market go to 44 up eight days from last year.
So surely an incremental buyer's market.
We've seen 402 or 34% year-over-year increase in active listings, which is pretty large.
But we are seeing folks generally pricing it right with the median sale to list price at 100%.
What do you think here?
What's your reaction to this?
Yeah.
So I love data like this.
I love that you guys were able to put this together.
Shout out to the team.
Just because, again, I look literally every day.
There's one subtlety below this data, and that is what's happening above and below the median,
right?
What we are seeing in Fresno, California is median and below, less inventory, more competition,
less price drops.
Median and above, and oh my goodness, if you're 2x the median, inventory is stacking up.
So right now we are seeing, which I think we're seeing in a lot of the country, is above the median
is starting to balloon out, where below the median is still relatively competitive. But, you know,
this is a great set of data to start with. Yeah, this is, this is fun. And I love it.
Let me tell people, because again, I talk about buybox all the time and I don't want people to
miss it. I want to be very specific on how focused my buybox was in 2001 when I started.
Here it is, 93703. So I picked a zip code of Fresno, California. And again, remember, I never
live there. I never visited there. I relied on my network of people to tell me, hey, where should I go?
So that was the winning zip code. I then picked single family homes. So not condos, not townhouses,
not duplexes, not apartments, not mobile homes, not land, none of that. Then I picked three or four
bedrooms, so not small, not big. Single story, two car garage between 1,200 and 2,100 square feet.
And when you look at that set of criteria, day after day after day, and you're trying to
tracking what's going on, what sells, what price drop, what, what's this, what's that? You start
to learn the market. You start to understand what an average deal is. And then once you unlock what
average is, the world's your oyster. Because then you could start writing good or great deals.
Back in 2002, an average yield, cash on cash, was 7%. I don't think investors should ever do
average deals. So if your average yield is 7%, you should do 9 or 10. Now, that's hard. They're not out there
all the time. But when you are looking daily for 20 minutes, you will start to uncover this.
It takes time. It feels boring. But once you get the unlock, it's like, I get it now. So I looked at
that buy box in Fresno, California for almost three years, which means in that buy box,
I knew it better than anybody else on the planet. And it means I knew nothing else about Fresno.
You could have been in the Tower District or Fig Garden or Clovis. I would have had no idea.
I only carried about single family homes, three or four bedrooms in this particular zip code.
And I think most investors, certainly in the beginning, Scott, are not focused enough and thus
are not learning and building that skill, that experience.
I've been investing in Denver since 2014.
I've been investing in several neighborhoods.
So I'm not as prescriptive as one zip code in there.
But I have lived in three out of the six properties I've purchased.
By the way, it's one thing to say, hey, you should study the market for three years.
It's another to say, you're 22 and you want to get started.
If you house hack, you defray a lot of these risks.
So like that defraise a lot of the risks. I moved into my first few properties here. And that
makes it much more manageable. I can make a lot of mistakes as a house hacker that I can't make
as a fairly semi-passive investor hiring out property management, for example, in these areas.
But I've been investing for 10 years, right? And like, people are going to say, oh, I can find
better deals in Denver. No, you can't. Not that much better. I know this market. I know it really
well. I looked at another deal right nearby that's arguably selling at a higher cap rate. Guess what?
That property, the roof and the basement unit, which is rented out there, is six foot two inches,
right? So, like, yeah, I'm getting a totally different quality of property here at this price point
than what is theoretically available in some other situations there. And I just know it. I know the market.
I've done it for 10 years on it. And I'll do it for another 20 or 30. And that's where this data can't
possibly get to that next level bit there. But over time,
time mark that can help you. And this data can tell you at the very least that you probably
not buying at the peak or you are in some cases, right? So like, let's do some quick observations
that I'll preview with you because you're reacting to this data live. I didn't preview this
with you intentionally because I want to get your live reactions to some of it just like that
on this. So Denver, for example, Denver is probably a buyer's market at this point, right? We've seen
much more properties with price drops here, 7.3% compared to Fresno. We've seen a price drop a little
bit further than Fresno. Days on market is actually lower in some cases. So maybe I'm wrong on a
couple of these items here. Active listings is up 48%. So that is a big jump over Fresno, for example.
