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Dave:
Hey everyone. Welcome to On the Market. I’m your host, Dave Meyer, and we are going to be ending the year with an absolutely incredible and very special show. Today we have one of my personal heroes and role models coming on the show. Her name is Liz Ann Sonders. She is the chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab and is one of the best analysts and economists in the entire world. And I promise you, you all are going to learn a ton from our very interesting conversation. Liz Ann and her team at Charles Schwab recently released a report called US Outlook: One Thing Leads to Another, it just came out in the last couple of weeks and presents information and their basic outline for what they think is going to happen in the economy next year. And during our conversation today, we are going to talk about the report. We get in all sorts of topics like the concept of a recession or a soft landing and where Liz Ann thinks we fall on that spectrum.
We also talk about mortgage rates and bond yields, consumer spending and sentiment. And of course we are going to talk about the Fed and what they’ve been up to. But I think in addition to just Liz Ann’s opinions about these things, there’s a lot to learn in this episode because Liz Ann does a great job explaining what data you should pay attention to and why, and which data is just kind of noise that isn’t as important for investors like us when we’re making our decisions about our portfolio.
So, while you’re listening to this, in addition to what she says, also pay attention to the things she’s talking about, why she looks at certain indicators, why she ignores other indicators, because it can really help you sort through all the noise out there and just focus on the things that are going to help you build your portfolio in 2024. With that, let’s bring on Liz Ann Sonders, the Chief Investment Strategist at Charles Schwab.
Liz Ann Sonders, welcome back to On the Market. Thanks so much for being here.

Liz Ann:
Oh, thanks for having me. Happy holidays.

Dave:
Thank you, you too. For those of our audience who didn’t catch your first appearance on this show, can you please just briefly introduce yourself and what you do at Charles Schwab?

Liz Ann:
Sure. So Liz Ann Sonders. I am the Chief Investment Strategist at Schwab, a role I have had, I’ve been at Schwab since 2000, so long time. And before that I was at a firm called Zweig Avatar.

Dave:
During our last episode, we ended on something that I’d love to just pick up on, which was your concept of a rolling recession. Can you tell us a little bit about what a rolling recession is in your mind?

Liz Ann:
Sure. So there’s no precise definition. It’s just a term that we’ve chosen to use to describe what is obviously a very unique cycle. And I’m not going to go back three and a half years and run through the litany of things that makes it unique. But I think it is important to go back to the stimulus era during the early part of the pandemic because at the time that stimulus kicked in, both on the monetary side and the fiscal side, and it boosted the, economy dramatically very quickly and took the economy out of what was, although painful, a very short-lived pandemic recession. That stimulus and the demand associated with it was all funneled into the goods side of the economy, because services weren’t accessible. And that’s also where the inflation problem began on the goods side of various inflation metrics. But since then, we’ve not only seen hyperinflation go to disinflation to deflation in many categories on the goods side, we actually have had recessions in a rolling sense in manufacturing, housing, housing-related, a lot of consumer-oriented products and goods that were big beneficiaries of the stay-at-home phase.
And we’ve had more recent offsetting strength on the services side. That’s also where you saw the more recent pickup and inflation on the services side. Inherently those metrics are a little bit stickier. So when we think about the recession versus soft landing debate, I think that’s a little too simplistic because we’ve already had hard landings in some of those areas. To me, best-case scenario is a continued roll-through. Whereby if and when services needs to take a breather that you’ve got offsetting stability and/or maybe even recovery in areas that are already had their hard landing. So that’s in essence what we’re talking about.

Dave:
Just to make sure I understand and to explain to everyone, traditionally a recession, at least as it’s defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research, states that there needs to be significant declines in economic activity through a broad portion of the economy. And as Liz Ann is explaining here, what’s going on now is more like a whack-a-mole situation if you will, where one section of the economy might start to see a decline as Liz Ann said that was mostly in the goods area, and then services, a different sector of the economy might be strong and might in the future start to decline. So that’s why it’s rolling through the economy one industry at a time. And Liz Ann, you mentioned that some industries have had hard landings. Are there any that come to mind that have been particularly painful?

