BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - The 2026 Housing Market is Here: 3 New Moves We’re Making This Year

Episode Date: January 2, 2026

2026 is finally here! And if you can still read this sentence without seeing double, you’ve made it!  But this year, things are going to be a little… different. We usually talk about the best places or strategies for buying rentals, but we’re going on a bit of a detour to start the year by discussing our real estate resolutions, all of which will actively help us retire early. Want to retire with rentals, too? This is the episode for you, and we’re sharing the strategies we’re using in 2026 to get there.  Kathy Fettke shares a new way she’s optimizing her real estate portfolio, with the goal to increase cash flow by 10% on her current portfolio (not buying more rentals!). Henry takes an opposite approach to most investors, opting not to scale his portfolio and instead doing something much safer. Dave details his “End Game”—the ultimate real estate portfolio for early retirement.  You can copy these experts’ strategies in 2026 to retire with rentals, too! In This Episode We Cover How to use AI to optimize your portfolio and find the cash flow blind spots where you’re losing potential profits  Stop scaling? Why Henry is making moves to pay off some rentals instead (and whether you should, too) Building your “End Game” portfolio to retire with rentals you actually enjoy owning  The three “buckets” of investing and a sign you’ve already outgrown yours (it could cost you) Henry and Dave’s real goal that has nothing to do with real estate (can you help them out?) And So Much More! Check out more resources from this show on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BiggerPockets.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-1221 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Happy New Year, everyone. Welcome to the Bigger Pockets podcast. I'm Dave Meyer, head of real estate investing at Bigger Pockets. I hope you all had a great holiday and are excited as I am to grow your portfolios this year. Today, we're kicking off the year with New Year's resolutions. And for that, I'm joined by my on-the-market co-host, Kathy Fecky and Henry Washington. We're going to share our goals for the year. The strategies we're planning to achieve those goals and the risks were avoiding in a changing market. A heads up that this show will also be published on the on-the-market podcast feed over this New Year's break.

And make sure to tune in next week for my annual state of real estate investing show and a huge announcement for the Bigger Pockets podcast you're not going to want to miss. With that, let's jump in. Kathy, Henry, how are you? Happy New Year. Happy New Year to you. Happy New Year. I am not going to lie and pretend that we're recording this in the New Year.

It's not really the New Year. proactively to everyone. We're recording this in December, but happy New Year to all of you. Kathy, you have some great holiday plans. Tell everyone what you're up to. You're always somewhere fun. Well, yes, I'm in Paris recording this from a cave. You literally look like you're in like a medieval wide cellar right now. I'm pretty sure I am. I'm in the oldest part of Paris. But I am here for the Christmas markets and mainly because my daughter is getting buried in France. So I had to come to come see the venue with her. Had to. You had to. I had to. And it's the last year of the northern

lights being like really intense. So we're going to take a little trip up to the North Pole, to the north of Norway. Oh, that's so great. Wow. What a fun trip. Henry, what were you up to in the holidays? Food. Enough said, really. I mean, I have little kids, so I do get to enjoy like the joy of Christmas still. So that's fun. But mostly I'm eating my way through the holidays. Yeah, good for you. All right, well, let's jump into today's episode because I really wanted to just start looking forward. Last year was an interesting, I wouldn't call it a great year. I was going to say it's a great year.

I would not have called 2025 a great year. That would have been a straight up lie. I am feeling optimistic going into 2026 and just about real estate in general. So let's talk about this in terms of what our New Year's resolutions are. We'll start with real estate. But if you want to throw a non-real estate one in, I would love to hear them. But Kathy, what's your real estate New Year's resolution? Well, I have a few.

But one is to really dive into AI because Rich actually bought a really expensive program. And he's finished it. And I have not. I'm not even close. But it is, I know it's so powerful. I mean, one of the things that Rich did is he uploaded everything. Our bank statements, the cash flow, our system knows everything about. us and when we upload it, we could know which properties are performing well, which are not.