And then median sales to list price is slightly under one. So folks are reasonably pricing here.
A counterpoint here is let's look at Kansas City, right? Kansas City, we're seeing actually a couple
of properties of price drops. We're not seeing the same dynamics that screams, you know,
buyers market here in Kansas City on most of the key four variables that you outlined for us here.
We're seeing deep buyers markets from the data that we can perceive here in Florida, right?
Look at Florida. Compare Florida to California right now, right?
Florida you can see is in deep purple, right?
It means that there's a lot of properties with price drops, a lot of properties, all the variables we think is signal a buyer's market here.
In most of these categories, it is shining purple while California is orange or yellow on a lot of these things.
You're seeing the same pattern in the northeast with a lot of those markets signaling.
If they're not truly sellers markets, they're certainly not as deep of buyers markets as other places around the country.
One of the places I like to pick on the most, and I'm kind of wrongish, frankly, on is Austin, Texas, where Austin, Texas is certainly seeing signals of a buyer's market here.
But it's not as deep a buyer's market as Florida, for example, or other parts of Texas based on the data.
that we can see in aggregate, which is surprising, given how much supply has come into Austin and how
hot it was two or three years ago, not to see the inverse happening here at the same way.
I think Austin would be really, really cool to look at if we had a time machine because I think
Austin was peak buyer's market a year ago, right? And it kind of worked through its stuff,
and we kind of transitioned to Florida with maximum pain. I, you know, again, I'm pretty geeky
with this data. My guess is Austin would have been a deep purple a year ago.
go, certainly 16 months ago. But people in Austin are, you know, the boomerang has happened,
and people are starting to buy again in Austin for sure. By the way, we will create a little link.
This is all free for folks who want to play around with this data. It's pretty simple.
Wow. You can take a look at it. Again, it does not cover the whole country because we don't have good
data in rural, remote places in the Midwest, but it should cover the places where 90 plus percent
of the U.S. population are housed. That's pretty cool of you because, again, a lot of people put
out data like this, but it's behind a paywall.
So that's very nice of you.
All right.
We have another big freebie to announce here that I think will be pretty fun.
We're going to actually show you how to find the best cash flowing deals or at least save some time
and searching for those best cash flowing deals here.
And that big unveil will come right after another break.
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All right, Michael, let's talk about the path that you use to just begin browsing for cash
flowing deals. Like, let's say you haven't looked at the market in a while. Life's gotten away
from you a little bit on this. And you haven't checked them MLS for a couple of months.
I'm sure it's happened to you a few times. Happens to me quite frequently there.
How do you kind of recommence that search? Yeah. So if I was talking to myself getting started a new
investor or I wanted to get started in a new market, I think it first goes down to my belief,
got that real estate investing is a skill. And any skill, whether that be a new sport, a new language,
a new instrument takes focus and discipline. So what I would do is go back to what I talked about
early in this episode is I would try to find a defined buy box. I would search the country.
I would look for what that is. And then I would set it and forget it, which would then allow me
to go learn what's going on. So it's a very manual process, very Excel-based. It's monotonous. It's time
consuming. Again, I started this 20 years ago. There wasn't really great options. That's what I would
do. And, you know, I've always hoped somebody could produce something that would make that more efficient
and quicker. But I haven't seen anything. All right. Well, today's your lucky day. So let's talk about
this. We at Bigger Pockets have, I think, built something pretty cool here. Right. So when I want to
go look for properties on there, I'm an agent, right? I'm licensed in my market. So I go to the
MLS, right? If I wasn't, I'd go to someplace like Zillow and just start poking around,
filter things by like multifamily or whatever. The problem is then I'm presented with dozens or
hundreds of listings. And while I can confine and refine my buybox or whatever, I have to click on
every single property. Yes, you do, Scott. Yes, you do. To make, like, to make an opinion about
whether it's worth diving into further. And this is an hours and hours and hours long exercise
every single time. I want to recommence my search. And so we have bigger pockets. I thought we'd save
some investors some time here. And I could not be more thrilled to present this, uh,
piece of technology that we've built where we are taking MLS data here. Let's start from the
beginning here. We'll go to biggerpockets.com slash bigger deals. This is our new product called
bigger deals. I'm not a marketer. So I find it fun to just label everything bigger. Bigger deals.