Liz Ann:
Well, housing, depending on what metric you’re looking at, you didn’t see epic-level declines in prices, at least not in existing homes. And I think that just has to do with the supply-demand imbalance, the fact that even though mortgage rates accelerated quite dramatically over the last year or so for the existing home market, so many homeowners are locked in at much lower mortgage rates and therefore they’re locked into their homes. But we did see pretty epic declines akin to the bursting of the housing bubble type declines in sales. Now we started to see a bit of recovery there, but that’s one area that saw compression. You certainly saw it in manufacturing broadly in certain components of manufacturing. And by the way, the weakness in manufacturing without the attendant weakness, we’ve had a little bit of weakness in services, but nowhere near the extreme helps to explain why an index like the LEI, the Leading Economic Index, which has 10 subcomponents has been flashing recession.
Now that index is more manufacturing-biased, not because the conference board that created the index is missing something. They know that services is a larger portion of the US economy, but manufacturing does tend to lead, and that’s why there’s more of a manufacturing bias in the leading indicators. But that helps to explain a disconnect too, given that we’ve seen recession in manufacturing, it’s picked up in something like the LEI, but it hasn’t manifested itself in this big decline in the economy because of the resilience in services, which is a larger, by the way, services is also a larger employer, helping to explain why the labor market has been so resilient.

Dave:
I’d love to talk a little bit more in a minute about the services and what might happen in 2024, but I’m just curious your opinion on the implications of this rolling recession, because in my mind, parts of it seemed to be positive, right? Rather than having this one deep recession, different sectors of the economy are performing at different levels, but it also feels like it’s sort of dragged out the economic pain and people are still sort of waiting for some definitive event to happen to declare a recession or to declare that the economy’s better and it feels like we’re sort of in this economic purgatory right now. Do you think this is having a psychological effect on businesses and American consumers?

Liz Ann:
I do. In fact, I think that that’s an important question because it brings up another unique facet to this cycle, and that is that the psychological ways we measure growth in the economy, whether it’s things like consumer confidence or consumer sentiment, they’re very similar monthly readings, they’re put out by two different organizations. Consumer confidence tends to be a little bit more biased to what’s going on in the labor market where consumer sentiment tends to be a little bit more biased to what’s going on with inflation. So you can see divergences there. You can also look at other surveys like CEO Confidence, well, that’s considered soft economic data, survey-based data. What are people saying? What’s their mood? What’s been interesting is the hard data does not corroborate the much weaker soft data. In other words, you’ve had this very dour backdrop of consumer confidence/sentiment, but you haven’t seen the equivalent in consumer spending.
You’ve seen this very dour recessionary-like backdrop in CEO confidence, but as a proxy maybe for what would make them confident or not would be corporate earnings. And although corporate earnings were slightly negative in the last year or so, nowhere near to the degree that you would expect given the weakness in CEO confidence. So that’s another unique aspect to this cycle is a pretty wide gap between the sort of attitudinal or soft economic data and the actual hard activity-based data. So that’s good news in the sense that yes, we’re seeing it psychologically, but it’s not manifesting itself in behavior that’s commensurate with the weakness in confidence.

Dave:
That makes a lot of sense, and I just experience that almost every day. When you talk to someone about the economy, almost always you hear negativity or pessimism or fear, but when you look at these macro indicators, you see pretty strong reports coming out of multiple different sectors of the economy. So it does just feel like there’s this sort of strange disconnect and that’s why I really appreciate your analysis and terming of the rolling recession because it does explain, at least in my mind, a lot of what’s driving that psychological element.

Liz Ann:
And by the way, I agree it is arguably a better backdrop than a recession where the bottom falls out all at once, particularly in an extreme way like was the case in 2008. I mean that was a protracted recession, but certainly that acute ’08 part was the bottom falls out all at once, and I think probably anybody would choose more of a roll through than that. But you’re right, it does leave I think a lot of people in this state of limbo and uncertainty for maybe a more extended period of time.

Dave:
You mentioned that the best case scenario in your mind heading forward is a continued roll through. So presumably some sectors recover, others go into an economic decline, and you mentioned services as being potentially one of the areas that might get hit. Why do you think services are one of the big things to watch in 2024?

Liz Ann:
Particularly in areas where the strength has been a bit more recent, where the job growth has been more recent, reflecting the revenge spending on things like travel and leisure and hospitality. I think that the key ingredient to keeping that afloat, and we have started to see some cracks, ISM services index, which is a proxy for the broader services category, that has weakened from recent peaks. You’re seeing it in a smattering of ways where we may be not at the exhaustion point, but at some point you’ve met that pent-up demand. But I think the real key is the labor market. I think if the labor market can remain resilient, I think that’s been a thing that consumers are hanging onto to maintain that consumption, which again, in more recent periods has been more sort of services-oriented or experiences-oriented as opposed to things, stuff, goods.
I think if we start to see more cracks in the labor market, given that metrics like the savings rate, the diminution of the so-called excess savings, the fact that delinquencies for auto loans, for credit card loans are really picking up particularly down the income spectrum into the subprime categories, the increased use of credit cards for those that are turned off by the high fees or high interest rates, the increased use of buy now pay later, those are signs that there’s at least some pocket of the consumer that is starting to get a little bit tapped out. But I think there’s been this reliance on the health of the labor market as a buffer, and I think if we were to start to see more than just the cracks we have seen, I think that that would have a feeder on the services consumption side that might occur a bit more quickly.

