Epic Real Estate Investing - The Wrong Line: Why Sellers Are Quitting and Why Your "Safe" Bank Note Isn't

Episode Date: June 22, 2026

This week, Matt unpacks two stories the headlines are getting wrong on purpose. First, sellers are pulling homes off the market at the fastest rate since 2020 -- and the press wants you to picture another 2008. Matt shows why this is a standoff, not a crash, and what Warren Buffett quietly did last week that tells you everything about where real estate is headed. Then, a deep dive into a sentence buried in Wells Fargo's own filings -- and the $150 billion in "safe income" bank notes being sold to retirees who have no idea they're standing in the wrong line if the bank ever stumbles. Two stories, one pattern: the people who read the fine print win, and the people who trust the pitch get stuck. Don't buy gold before you take the free dealer interrogation audit -> HedgeTheFed.com If you've felt off about the market or your savings lately, this episode will tell you exactly why -- and what to do next.  

They take the risk. You take the loss. This is the epic real estate podcast. Contrarian takes on money, housing, and policy without the guru nonsense. Let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. And look, if you turned on the news this week, you've already seen the headline. Homeowners are pulling their houses off the market at the fastest pace since 2020. I mean, people are done. This is the fastest since the pandemic. And the way they write the headline, it's built to do exactly one thing to you. Scare you half the death.

It's the financial version of a web MD search that starts at mild cough and ends at shelter in place. It'll make you sit up and think, oh no, here we go again. Inventory's drying up. The music's about to stop. I better make my move before I get locked out like last time. Well, I'm here to tell you that is not the story. That's the half they want you to see. Because buried in the very same report, same company, same week, sometimes the same

paragraph is the part that never makes the headline. And once you see it, you're going to read this whole fastest since 2020 business very, very differently. So before you do anything with your house, before you list it, before you panic, before you let some real estate company's press release make your decisions for you, give me 10 minutes because there's so much more to the story than a real estate market update. So here's the number everybody's running with. In April, 5.8% of all home listings got pulled off the market. That's according to Redfin. It ties December for for the biggest share of homes delisted since March of 2020. So that part is true.

Sellers really are walking away in numbers we haven't seen since the world shut down. The question nobody's asking is why. And the answer is not the apocalypse is coming. The answer is a lot more ordinary and a lot more useful to you. Sellers are pulling their homes because they couldn't get the price they wanted. They got tired of waiting and they threw in the towel. And they all tell themselves the same little story on the way out. We'll try again in a few months.

We'll get fresh photos. We'll write a better description. We'll hire a new agent. We'll actually sage the living room to exercise the ghost of whatever Victorian child is scaring off all the buyers. Notice what's never on that list. The price. Nobody pulling their house off the market this spring is saying the problem was the price. They'll change the photos, the words, the agent, the season, anything but the number.

It's like getting rejected on a dating app over and over and deciding the real problem must be that your bio didn't have enough emojis. No, Kevin, it's not the missing thumbs up icon. It's that your asking price has completely lost touch with reality. And that, right there, is the whole game. You see, while 5.8% of sellers were quitting, another group was doing the exact opposite. They were coming back. Real listings hit the highest rate since 2020 also.

Same report. And the homes for sale right now? Roughly one and a half million of them per Redfin. That is the most inventory we've seen in five years. Back in 2021, there were about 300,000 fewer homes on the market than there are today. The headline wants you to picture houses vanishing, scarcity, a stampede. The reality is, the shelves are stocked. At the moment, this isn't a supply shortage. It's a standoff.

Sellers want yesterday's price, buyers know it's a different day, and the houses just sit there while everybody waits for the other side to flinch. And that tells you everything about what this means for your house. Because if you're sitting on a home thinking about selling, the market just did you a favor it didn't mean to. It told 5.8% of your neighbors, to their faces, that the price they wanted was a fantasy. That's free information. You don't have to learn it the hard way like they did. So here's the deal. Listings are up, re-listings are up, de-listings are up, all at once. So every single metric is moving the same way, and every expert lines up to tell you the same comforting thing. This is not a crash. They're telling you that because it's not.