I mean, we should be knowing that anyway. But I feel like sometimes it's easy to get lazy or you've just owned properties for a while and haven't really taken a look. Like, how is this, is this still a good performer? So using AI to optimize our portfolio is my goal for real estate. I like that a lot. I like this as a goal. It's not like, oh, I have to buy this property by this state. It's this is more like a growth mindset kind of goal. Like, how do you just evolve as an investor generally so that you can make better decisions going forward? Is that program, is that real estate specific? No, no, it was just a bunch of business owners. But, I mean, it's like he's got a business consultant now. All of our business financials are in there.

And we had every employee detail what they do, not in a doge kind of way, but I guess kind of. Like, what do you do all day? And so AI knows each employee and knows, and knows, how to optimize for them. It's really been phenomenal. Wow. And we've already, we had one of the best months ever for our company last month. I don't know if it has to do with that or not, but that's strange, right, at a time when real estate has been so slow, sales have been slow. We had a really good month. That's awesome. So it sounds like you're using AI not just to identify properties or deals, but work on and in your business as well. Yeah. I mean, how many times do you really know what your insurance covers?

Literally never. So with, I'll say Claude, for example, we can upload our entire insurance thing. There's a word for it. Your insurance binder, yeah. Yeah, that thing, the binder, to just really know the details of your insurance policy and even ask it, hey, is this covering me for everything I need for this investment property in this particular state? It's really phenomenal what's available to us.

It's only going to get better. So why not be on the cutting edge of it? I love it. Henry, are using AI regularly? The short answer is yes, but I'd be lying to you if I told you I was using it on a much deeper level than just the surface level asking for help with certain items. Now, I did try to build something similar to what Kathy is talking about about two months ago where I was uploading transaction data and information from my property manager because I wanted

to see if AI could give me a sense of how well certain properties are performing. And I thought if I could upload the actual. bank statements and marry that against the data from your property manager who's actually going out to the properties doing the actual repairs. And then I wanted to marry that against what I'm spending with contractors on certain properties to get just like a bird's eye view of my portfolio. And it was very challenging in chat, GPT. And so I'm wondering if I should try like Claude or Gemini or one of those. Clot is so good for business. Oh, really? I got to check that out. Henry and I were just in Seattle and people were raving about Gemini.

I feel like it's a horse race right now. One releases a new one and it gets a little bit better and then the other one gets a little bit better, but there's not a clear winner. I just have to tell you guys, I got a little bit of a behind the scenes look at a big real estate company's new AI tool. It's not bigger pockets, but there's another one that's going to release one soon. I got to do the beta. It is so fucking cool. It's unbelievable how good the analysis and information about properties and markets for a Data analysts, this thing is so cool.

I am super excited to start using these kinds of tools in my own analysis. But I have to ask you guys, like, I am, maybe I'm just a complete control freak. But like I use this for research, but I double check everything. Oh, you have to. I does still, right? Yeah, because it still makes lots of errors. It's not there yet. But it will be.

It will be so learning the things that we're learning. And, you know, bottom line, the goal for me for doing all this is I want to see if I can, wait, let me say that in a more powerful way. I'm going to increase cash flow by 10% by optimizing our portfolio, whether that means taking some older properties that aren't really performing and 1031 exchanging them into better ones or just looking at things like we bought a lot 10 years ago because we were living at a house where someone was going to build this mega box property that block our view. And so we bought the lot so they wouldn't do it. And now we don't live there anymore. And we just kind of haven't done anything with it. We tried to sell it. Nobody wanted just a lot. So that's one thing.

It's like, how do I optimize this piece of land that's just been sitting there and we're paying taxes on? And so I've been working with a manufactured housing company and we're going to put manufactured housing on that lot. And so when I'm doing a whole new thing and it's actually going to cash flow in California. Yeah. And if my daughter ever decides she wants to move down the street from us, there'll be a house for her. Hint. Hint. But yeah, it's kind of just stuff like that. Just kind of looking at what we have, kind of the theme is more isn't always better. Look at what you have and make it better.