Dave:
So in your outlook for 2024, are you forecasting breaking the labor market or at least an uptick in the unemployment rate?

Liz Ann:
So we had gotten obviously an uptick in the unemployment rate from 3.4 at the low to 4%, and then that came back down to 3.7%. What’s interesting about the unemployment rate is you don’t historically see a lot of jump around volatility. It tends to be trending in one direction and then there’s the inflection and then it tends to trend in the other direction. It’s not like a metric initial unemployment claims where you can see an incredible amount of volatility. So it was a bit of a surprise. I think in general, the unemployment rate is probably going to be trending higher. That’s just the nature of being later in an economic cycle. But there is also truth to this notion of labor hoarding and the fact that for a lot of companies, the skills gap, the labor shortages were so acute that I think they’re more hesitant to use that, laying off people as a cost-cutting mechanism.
So there is that sort of hanging on of labor. You’ve seen it picked up in other metrics like hours worked having come down. You’re also seeing cracks under the surface. For instance, with initial unemployment claims, which continue to be very low, that’s a weekly reading, but there’s attendant report or a metric that comes out every Thursday morning with initial claims, which is continuing claims measures, not people who have just initially filed for unemployment insurance in the prior week, but people who continue to be on unemployment insurance. And the fact that that has accelerated to a much more significant degree than initial unemployment claims tells you that it’s taking a bit longer for people to find jobs. So it really just is peeling a layer or two of the onion back to see where we’re starting to see some cracks. I don’t anticipate some major move up in the unemployment rate.
I think that there is resilience in the labor market. There is truth to that notion of labor hoarding, but it’s what happens when you’re later in the cycle. And by the way, one mistake that a lot of economic watchers or market watchers, investors, whatever term you want to use make is they think of the unemployment rate almost as a leading indicator and it manifests itself in questions I get all the time. Why is anyone talking about a recession when the unemployment rate is so low? Wouldn’t that, I’m paraphrasing different forms of the question, wouldn’t that have to go up a lot to bring on a recession? Well, it’s actually the opposite that happens. Recessions happen for lots of reasons, and eventually the recession causes the unemployment rate to go up. It’s not the other way around. So that’s why it’s important to look at things like unemployment claims and even more leading than that, layoff announcements and job openings because those are where you pick up in a leading way signs that eventually will work their way into a rising unemployment rate.

Dave:
That’s an excellent analysis and detailed opinion about the labor market and underscore something we talk about on the show that I want to remind everyone that there are lots of ways to look at the labor market. No one is perfect and as Liz and clearly stated, you sort of have to look at the whole picture by understanding the unemployment rate, how many people are filing for claims, how many hours are work, the labor participation rate. There’s a lot to understand. So if you want to use this type of data and information in your own investing, you should, but make sure to get a holistic picture and not just cherry-pick one sort of metric and use that as your barometer for the labor market. Liz Ann, you mentioned that we’re late in this cycle and your report discusses this at length and talks about how rate hikes have a quote long and variable lag associated with them. Can you explain this concept to our audience?

Liz Ann:
The terminology of long and variable lags dates back to the late great Milton Friedman who wrote about that in one of his books. And it’s really just this idea that changes in monetary policy. In other words, the Fed raising interest rates or lowering interest rates, the impact that that has on the economy from a time perspective is very variable. We know the lags are long, meaning the Fed raises rates, it doesn’t have an immediate and in the moment impact on the economy. It takes a little while, but the time it takes and the magnitude of that impact is very variable over time. And that’s really what we just wanted to point out. It’s also justification, and the Fed has stated as such for the Fed being what we believe to be in pause mode right now, we do think that the July 2023 rate hike was the final one in the cycle because they feel that they’ve done enough tightening.
It was the most aggressive tightening cycle in more than 40 years. And this is the time now to assess the impact given those long and variable lags. And the other point we made in the report looking at things like the decline in the leading indicators, which we touched on, the inversion of the yield curve, any number of measurements that in the past have been pretty good recession indicators that were still within the range of time spans historically that have incorporated when you finally see the impact. So that was why one of our conclusions was we’re not really past the expiration date, maybe not a recession per se, but we’re not past the expiration date of continuing to worry about this. There’s not some point where we can say every metric that has been calling for a recession, we’re way past the historical range of impact, therefore nothing to see here, nothing to worry about. Let’s celebrate. So we’re still within the variable range associated with the past, even including the unique characteristics of this cycle.