Because once you understand what it actually takes to crash a housing market, you'll stop wincing every time somebody says the word. A market crashes for just a couple of reasons. Either there's too much supply or there's just not enough money. That's the whole list. So let's hold this market up against both and see if either one is really here. Let's start with supply. About a million and a half homes for sale, the most in five years. On paper, that looks like a flood. But look at who's doing the selling. These aren't people who have to sell. These are people who would like to sell at their number, and when they don't get it, they just yank the sign out of the yard and wait. A house parked at a fantasy price by somebody who can sit on it forever. That's not supply. It's a wish. Real supply

is a house that has to be gone by Friday, and that house is nowhere in this data. The front doesn't crash a market. Need crashes a market. And right now, almost nobody needs to move. Now the money side. And this is the one that actually matters. A real crash needs forced sellers, people who lost the job, can't make the payment,

hand the keys back to the bank. So where are they? But they're barely here, and the numbers tell you exactly why. About four in 10 American homes don't even have a mortgage. They're paid off, free and clear. This is the highest share ever recorded. No payments to miss. And of the six,

and 10 who do have one, 80% of them are locked in under 6%. More than half of them under 4. Nobody is walking away from a 3% loan on a house they can comfortably afford. And here's the part that closes the case. The people holding these loans actually qualified for them. After 2008, the banks, they ripped out all the no-doc loans, anybody with a pulse-type lending that lit the fire last time. The kindling's gone. You can't burn the house down without it. So if there's no flood of forced sellers, but there's plenty for sale, what's the hold-up? Well, it's the other side of the table. Money, it got expensive. Buyers can't afford today's rate. Sellers don't have to drop their price, so everybody just stands there with their arms crossed.

That's not a collapse, it's a freeze. And a freeze only breaks for the people who genuinely have to move. The real need, on either side, everybody else waits. So no, neither thing it takes to crash a market is here, not the forced supply, not the desperation. But wait, houses in my market are down 20% over the last few years. How is that not a crash? Hey, I have. I, I have a crash. I hear you. But ask yourself a better question. Did the seller's asking price drop 20%? Or did the buyer's closing price drop 20%.

Those are two completely different things. One's what the seller hoped for. One's what somebody actually paid. And depending on which story you wanna tell, you can find a number that backs you up. And then there are the sellers who just flat out quit, pulled the home, chose not to sell at all. Did their price drop?

There was no sale, so there's nothing to drop, nothing to record. And then layer in one more thing. Real estate isn't a national thing. It's a regional one. I mean, I could make the prices or falling argument about Austin, down 8%, and be 100% right. And I could make the exact opposite argument about Providence, up 9% and be just as right. Same country, opposite answer.

So argue it however you want. I'm not here to win that one, but here's what's strange. Ask people how they feel about real estate right now, and you'll get a face full of doom. It's too expensive, it's too risky, a young person's never getting in now. The mood, it's sour. And yet, as recently as last year, more than 80% of Americans still said owning real estate is an important part of building long-term net worth. The mood says run. The belief says it's still the smartest place to put your money.

So let's check the math under that belief because there's a bigger lesson in here than you're expecting. Here, I'll use this example, straight from bank rate. Take a $500,000 house. You put 10% down, get a 6.5% mortgage. Let it appreciate at that slow, sane 2.1% a year that Moody's is forecasting for the next decade. Run it out 10 years. You'd build about $234,000 in equity. Now, here's what's not in the brochure.

What does it actually cost to own that house for those 10 years? Not the mortgage. I'm talking about the extras, the insurance, the property taxes, the repairs, the maintenance. The average homeowner spends about $21,000 a year on all of that. Insurance, taxes, the roof, the AC, the thousand little bleeds. Run it over the same 10 years, that's $214,000.