That's great. Well, I think this is an awesome New Year's resolution. I really like this idea of getting better at AI because I will admit I am simultaneously excited by AI and very, very scared of it and terrified of it. And so sometimes I just like choose to ignore it because I'll see these like, deep fake videos online and I'm like, AI is evil. But then you talk about all these things that like AI is amazing for. I just need to figure out the right way to use it for my business. That makes sense and not be like overwhelmed by the like societal implications that might be

coming with AI at the same time. I mean, an example is just, I've been working a lot with Claude. That's what I use. That's, um, and asking for LA County, you know, what do I need to know about manufactured housing, tell me the step-by-step process. And it's not 100%. You know, it's not easy, but it helps it feel not as daunting. All right. Well, I love this. This is a great New Year's resolution. Thanks for bringing this one, Kathy. We got to take a quick break, but we'll be back with Henry's New Year's resolution right after this. Do you ever notice how every passive investment somehow turns into a very active lifestyle, active spreadsheets, active phone calls, active stress? Here's a better question. What if you could buy brand-new construction,

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And I always feel. awkward when people ask questions like this because of the kind of investor I am like I'm in I just do old boring real estate Dave like I just buy distressed properties I fix them up and then I rent them out or I sell them and I think when people ask about resolutions they expect to hear some like super you know ambitious creative like thing that you're doing like a big pivot like you're making some change yeah and I'm not my goals are very similar either year because I just want to continue to do what works and what's worked for generations, which is another iteration of the same thing.

But now that I've placed that caveat, essentially I think of investing in three buckets where you're either growing, you're stabilizing, or you're protecting. And we as investors operate in typically two of those buckets at a time, heavily weighted more so on one than the other. And so as I started in 2017, I've been a lot more focused on growth. So my goals each year are always around how many more assets do I need to acquire, right? How many more projects do I need to flip to give me the funding to acquire those assets? But now I'm in a place where I'm more focused on stabilization and protection.

And to me, protection is paying off. And so my goals for 2026 or my resolution, if you want to call it that, is more focused around stabilization, optimization similar to Kathy, and paying off debt. So I have a stretch goal of paying off two properties in 2026. And I know two doesn't sound like a lot, but we're talking about completely clearing the debt on two assets, which I think is a big deal. So I want to pay off two of my assets. And there's about four assets that I need to stabilize because I'm bleeding money in them right now. Some of them my own fault. Some of them, no fault of my own. One in particular, I bought a duplex not in a flood zone and we had a crazy flash flood and it tore through

both units of the duplex. And then on top of that, a big mistake happened with one of the remediation companies where they did some work unauthorized to the tune of $40,000. So I have about a $40,000 bill that we're fighting because they weren't supposed to do the work. And I have about a $50,000 renovation. I'm going to have to fund out of pocket. Right. So, So these are big ticket items. I don't just come very easy. So that property right now is a duplex that I pay monthly, all the expenses on, but has no income. Right.

So stabilization is a big deal for me in 2026. I also have some multifamily assets. I bought in 2023. Again, no fault of my own. The city has come in and is requiring me to do some work that we didn't plan on doing. that we can't really fight. So there's just, there's a lot that happens in a real estate portfolio that I just, I think, requires you to take a step back and evaluate.