Dave:
That’s super important and your report does a great job pointing out that all of these indicators that market watchers point to that there should be a recession or is likely to be a recession. Even historically there is a long lag. Some of them take 24 months or 18 months, meaning that even though the Fed is in pause mode, the economy is very possibly still feeling the impact of rate hikes that happened, not just the most recent one, but ones that happened 12 months ago or perhaps even 18 months ago.
I’m curious if the recent Fed news, and as a reminder we are recording this towards the end of December, we just heard from the Fed that they’re continuing to pause and the most recent dot plot, which is a projection of where the Fed thinks that their federal funds rate will be in coming years, shows a potential for three rate cuts next year. Do you think that Fed’s signaling that they might bring down rates might blunt sort of this lag effect? There’s always this lag effect and part of me always thinks about how that’s psychological, that if rates stay high, people are a little less willing to invest money, they’re a little more timid, and now, perhaps the Fed is trying to blunt the impact of some of their more recent rate hikes and get people to start spending and feeling a bit more confident again.

Liz Ann:
That may be indirectly a part of it. To be perfectly honest, we were a little surprised at the telegraphing of a pivot. It’s been generally deemed to have been a more dovish meeting, particularly once the press conference started and Jerome Powell was taking questions. Now, that said, there is still a pretty wide gap between, to your point, what the dots plot, what is suggested by the expectations of Fed members for three rate cuts in 2024 versus now. The market’s expectation of six rate cuts in 2024. I think at this point, all else equal, given what we know now, and the rub is that the Fed is data-dependent, so the data will define when they start to cut and how aggressively, but given what we know now, to me it looks like the Fed is probably more right than the market. But in terms of blunting the impact, yeah, I mean the Fed looked at what in November was the most amount of financial conditions easing in a single month in the history of these multiple indexes that measure financial conditions.
And that was one of the reasons why there was an assumption that Powell at the meeting would a bit more hawkish and say, “Look, the loosening of financial conditions has done some of the job for us. We can stay in pause mode maybe longer.” But he did kind of do that more dovish kind of pivot to an expectation of rate cuts. But there is still a fairly yawning gap between what the Fed is telegraphing and via its dots. It’s not telegraphing anything, it’s data dependent. So they’re not on some predetermined path, but I think six seems fairly aggressive given that inflation is not anywhere near the fed’s target, and they claim that that’s what they want to see. So I wouldn’t be surprised if as we get into the beginning of 2024 if we don’t see continued significant disinflation and/or if the economy continues to behave quite well and we don’t see any further cracks in the labor market or maybe even strengthening in the labor market. It wouldn’t surprise me for the Fed to have to push back again against rate cuts starting as soon as three months into the next year.

Dave:
For what it’s worth, I was also very surprised. It’s not like we saw these amazing inflation numbers and as you said, financial conditions were already loosening. So it is a bit of surprise and I just want to remind everyone who’s mostly real estate investors here that although for those of us who are looking forward to lower mortgage rates, this may be encouraging, but certainly not guaranteed. We’ve seen mortgage rates move down about 100 basis points in the last couple of weeks, but as Liz Ann just pointed out, we don’t know what the Fed is going to do. They’re going to wait and see more economic data. And we also don’t know how the bond market and mortgage-backed security markets are going to react to further economic data.

Liz Ann:
And that’s a key point because it’s the 10-year yield that’s most directly correlated to mortgage rates, not the Fed Funds rate, which is what the Fed has direct control over. So that’s why it’s the market forces associated with the bond market and longer term yields that will influence mortgage rates.

Dave:
Well, that brings me to my final subject here that I want to talk about, which is the yield curve. Because bond yields are so pivotal in setting mortgage rates, as a real estate investor, I am very curious for your take on the yield curve, but for those who aren’t familiar, can you just explain what the yield curve is?