So look at the two numbers side by side. $234,000 in equity on paper. $214,000 out of pocket in real life just to keep the thing standing. And that's before you sell it, because the day you do, the realtor takes their 6% off the top. On a house that's now worth 6 something, that's another 30 plus grand gone. Net it all out and you didn't build a nest egg. You bought a wildly inefficient piggy bank that occasionally needs a $15,000 roof. This is nothing new, however.

I've been making this argument here for almost 15 years now. Your home is not a good investment. a good purchase, sure, a good investment, you can do much better parking your money elsewhere. So the natural question that always comes next is, well, if your home is a bad investment, then why do you specifically say that real estate is the final frontier where the average person has a legitimate shot at creating real wealth? Well, I say it because it is. I say that all the the time. But what I don't say is that you have to live in that real estate. You see, when you own your own home, that's you paying all the bills. That's you paying the mortgage. When you own a rental

property that your tenant paying all that stuff for you what other investment can you own where somebody else buys it for you with a few very obscure exceptions none and i'm not gonna make the argument for it here any further than that there's at least 500 videos on this channel where i've already done that i've already done that in detail nonetheless this idea will still get pushed back in the comments i'd be disappointed if it didn't but before you type or race to the comments to read them ask yourself one question when you want to make a real decision about real money. Who should you actually listen to? The folks arguing down in the comment section who aren't betting a dollar on any of it, or some guy on YouTube, or the greatest

investor who has ever lived, a man who bets billions and is right more often than anyone in history. I think you already know. And here's the better move. Don't just listen to what he says. Watch what he's doing and do what he does. Like right now, as recently as just last week. And of course I'm talking about Warren Buffett's company, Berkshire Hathaway. And what they just did should stop you cold. 60 years building one company into a fortress, sitting on the biggest pile of cash in corporate history, $400 billion.

Cash, they can buy anything on the planet. They can buy anything they want. So what did they buy just last week? They spent $8.5 billion buying a home builder, one of the biggest in the country. And Buffett, who's handed the day-to-day to his hand-picked successor, stood up and blessed the deal personally. His words, he has launched.

Now, sit with that. The smartest money on Earth, $400 billion to spend, free to buy anything, and it went all in on building houses. Not the latest AI trend, houses. So answer these questions. If there's too much supply, why is Berkshire building more? If real estate is crashing, why is it buying in right now in the beginning with both hands? And if real estate is a bad investment, why is the greatest money machine ever built betting $8.5 billion on it? And this isn't a one-off.

They've been quietly stacking home builders for much. Linar, D.R. Horton, Clayton, Holmes, it's a pattern, do you see it? But wait, I thought Trump banned Wall Street from buying up all the houses. And you're right, he did. Earlier this year, he signed an executive order to stop the big institutions from scooping up existing homes out from under regular families. Good. But read the fine print. It slammed to the door on buying homes and left one wide open for building them. So the easy path, buy what already exists, that got taken away.

Which leaves one question, is real estate such a good investment that the small, smartest money on earth will do it the hard way? Pour billions into building from the ground up just to own it? Apparently, yes. They're not building these houses to live in them either. They're building them for somebody else to and pay for them. You see, your home isn't the investment. The real estate somebody else pays for. That's the investment. For 15 years plus, I've never wavered, not once. Not even now, with real estate sentiment about as low as I've seen it since 2008, because the numbers they've never stopped pointing the same direction. Real estate done right is the average person's last chance, not just at building real net worth, but now actually at surviving this financial system and everything

that's throwing at us right now. And clearly, I'm not the only one who thinks so. So either Warren and I are both wrong, or maybe he's a fan of the channel. All kidding aside, and despite everything I just said, if you're still making your way to the comments to type your version of real estate sucks, be better than that. At the very least, include what you think is the alternative. What's better? really heavy these days on people pointing out problems, short on solutions. So feel free to share yours, your solution. And if you're at a loss for a solution, here's my idea, three moves, depending on where you sit. First one, if you don't need to move, don't. Sitting still in this case isn't doing nothing. It's positioning to benefit from the case-shaped economy we're in. Asset owners win in