So 2026, stabilizing the assets that are bleeding money and paying off two properties. And so those lead me to my other goals, which is I need money to do those things, right? So that guides me to how many projects I need to take on throughout the year to generate the income I need to solve those problems, live my life. Make sense? It does make sense. I love the way of thinking backwards. Like a lot of people would be like, how many flips can I do maximize? And then take that money and be like, what am I going to do with it? But I really like thinking about it, like, what do I need to do and then sort of backing into the minimum amount of work that you can do? That doesn't mean you might not take on more deals if you find opportunity. But like just having a good sense,

like, okay, I need to do two a quarter or one a year. Like, I need to do that. Make sure I'm hustling on that. And then I'll take everything else that comes from there. Yep. I average probably around like $45,000 net profit on a flip. And I would estimate that I need to do about 15 projects to be able to pay off the properties that I'm looking to pay off and to be able to have the income necessary to continue to live and be able to stabilize the four assets I need to stabilize. So that's my goals. I love it. I guess I understand maybe why you don't love a New Year's resolution because this sounds like it's a multi-year project, too. It's not like, you know, this is something you do in 20206. This is a piece of a larger goal that you have been working for and will probably need to keep working

towards beyond 2026. Yeah. My larger goal, like ideally, like this is, now they say your goals are supposed to be like big and scary, right? Like in corporate world, they called them stretch goals. The big scary stretch goal is to have a third of my portfolio paid off 10 years from now. I like that. That's a lot. It's a lot of money. Yeah, yeah. But I feel like if you don't set a big scary, like, you know, shoot for the moon land on the stars, right? If I end up with a, with, half of that paid off, that's still going to put me in an extremely strong financial position in 10 years. So the larger goal is that, and then what I do each year is tying into that. And then I have to adjust each year because, yeah, I have a goal of two this year, but what if I only get one, right? So then I need

to take what happens in 2026 in terms of the economic outlook and make new goals. Maybe 10 might be too far out. Maybe I need to change it. So, you know, I think, I'm not afraid to reevaluate my goals based on what's happening, but I try to make it all tie together. I love that. It sounds like you're also looking at the protection side of it. Because if you, as you start paying off properties, there's such relief knowing that if there's any, anything goes wrong. And you just can't predict. You can't predict things like 2020 coming along. That wasn't, that turned out not to be bad for real estate at all. It ended up being a pretty good time for real estate. But could have gone the other direction. And when you've got paid off properties, boy, all you have to do is sell a couple and it'll help pay for the other ones that you've maybe over leveraged. And I know that you have way over leveraged to get to where you are now. And that has worked. But at some point, you're like, okay, it's time to turn the ship and pay some of this off.

That's great. It's interesting to hear both of you are focusing on optimization instead of growth. Is that a reflection of the market or just where you are in your personal investing journey? That's a good question. It was just the first thing that came to mind because it's what I've been doing and excited about. You know, just taking a look at some of these properties that, you know, like about 10 or 15 years ago and really haven't paid any attention to them. You know, for example, one, it just vacated. And I talked to the property manager, and she goes, you know, if you update this by about $20,000, you'll get about $100,000 extra in equity.

Like, I hadn't even thought about it. Easy. Yeah. Right? So that's exciting. And what, if I do that, then we can sell that or keep it, take the money out. And so it's almost like an after the fact burr, you know, 10 years later down the road burr. It's a slow burr.

It just doesn't matter. Just keep optimizing things over the long run. This is the way to do it. Yeah. It's absolutely right. I love that. For me, Dave, it is more a function of where I am as an investor because I'm a deal junkie. And I love the process of finding deals.

I love buying a great deal. And I love operating assets in, you know, great parts of the community. Like it's just, it all is so fun for me. But at some point, I have to get to a place where I am protecting the assets I have so that I have paid off. assets to pass on to my children. The overarching goal for my real estate business is for my children to be able to be the people they're called to be and not the people that have to be for money. Right. So if they need or want to do something that isn't going to pay them a ton of money, at least I have these assets that will be paid off that can provide income for them. And so to get

there, I have to pay off properties. And so I have to draw a line in the sand somewhere and start paying down these assets. And so that's why I have the 10-year goal trying to get some of these paid off so that I have those to pass. Now, when I get to that point, Dave, I may just start doing more deals again, but I will always have. You will. You will. You're right. And I'll probably still do deals that are like home runne deals along the way. I'm not saying I'll never buy another renter property between now and 10 years from now. I'm just saying I'm not an aggressive growth mode. So optimization is more important to me right now than growth was. And growth was more. important to me when I first got started. It's just a shift in where I am as an investor.