Liz Ann:
There’s different yield spreads that are measured to then declare an inversion, which would in general just be when short-term interest rates are higher than long-term interest rates. It’s probably the two most popular yield spreads that are analyzed when looking for an inversion, how deep the inversion is would be the 10-year versus the three-month treasury or the 10-year versus the two-year. And it reflects an environment where early and even in advance of a tightening cycle, you’ve got still elevated short-term interest rates, but the bond market is starting to anticipate weaker economic growth and an eventual easing cycle by the Fed. So those longer term yields will come down and once they go below the shorter term yields, that’s when the yield curve inverts, which occurred now more than a year ago. And it was a very deep inversion. What’s interesting is recently when the yield curve started to steepen again, I heard a lot of comments saying, “Well, an inversion of the yield curve has been a pretty perfect historical precursor to a recession, and now that it’s un-inverting, which that was fairly short-lived, we don’t have to worry about recession anymore.”
But what’s interesting is that if you look at the long history of this, the inversion, if you want to use a weather analogy, inversions are the warning, and steepenings are actually the watch, because recessions have actually typically started after a steepening. And in many cases where the yield curve is actually un-inverted, and that’s because the long end starts to come down in anticipation of Fed easing to come. And so that’s another, I think misperception much like the relationship between the unemployment rate and recessions, inversions and recessions, it’s actually the steepening that is the watch, it’s the inversion that’s the warning. But it also reflects problems in the financial system given that most financial institutions, they borrow on the short end and they lend out at the long end and they make that spread. And that’s what then provides juice to the economy. It gives them the ability to lend and keep the credit markets open, and an inversion really stunts that. And so it works its way through the financial system and through lending standards. And that’s ultimately how it impacts the economy.

Dave:
Given the importance of the steepening, what is happening with the yield curve of late? You mentioned that it inverted I think over a year ago, but has there been any recent movement of note?

Liz Ann:
Well, yeah. So the 10-year as a perfect example, went from a 5% where it hit for a fairly short period of time all the way down to when I looked before coming on here, it was sub-3.9. So that’s an extraordinary swing in the 10-year yield. And by the way, has had direct implications for the equity market, which was one of the themes in our report that really the bond market has been in the driver’s seat of the equity market. And the period from mid-July or so until the end of October when the 10-year yield was surging on the upside, ultimately hitting that 5% peak, that was the period when the US equity market had its correction. S&P down 10%, NASDAQ down 12 or 13%.
And then since then, the peak in the 10-year yield at 5% all the way back down to below 4% has been very much what’s behind the incredible move off the lows at the end of October for the equity market. So there has been a very, very direct relationship between what’s going on in the bond market with an inverse relationship between yields and stock prices, higher yields met lower stock prices and vice versa more recently.

Dave:
Thank you for explaining that. That’s super helpful for all of us who are so interested and watch the bond markets pretty carefully. Liz Ann, before we get out of here, I’d just love to hear from you what you would recommend to our audience, if there’s a couple of indicators that you think they should be watching heading into 2024 to understand the health of the US economy.

Liz Ann:
Well, one thing that’s always important to understand is which economic indicators, and we’re barraged with them on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, but what bucket they fall into, are they a leading indicator? Are they a coincident indicator? Are they a lagging indicator? And that applies to not just labor market data. I mentioned initial unemployment claims, a key leading indicator, payrolls, a coincident indicator. The unemployment rate, not only a lagging indicator, one of the most lagging of indicators. So that’s really important is understanding which fall in which buckets. Understanding that at times there can be a big difference between the soft and the hard economic data, which we touched on. So survey-based data versus actual hard activity-based data, kind of like you’ve got to look at what they’re doing, not just what they’re saying, whether it’s consumers or CEOs. But I think at this point, I happen to believe that what the Fed will key off of when it comes time to start to cut rates, actually pivoting to rate cuts, not just staying in pause mode, will be the combination of their dual mandate, inflation and the labor market.
So on the tightening part of the cycle, they were almost solely focused on their inflation mandate. That was what was triggering the rate hikes in this very aggressive cycle. I don’t think, they don’t not care about inflation anymore, but I think the labor market, the employment half of their dual mandate, I think will sit alongside the inflation data and it’s the combination of the two that will send the message to the Fed. Okay, you can feel somewhat confident that not only has inflation come down to or close to the target, but conditions in the labor market are not such that it’s likely to reignite inflation again if we start to ease policy. So we always pay attention to labor market data, but the point is that I think the Fed is going to have a more keen eye on that than was the case during the tightening part of the cycle.

Dave:
All right, well thank you so much, Liz Ann. We’ll of course link to your report in the show notes. Is there anywhere else people can find you if they want to follow your work?

Liz Ann:
Sure. So all of our work is actually on the public site of Schwab.com. That’s one thing a lot of people don’t realize. You don’t have to be a client, you don’t need to log in. There’s a learn section on Schwab.com. That’s where all of our written, what we heard is. That said, probably the most efficient way to get everything, not just written reports and videos and links to our new podcast, but the daily massive production of charts and reactions to economic data on either Twitter, X, formerly known as Twitter, or LinkedIn. So that’s probably the easiest sort of one-stop shopping way to get everything.