this economy. Don't sell your assets unless you have to, and that would bring me to number two. If you do actually have to sell, then get two numbers straight in your head, what you want and what the market will pay. And get comfortable with the market is always right. Sometimes that helps you. Sometimes it doesn't. But it's always right. So price to reality. And reality isn't what the guy down the street is asking.

He hasn't sold anything. Reality is what houses actually closed for. Look at the solds, not the listed. And it's your choice how you sell. But if it were my house, I'd take that sold number and list it 5% under it. purpose you know as a former realtor I learned the showing houses buyers always start at the bottom of their budget always so the cheapest houses in any price range those get shown the most they get shown first most showings most

exposure and exposure creates demand demand drives price so price at a hair low and you don't get lowballed you get a bidding war that drags you up to real value sometimes oftentimes past it and don't confuse under pricing with underselling I'm not saying to do that the seller who comes out low and lets the market bid him up, beats the proud seller chasing it down, cut after cut after cut, while his house goes stale. And three, if you need to move because money's tight, you need to make some adjustments to your finances,

still, try not to sell. Try to turn your house into a rental and then go rent one for yourself to live in. And it sounds backwards, but here's why. In almost every major market right now, it's cheaper, much cheaper to rent than to own the same house. So you get to rent a nicer place, better neighborhood, better schools, for less than you're paying now. Your cost of living, it drives,

your comfort, it rises. But you keep the house, you keep the deed. Inflation, it crushes the renter and the saver, but it quietly works for the owner. And most owners have no idea how much that's about to tilt in their favor. Because the same inflation that's got everybody else white-knuckled is for you doing the heavy lifting in the background. If you've been grinding for deals and coming up empty, you're not alone. That's why we created a way for frustrated investors to finally get cash-fifting. flowing income property without the hassle. Go to frustratedinvestor.com.

And now, back to the show. And look, you've seen it before. People lined up outside a bank holding their statements like they mean something. Cops at the door. No announcement. No news alert. No warning. Just a line.

And a locked door. That image, it has a name. They call it a bank run. We were told we would get in. Stay open an extra hour. What they don't tell you is, they already decided who gets paid and who gets stuck in that line. And they put it in writing in documents you were never supposed to find. I mean, you watch the banks get bailed out with your tax money in 2008, and you were furious, rightfully so.

But here's what they didn't tell you. They've since rewritten the rules. You see, after 2008, Congress passed a law that said, no more taxpayer bailouts. ever again, which sounds great until you realize what that actually means. You see, if taxpayers aren't covering the next banking disaster, who's taking the loss? Well, they decided who, and they wrote it down, they filed the paperwork. It is sitting on a government website right now. The person eating the loss in the next banking disaster, it might be you.

Not because you made a bad bet, because your broker sold you something that is legally built to take that hit. and call it a safe, steady income product. By the end of this video, you'll know if any of your savings are sitting in something a bank is allowed to just take and what you can do about it. All right, so here's what's going on.

Every big bank in this country has to file what regulators call a living will. Think of it like a funeral plan. It's a document that says, if we go under, here's who gets paid first, who gets paid second, and who gets left waiting in line.