All right. Well, these are great resolutions. Thank you. I really think these are, obviously, they're not just resolutions, but just goals and good perspective on where you both are in your investing journey. We are going to take a quick break, but we'll come back with my New Year's resolution right after this. The Cashflow Road Show is back. Me, Henry, and other Bigger Pockets personalities are coming to the Texas area from January 13th to 16th. We're going to be in Dallas. We're going to be an Austin. We're going to Houston and we have a whole slate of events. We're definitely going to have meetups. We're doing our first ever live podcast recording of the Bigger Pockets podcast. And we're also doing our first ever one-day workshop where Henry and I and other experts are going to be giving you

hands-on advice on your personalized strategy. So if you want to join us, which I hope you will, go to biggerpockets.com slash Texas. You can get all the information and tickets there. People love to call real estate passive income, which is interesting because most of the investors I know are very busy. Busy finding deals, busy managing teams, busy worrying they pick the wrong market. Rent to retirement flips that model. They help investors buy turnkey new construction homes, often 10% below market value in top rental markets across the country. Their local teams handle the build, the property management and the details, so you don't have to. In some cases, investors even receive 50 to 75% of their down payment back at closing, and there are interest rates as low as 3.75%. They've been trusted partners with BiggerPockets for over a decade. And if you want to learn more, visit BiggerPockets.com slash retirement.

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Start your seven-day free trial and get 50 free leads at Propstream.com slash BP. That's P-R-O-P-S-T-R-E-A-M dot com slash BP. Don't just dream about real estate. Make it happen with PropStream. If you own a short-term rental, here's something worth knowing. Not all landlord policies are built for your type of property. And with holiday bookings, chilly weather, and higher guest turnover, having the right coverage is more important than ever. Steadily offers insurance designed specifically for short-term rentals, covering property damage, liability, lost rental income, and even unexpected issues like bedbugs.

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That's Dominion Financial. Check them out at biggerpockets.com slash dominion. Again, that's biggerpockets.com slash dominion. Welcome back. I am here with Henry and Kathy talking about our New Year's resolution. Kathy shared that she's looking to optimize her portfolio and learn more about AI. Henry is going to be trying to pay down some of his debt and stabilize some of his assets. My New Year's resolution for 2026, and I'm with Janus, Henry. This is something I've

been thinking about for at least six months and is going to take me 10 years. But my plan right now, and the thing that I'm focusing on is enacting what I'm calling my end game, hopefully not going anywhere. But I've been investing for 15 years now. And I feel like I've had these like two different eras of my own investing. My first 10 years, I bought rental properties. I self-managed them, all of them locally in Denver. Those were the first 10 years. The last five years, then I moved abroad.

I was living in Europe. I sold some rentals. I got pretty into passive investing. I got into lending. I do syndications. I still own rental properties. But I've kind of had this second era. And now I want to move.

I'm back in the United States. I want to move into my third act as a real estate. investor. And I call it my end game because I want to spend the next 10 to 15 years putting myself into retirement. I am in a fortunate position where I do feel like I have enough capital to do it, but I need to rearrange my portfolio into an optimized way so that 10, 15 years from now, I'm going to have a portfolio that is just rock solid. It's only assets that I really like. ideally they are paid off or have a very low debt on my overall portfolio. And I actually think it's like a good time to start acquiring rental properties right now. And so I'm seeing opportunities