Dave:
Absolutely. And we’ll make sure to link to Liz Ann’s Twitter or X profile as well as her LinkedIn profile below, if you want to check that out. Liz Ann, thanks again for joining us. We really appreciate it. Have a happy New Year.

Liz Ann:
You too. Thank you.

Dave:
On the Market was created by me, Dave Meyer and Kaitlin Bennett. The show is produced by Kaitlin Bennett, with editing by Exodus Media. Copywriting is by Calico Content, and we want to extend a big thank you to everyone at BiggerPockets for making this show possible.

Redfin’s November rent report is out, showing that median rent prices declined by 2.1% year over year. This is the biggest decline since 2020, and renters nationwide will breathe a sigh of relief. Landlords and investors? Perhaps not so much, although there are regional variations that are worth exploring if you’re planning on investing in real estate in 2024. 

Asking rent prices have been dropping steadily since May 2022, when the median U.S. rental price shot up to above $2,000 per month. At that point, rents were growing at a monstrous rate of 15% year over year as a result of the pandemic-induced scarcity of available rental homes.  

The situation now is very different. The severe supply-demand gap has been steadily closing over the past year and a half, with new construction boosting supply—to the point where some landlords have been struggling to find tenants and offering rental concessions such as the first month rent-free or free parking. The rental vacancy rate rose to 6.6% in the third quarter of 2023, the highest level since the first quarter of 2021, which was during the era of COVID pandemic restrictions. 

More Renters, Lower Rents

The apartment building sector is gaining momentum. New construction of apartment buildings rose by 7% year over year in the third quarter of 2023 to a seasonally adjusted rate of 1.2 million. This is the highest rate in the past 30 years. New construction starts in the sector are declining somewhat, falling 26.2% year over year in the third quarter, but the overall rate of new starts that have just begun is still historically high, standing at 1.2 million. 

Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather interprets the data as a sign that ‘‘rents have started falling in a meaningful way. Rising supply […] means renters have more good options to choose from.’’

Rising supply isn’t the only reason why rents are falling. There are larger socioeconomic factors at play. The biggest one is, of course, the nationwide shift toward renting as a longer-term option as homeownership becomes less and less affordable. 

Currently, 1 in 3 people in the U.S. are renters; they rent for longer than before and are older than ever before. This trend toward longer-term renting is changing the status of renting from the short-term stopgap option before homeownership to more of a valid lifestyle choice. Fairweather says that ‘’with homeownership so expensive, renting has started to lose its stigma.’’

The ongoing uncertainty about the economy is also contributing to declining rents. People are becoming more cautious about spending and a little more conservative about what they consider a reasonable amount to spend on rent than they were even a year ago. 

What Does This Mean for Real Estate Investors?

If you’re a real estate investor and these trends are making you nervous, there is a silver lining: The rental market is not uniform, and apartment buildings represent only one segment of it. While this segment is currently on a downward trajectory, Redfin predicts that 2024 will be a good year for the single-family home segment of the rental market. That’s because there aren’t as many single-family homes available to rent, while demand for this type of rental is growing. 

This growth is driven mainly by millennial renters, many of whom are still priced out of homeownership but have a real need for more spacious family housing as they start and grow families. Family homes are also popular rental options for millennials who prefer working from home and sharing a house with friends.   

As an investor, you should also consider the ever-prevalent regional differences in the rental market. While rental prices are declining overall, they are steadily growing in the Midwest. Rental prices in this region climbed a very healthy 4.6% year over year to an average of $1,434. Parts of the Midwest are experiencing something of a housing boom, with many renters attracted by the overall affordability of the region.

It’s a very simple pattern: As the economic outlook worsens and people become more aware of their spending, they look for cheaper areas to live. This migration causes rental prices to rise in the now-popular region, while the expensive areas experiencing the exodus see falling prices. Currently, all other U.S. regions are seeing these declines, following years of unprecedented rent increases during the pandemic.  

Want to know the one place you should be looking at as a real estate investor right now? It’s Milwaukee. This Midwestern city is seeing a robust demand for affordable rentals, partly in response to the increasing unaffordability of homeownership. Owning a unit here is a sure bet, according to local Redfin real estate agent Keisha Tally: “Every time one of my own units goes vacant, I get a ton of applicants.” 

The Bottom Line

Identifying locally booming markets is a must for any investor right now, as these will continue offering opportunities for a reliable rental income in 2024 and beyond.