Well, Wells Fargo, They filed one and in it, along with the paperwork they file with the government for certain investments, they spell out exactly which of their products take the hit first. Here's the actual sentence from their filing. It is possible that our strategy could result in greater losses to holders of our debt securities, including the notes, than a different strategy would. Their words, filed with the government on the public record, And this is the same bank that in December of 2022 paid $3.7 billion in penalties for what the government called

a pattern of breaking the law across 16 million customer accounts. Wrongful home foreclosures, illegal car repossessions, bank accounts frozen for no reason. This is the institution that quietly designed which of their own products take the loss first. And not one word of that made it into the sales pitch at the branch, did it? Here is how they built this.

thing. There is a government rule put in place after 2008 that says big banks have to hold a certain amount of investments that can absorb losses before the bank itself goes down. They gave this rule a name. They call it total loss absorbing capacity, T-L-A-C, which is a lot like calling a shark attack an unplanned biological integration. They built themselves an airbag in case of a crash, except you're the one stuffed inside it. What it really means is this. If the bank loses money, certain investors lose their money first,

so the bank can survive. And when Wells Fargo described these investments to global regulators, they said they should be, and I'm quoting, operationally straightforward to take losses on. Easy to hit. Hard for you to fight.

So about these investments that put you at risk, your broker might have sold you something called a structured note or a yield note or an income note or a market linked note they go by different names here's what they actually are it's a loan you're making to the bank the bank takes your money promises to pay you back with interest and calls it an investment sounds fine until you understand what happens when the bank gets into trouble when you put money in a regular checking or savings account the government insures it up to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars You've seen the FDI sticker.

That protection is real. These notes, no sticker, no insurance. When you buy one, you are an IOU holder, not a protected depositor. You are in a completely different line. And a much longer line, a line that forms after the bank has already paid everyone with an actual claim. There's about $150 billion worth of these notes being sold right now in the United States. And a huge chunk of that is being pitched specifically. to people in their 50s, 60s, and 70s.

People who say, I'm scared of the stock market, but I still need some income. Well, here's the math they don't show you. Say you put $100,000 into one of these bank notes. If the bank gets into serious trouble, you are now in line behind people who have insured accounts, behind people who have government-backed bonds, behind a lot of people.

Historically, people in your position get back well under half, half of what they put in, sometimes far less. In 2008, people who owned Lehman Brothers notes, just like this, saw their investments drop to pennies on the dollar, because they were in the exact same spot in line that you might be sitting in right now.

And look, this isn't ancient history. In October of 2004, the first National Bank of Lindsay in Oklahoma failed. A hundred and seven million dollar bank, gone. The FDIC said nearly a hundred million million dollars in deposits exceeded the insurance limit. They initially gave those depositors back 50 cents on the dollar. 50 cents.

And just two months ago, January, 2026, Metropolitan Capital Bank and Trust in Chicago closed its doors. $260 million in assets. First bank failure of this year. These aren't big dramatic collapses on the evening news. They're quiet, a Friday afternoon press release. and the people who were in the wrong line found out the hard way. They take the risk.

You take the loss. Every one of the biggest banks in America filed one of these funeral plans. Jamie Diamond at J.P. Morgan calls his balance sheet a fortress in his own documents. Charlie Scharf at Wells Fargo filed exactly what I just showed you and then Jane Frazier at Citigroup. Her bank's document is the most plain spoken of all. Here's what Citigroup put in their own public filing. Any value realized by holders of our unsecured long-term debt may not be sufficient to repay the amounts owed. May not be sufficient to repay.

This is not my interpretation. That is Citigroup. In a document they hand to people buying their investments telling you they might just keep your money. Their words, not mine. Now, I know exactly what this sounds like right now. It sounds like something you'd read at 2 in the morning on a website. you're not sure you should trust. So let me be very clear about something.

This is not a secret plan cooked up in a back room. The problem is not that it's even hidden. The problem is that it is written in language that takes a law degree to find and another law degree to understand. And it is printed in the official government record. It's been public since 2017. And look, I'm just a guy who buys houses for a living.