for like trade out of some of my more passive options or lending and start acquiring the assets that I want to own, ideally for the rest of my life. Like that, that's kind of what I'm starting to think about. And I'm even considering, Henry and I were just together in Seattle, we were talking about this. Thinking about putting things on 15-year notes, for example, instead of going to the 30-year fix that I've always really used and just start thinking, I'm 38 years old. Like, at 53, I probably still won't retire, but I want the portfolio that I can retire off of and that I wouldn't need to touch if I didn't want to for the rest of my life to be in place. That's not going to happen in 2026. This is going to take me probably at least five years to reposition things, do some different

projects, learn a little bit. But that's my goal. That's the thing I'm really working on. Love it. Yeah, no, I think that that's just smart financial planning, right? Like, it's similar to what I'm thinking about because I enjoy what I do now. Like, I like chasing deals. I like flipping houses. It's still fun and exciting. And is there annoying parts of it? Sure, but I enjoy it. But will I still enjoy it in 10 years? Right. Will I just be tied? of the chase. I've talked to a lot of seasoned investors in their 50s, 60s, and 70s, and the one theme across all of them is at some point, they got tired of chasing deals, right? They got tired of churning houses and flipping houses. And so if I can get myself to a

point where I don't ever have to flip another house if I don't want to, but I can still choose to, like that's ideal. And it sounds like that's what you're trying to get to. Like, how do I get to the point where if I just want to sit down and do nothing, I can? I'm taking care of my family's taking care of, my legacy is taking care of. But if I want to go do some cockamamie crazy deal, I can also go do that. Right? Like just getting, definitely. Getting yourself to retirement doesn't mean you have to retire. First of all, I got tired of flipping houses before I even got started. So good for you. Good for you. I did one. That's all I needed. I'm at two right now and I'm tired. And I didn't even do the G.C.

You didn't do the hard part. I didn't even do the hard part. And I'm tired of it. No, I signed the I signed last night, though. Wow. So that's great. No, I, that's exactly right. It's like I, it's not for me. It's not even like the flipping. I'm always tinkering.

I'm just like an optimizer. I'm like always moving money from here to there and like I got to stop doing that too. Like I just, it's I will do some of it. I will keep some of my money for fun because for me that's fun. Like you were talking about Henry, you like looking at deals. For me, I like investing in passive deals. I like underwriting deals and like,

hearing them out and looking for different opportunities. But I need to put sort of like the rock solid thing back in place because I had a lot of great rentals. I'm not, I don't regret selling any of them. But I have not rebuilt my active portfolio in the way I want to yet. And so that's really what I'm going to be focusing on. And like I said, there's better and better deals. Like it's not even that prices have gone down that much. It's just the asset quality is so much better, in my opinion. And you're seeing high quality properties come on the market. I think multifamily is looking more and more attractive right now. And so that's that's the plan for 2026. My other resolution, just so you know, as always, is to go on as many vacations as humanly possible.

Yeah. How do I travel all the time? Can we go on record, Dave, and set a stretch resolution? Yeah. You and I? Uh-oh. Can we set a. resolution that within five years we land an Anthony Bourdain-style TV show where we travel around, eat food and talk about real estate. This is our dream in life. Yes. We need a new vision board, you and I. All right.

Well, this was a lot of fun. Thank you guys. I would love to hear your New Year's resolutions, right? We want to hear them. Share them with us in the comments. We want to hear what your New Year's resolutions are, real estate-wise, fun-wise, lifestyle-wise, because at the end of the day in real estate, we're doing this. usually not because we just want to own or acquire assets for something, because it frees up

something else in our lives, spending more times with their friends, family, traveling, eating disgusting amounts of food. This is why we're actually here. So tell us what your resolutions are. Kathy, happy New Year. Thanks for being here. Thank you. You too. Henry, happy New Year. Excited for another year doing on the market with you both. And James, of course, when he decides to grace us with his president. Yes. Absolutely. Thank you. Thanks, everyone. We'll see you next time. Do you ever notice how every passive investment somehow turns into a very active lifestyle, active spreadsheets, active phone calls, active stress? Here's a better question. What if you could

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