Find an Agent in Minutes

Match with an investor-friendly agent who can help you find, analyze, and close your next deal.

Frank Sorrentino, ConnectOne Bank CEO, joins ‘Squawk on the Street’ to discuss the housing sector and more.

Mindy:
Hello, listeners, and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast where we interview Vivian Tu from Networth and Chill and talk about her new book, Rich AF. Hello, hello, hello. My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me today is the Shewolfeofwallstreet, Amanda Wolfe.
Amanda, I’m so glad you could join me today. Thanks for

Amanda:
Having me. I’m excited to be here.

Mindy:
I always love talking to you, Amanda.

Amanda:
Yeah.

Mindy:
Amanda and I are here to make financial independence less scary, less just for somebody else, to introduce you to every money story because we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for everyone, no matter when or where you starting.

Amanda:
Whether you want to retire early and travel the world, go on to make big time investments in assets like real estate or start your own business, we’ll help you reach your financial goals and get money out of the way so you can launch yourself towards your dreams.

Mindy:
Okay, Amanda, I am so excited to talk to Vivian today because she has a great framework for not only becoming rich, but also a great way to think about being rich and growing your wealth and ways to invest so that you can join the rich people club too.

Amanda:
Yeah. And I loved her book so much and I’m so excited to talk to her because I think that she had a really refreshing, unique spin on money mentality stuff and thinking rich. I’m a total self-development money junkie. I read all the books and I really liked the way that she broke things down. She broke things down in a lot of analogies and storytelling, which I find really helpful for me to retain information. So I’m super excited to talk to her today. I thought her book was awesome.

Mindy:
Exactly. Yeah, this is a really engaging book and I’m excited to talk to her. But before we bring in Vivian, let’s take a quick break.
And we’re back. Vivian is an ex Wall Street trader and is now the founder and CEO of Your Rich BFF Media and the host of the podcast, Networth and Chill. Vivian produces educational financial content on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube with over 5 million followers across those platforms.
Vivian, welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. I’m so excited to talk to you today.

Vivian:
Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

Mindy:
Vivian, for those who don’t follow you yet on social media, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Vivian:
Yeah. I am the daughter of two immigrant Chinese parents. I grew up in the suburbs of DC, went to school in Chicago, and when I graduated, I started my career on Wall Street. That is my big tagline, your favorite Wall Street girly. I started as a trader. I traded equities. And I did that for a while until I realized that that job wasn’t the best fit. I wasn’t making the kind of money that I had seen in the movies and I wanted to do something that was a little bit more creative, but also where I could just get paid more.
I ended up moving into the tech and media space. And there, all of my new friends wanted to hear more about what I was investing in, should they put money into our company 401k, what kind of health insurance to buy. And I ended up creating educational content to put on the internet because they wouldn’t stop harassing me about it. And as it turns out, a lot more people needed that information than I had anticipated. And very much, the first video I put up went viral, like that, and overnight I became your rich BFF.

Mindy:
Well, I love that. So growing up, what was your relationship with money and how did you start to educate yourself?

Vivian:
I would say my parents were really good at saving. That’s the story of so many immigrant parents. My mom was a coupon clipper. I would sit there and cut them with her and we would wash Ziploc bags. And in our kitchen there’s a drawer with one big trash bag with a bunch of smaller grocery bags in it, and we save all the bags. We’re bag people. But what that ended up teaching me was to really, really value a dollar and how hard somebody has to work to have that dollar. So I’ve always been really good at budgeting and saving, and I’m certainly not someone who’s been a frivolous spender in the past.
But going to school in Chicago, I went to the University of Chicago, I grew up in what I would consider a upper middle class neighborhood. I would say, in that neighborhood, my family was probably slightly below average in terms of wealth. I got to college and I saw a level of wealth that I had just never seen before. It really, really led me to feel like I had to do certain things to keep up appearances, which frankly, if you don’t got it like that, you’re just never going to be able to keep it up. So I would say I probably made some money mistakes in college, spent some money that I certainly shouldn’t have on things that I didn’t need to impress people that I didn’t even like.
And it wasn’t until I graduated and got my first big girl job full-time, I was working on Wall Street, that my mentor, my very first manager took me under her wing and she was so cool and everything I wanted to be, new Chanel bag, new pair of Gucci stilettos every single day to work, would clickity clack in on the way. And I was like, wow, I want to have that. But she was also the first person who explained investing in a way that I understood. And she was like, “Listen, I grew up, my family ran a Chinese restaurant. I didn’t come from money.” She had a very similar background. She went to Stanford on scholarship, did not have money like that, got this kind of job and she had to learn things the hard way. She was like, “I did not contribute to my 401k for the first five years of my career because I couldn’t afford to. I literally was hand to mouth.” And she’s like, “I know that’s not the case for you, so you need to be doing this.”
And so she was really the first person who encouraged me to use investing as a tool to grow my wealth versus just scrimping and saving and cutting out every single purchase that brought me a tiny ounce of joy in my life.