Bigger pockets money. Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah. Smaller pockets, all those kinds of things.
Basically, this is a listings platform, right? This is like a place to go and find properties for sale.
The deals today are all on market, but we do hope to add off market deals.
foreclosures and auctions, maybe even some wholesale listings. And we have approximated the cap rate of these
properties. This is an art, right? Do not come in here and think this is a precise estimate of cash flow.
For example, this is a starting point for the search. But we are saying, hey, here's a property.
Here's what we think it will rent for. And then after using maximum leverage with today's interest
rates and factoring out conservative assumptions for, you know, things like your operating expenses,
like property taxes, insurance, all those kinds of things.
Where's your operating expenses and where's your operating income here?
And we've done this in an automated fashion for every on-market property that is listed for sale, right?
Some of these will be wrong.
Maybe you disagree with our conclusion there.
But hopefully bigger deals, biggerpockets.com slash bigger deals, is a useful starting point for your search on this.
And we'll help you click on the ones that are most likely to be successful.
Right.
Now, investors have told us they want cash flow.
I think investors should be looking at cap rate.
So I had the team also provide toggles here to filter all the deals in a given area by cap rate here.
So you can see that.
And then, you know, I think there's a component here where from a cash flow perspective,
and we show cash flow on the little icons here, you know, there's a reality check here with some of these areas in the market where not a lot of deals produce that positive cash flow at max leverage in Denver with conservative assumptions.
But you can at least start the search and begin challenging whether some of these might cash flow
by looking at the MLS in Denver, for example, in multifamily, and clicking through and saying,
hmm, let's take a look at this and see if I agree with the assumptions here.
Maybe I can make it work.
Maybe it will be a good house hack for me.
Maybe there's a good opportunity here to begin looking at it.
It's at least the least bad cash flowing property in the area here.
So what do you think about this so far?
This is an early version.
Any initial feedback or suggestions?
Well, I think there's a couple of things that jump out at me right away.
First off, this would have helped me immensely in the beginning because literally I went to
Realtorre.com or Redfin and put in my criteria, built a spreadsheet, and then had to do all of this.
So the fact that I could have come here and started really evaluating different areas and then maybe
making a more educated guess on where I should start. So thumbs up for that. Definitely more efficient
and quick. I like the fact that you can toggle based on what different investors like, some like cash flow,
some like, you know, cap rate. I like yield. Everybody finds their things.
things. You know, the one thing when I look at this that I would be really cool. And again,
it does look like we're taking list price. Yes. Right. Which you obviously have to start somewhere.
You know, one of the things that I often get with, and this is, you know, this is just getting nitpicky,
frankly. One of the things that I challenge investors out of, okay, you like that property,
but it doesn't cash flow or it doesn't meet your minimum. How low do you have to write an offer
where it would make sense? That's right.
That's what I think a lot of investors need to be thinking about in a buyer's market, right?
You bought a fourplex that was listed at one three ultimately for a million bucks.
It made sense in a million.
It didn't make sense at one three.
So if the app eventually could allow you to say, hey, you can't pay this.
But if you pay this, you're getting close, that would be kind of cool.
Well, let's see here.
Again, all this is free with the exclusion at some of the more advanced items here.
Like you want to put you want to get super specific in your calculations.
then some of that is behind the pro.
But the feature that you're asking for is right here.
Look, and shoot, you can change that?
The analysis defaults to whatever the asking price is.
Totally makes sense.
But you can customize the inputs here and say, let's say, let's say we can get this property for $2.75.
How does that change things?
Right?
Okay.
Now we got some cash flow.
Oh, that's not cool.
Dude, you know how long that took me to do that in the old days?
That's not, that's not fair.
That's it, right?
I think this is pretty cool.
Yeah.
I did not think you had them.
That is awesome.
So that's right there on the customized inputs on any of these listings.
You can filter that.
And also, if you're going to sell or finance or you think that you can get a better interest.
You change the rate too.