I don't have any insider knowledge, but I can read a press release. like this. In June of 2024, the Federal Reserve and the FDIC reviewed the living wills from the biggest banks in America, and they stamped multiple ones with a warning. Not just J.P. Morgan, several of the giant banks had holes in their plans. Holes that make regulators question whether the machinery actually works when things go wrong. The biggest, most powerful banks in the country have plans that the government's own regulators

say might not hold up in a real crisis. And almost nobody is connecting that to the $150 billion sitting in those notes today. Your broker or your favorite financial advice guy on TV probably told you that the big banks are the safe ones, JP Morgan, Citibank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, these places they don't go under. Well, here's the problem with that advice.

The bigger the bank, the more dangerous it actually is for you specifically. You see, your local credit, union doesn't have a 12-page funeral plan on file with the government. You're safe, Big Bank does. This is FINRA. That is the government agency that oversees brokers and the people who sell investments. And here's what they say about these notes.

You could lose all of your investment if the issuer of your note goes bankrupt. Investors who hold these notes are typically considered unsecured creditors and might recover little, if any, of their original investment. from the government's own investor watchdog's mouth. And if you're over 60, you've already lived through enough of these once-in-a-lifetime financial disasters to know they are not once-in-a-lifetime. Dot-com crash, 2008, the pandemic, I mean, every time regular people end up holding the bag. Here's what I'd be looking at if I were sitting at your kitchen table right now. First, pull out every investment and brokerage statement you have. Make two piles. Pile one is anything that says

it's FDIC insured. Regular bank accounts, CDs and money markets, up to $250,000 per institution. That pile, that pile is protected. Pile number two, anything that isn't, notes, income products, yield products, market linked products. That is the pile you need to look hard at. One thing a lot of people don't know, there's a separate protection called SIPC that covers you if your brokerage goes out of business. but it does not cover you if the bank that issued your note fails. So if you hold a city group note inside your Fidelity account, Fidelity is fine. Your city note is not.

Second, ask yourself whether the extra interest is worth it. If you're holding a bank note instead of an insured CD because it pays a little more, how much more? A half a percent? Three quarters of a percent? Is that worth being in the wrong line if things go wrong? Third, think about what you, own that nobody can just write off on paper. A house has your name on the deed. A rental property

generates income they can't just come and take to save the bank. And physical gold held outside a bank account stored somewhere the banking system can't reach. These are the things that cannot be written down to recapitalize a holding company. And before you buy any gold, though, visit hedge the fed.com and take the free dealer interrogation audit with you. It keeps everybody in the process honest. And fourth, if you're checking, savings, and investments are all sitting at one giant bank, you're putting all your eggs in one basket. Spreading that around, it's just common sense, so do it.

Listen, everything I've shown you, the Wells Fargo filings, the city group language, the government's own warnings about multiple big bank plans, all of that is verifiable. I'll put all the links below in the description. What I'm about to say next though is my read on the pattern. I can't prove it, but here's what I'm. I think is happening. The fact that the government's own regulators have found holes in these bank plans and almost nobody is reporting it as a story tells me the people at risk have no idea they're at risk. The gap between what those documents say and what ordinary investors know,

that is the real problem. Not the bank's failing. They've planned for that. The surprise is going to be the people who had no idea they were holding the wrong thing when the music stopped. So here's where you are. You got two choices. Option one, do nothing. Assume the bank has your best interest at heart. Assume the fine print doesn't apply to you. Assume it'll all work out because it always has. That's a choice and a lot of people make it. Option two, you move the money, you pull the statements, you find the notes, you ask the question, and then you sit there wondering, okay, now what? Where does it go? Because if the answer is just put it in a different bank, You haven't actually solved anything.

You've just changed your spot in a different line. That's the part you don't hear people talking about very much. So getting out, that's step one. But step one without step two, it's just anxiety with better paperwork. And that wraps up the epic show. If you found this episode valuable, who else do you know that might too? There's a really good chance you know someone else who would. And when their name comes to mind, please share it with them

and ask them to click the subscribe button when they get here, and we will take great care of them. Yeah, yeah, we got cash flow. You didn't know whole boy, we got the dash low.