You can change those types of things here and the basic toggles.
There's obviously way more advanced, but we thought this was the simplest way to help investors
make a fairly rapid screening decision before learning more and going to see the property.
Like that was the whole plan here is, again, this may not be precise.
You may not like some of these inputs.
Change them.
Change them with this.
and put your own ones in here. We've just hopefully given you a time saver here. We've also,
all of the listings for Denver, for example, are here. They're just, we've taken away many of them,
so it's not an overwhelming grid and provided the ones that are in the upper echelon. So as you
zoom in more, you'll see more and more pop up in different ways. Ah, that's a good idea. That ones,
we love feedback on that. We're not sure if that's the right way to present it. But we wanted to
show the relative best opportunities, not all of them, which you would be presented with,
for example, on a Zillow. Yeah, I think that makes sense. And again, as you drilled in,
it more popped up. So I think that makes perfect sense. Again, you could be overwhelmed
sometimes. So this is going to be a first version MVP. Go check it out at biggerpockets.com
slash bigger deals. The difference here is this is, again, free. And that's been a, it was a big
challenge for us because there are platforms that provide similar types of analysis, but they're
typically very expensive software subscriptions. Yes, they are. And so this is our goal is to make this a
free to consume experience on Bigger Pockets to help save some time and hopefully begin the starting
point for folks doing more research. And we've gone to great lengths there. We had to go and
negotiate with MLSs to be able to provide this data and present it in an investor-friendly format.
In many cases, they're very particular about the way you display listings data. So this is a big,
big effort from Bigger Pockets to do it. So when I think about myself or my community and how we could
use this. I think there's a couple of ways right off. First and foremost, if you're just getting started,
this is a, I don't know, 100x faster, more efficient, you know, set the criteria, pull the data,
especially if you're trying to figure out where you should start, huge game saver.
The other thing I think for more experienced folks, like people like me who have a buy box
defined and know the numbers, I can use it to double check what's going on, right? I could go in
and see, hey, you know, I think this or I think that, what is pulling from this? And again,
And this data being represented is not gospel.
It's just meant to be a first cut.
But you could use it to cross-check yourself, which I think is very valuable because sometimes
myself included, I almost get tunnel vision, right?
I've looked at the same list for 37 days in a row, but I missed something.
And an application like this, which is not a human, isn't going to miss anything.
It'll pull it out for you.
So I think you're on to something.
We think it's a good product.
So hopefully folks will go and check it out here and take a look.
So thanks for letting me demo it to you very briefly here.
That was fun.
Again, I mean, I know a lot of these listing services out there.
So to see what you guys put together and the price tag is free is just shows that
bigger pockets cares about real estate investors.
So shout out to you and the team for doing that.
That certainly didn't have to be free, but I'm glad you did it free.
This is a fun one.
Yeah.
And the team, I think the technology team here deserves a lot of kudos for having built this.
A lot of work to do.
This will be just a starting point for it.
But we'll look forward to plenty of feedback from folks.
Folks of bigger pockets, always give us great feedback when we release new stuff and makes the product better.
There you go.
Well, cool.
Any other thoughts that you want to discuss here before we adjourn on whether it's a buyer's market here or not?
No, I think at the end of the day, kind of going back to the beginning, 2025 is going to be full of chaos and disruption.
I would tell real estate investors to distance yourself.
We don't really care about the cost of capital as long as it's the same.
We want less competition, which we're getting.
You want more supply, which we're getting.
It's time to do the work.
It's time to create good deals.
And go find that motivated seller.
You can do it.
Awesome.
Well, thanks so much for joining us today, Michael.
True privilege.
Thank you.
As a reminder, the two core resources that we link to, one's a free data set, right?
So it's just a data set visualized on some apps.
That's free for everyone.
And then the other product that we demoed here, bigger deals, is our new listings platform.
That can be found at biggerpockets.com slash bigger deals.
So go check those out and play around with them.
Both are free.
Some components, the more advanced analytics functions of bigger deals, are only for our pro members.
And thank you very much to everyone who is already a pro member.
We really appreciate your business and support of Bigger Pockets.
Thank you all for listening to the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast.
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