Amanda:
So it sounds like she was really a pivotal moment in your life as it relates to finance. So you did the couponing and the reusing of the paper bags and probably the containers for your Tupperware type life and then know what we know. So then you’re exposed to all of this great wealth. You’re working on Wall Street. So what made you decide that you wanted to get into the personal finance education space and start your platform, Your Rich BFF and Networth and Chill?

Vivian:
Yeah. I was working on Wall Street and I was working for my manager who I loved so much, but I ended up getting switched over to work for somebody else. And this new guy was just awful. He treated me badly. I was not given the respect that I deserved. And frankly, he was a chauvinistic pig who would say racist things. Like when I would wear a long cardigan to work, he would ask, “Is that a kimono?” and touch his hands and bow at me. And it was just really, really inappropriate. And I knew that he wasn’t ever going to be my advocate, but more importantly, he was never going to pay me. I was never going to get the money that I had been promised for sitting 14 hours next to an insufferable man to then have to go to a client event after work. All of the things that I was promised I wasn’t getting, and I was like, well, I’m going to get them one way or another, whether or not it’s through this traditional corporate financey route.
So I told my mentor, I was like, “Hey, I am not cool with this. I’m about to leave.” And she was like, “No, no, no, do some interviews.” I ended up interviewing with her best friend who ended up becoming my first manager, and I moved into the tech media space in strategy sales at Buzzfeed. And there, I made a lot of new friends who wanted my advice, who wanted a recommendation on what they should do, should they buy the company stock options, should they select this fund over another in their 401k portal. And because it was so crazy to me that so many people had the same questions, I just started making videos so I could refer back and be like, “Hey, guys, if you have this question, just go watch video seven at the lunch table.” I didn’t mean for it to become a whole business and take my job into the entrepreneurship realm like it did.

Mindy:
So You wrote a book called Rich AF, that’s what we’re going to call it today. Rich, can you tell us about this book and why you chose to write this at this time and who did you write it for?

Vivian:
Yeah. I felt like there had been a slew of really, really classic OG finance books that had served my parents’ generation really well. But knock, knock, welcome. It’s 2023. It does not look the same anymore. The landscape is not the same wages of stagnated. The price of housing has tripled. The price of an education has 10x. We do not live in the same reality that our parents live in. And on top of that, I think it’s been easy for some people for a while. They’ve been playing on tutorial mode. If you are a old rich white guy, you can get into your little time teleportation machine and go back to any time in the timeline. As a young Asian woman, there are some time periods that I cannot go to. If you are a Black person, there are some real time periods you cannot go back to. If you are a gay person, there are many times that you cannot go back to.
And I think that speaks volumes to the access we’ve all had with financial information for some time as well, because for so long, financial services has only catered to people who are already rich, likely white and likely men, and that’s not fair. I wrote this book to teach personal finance to people who I like to call my audience. I’ve lovingly dubbed them the leftovers. They are the people that the financial services industry has left over. These are women. These are people of color. These are the LGBTQ community. These are people who grew up low income. These are people who may not have gotten that education because they grew up with money trauma. And it’s so important in particular for those communities to learn about this because that is how you build up overall in those demographics because when you put money in those pockets, that money gets reinvested. And so it’s important to not concentrate wealth just with people who already have it.

Amanda:
Right. And that’s definitely what continues to happen within generations. And I think that we can probably all agree that financial literacy is quite often missing in most households and schools in the US. So can you talk to why financial literacy is so important, why it’s never too late? Because I think that’s another one too, right? Well, it’s too late for me, so I’m just going to set my kids up. Or does it even make sense to start now? Can you talk a little bit about that?

Vivian:
Yeah, absolutely. It is a damn shame that you are legally obligated to go through 12 years of education, so first through 12th grade. I don’t know kindergarten’s mandatory, but you have to go through school. If you don’t take your kid to school or if you don’t homeschool them or they’re not in some sort of education, you as a parent can get in a lot of trouble. You then expect them to get the education they deserve in those schools. And I’m not putting this on teachers, certainly not because they are bound by what is federally and state mandated. And financial literacy is not a federally mandated subject.
So I’m out here in my biology class learning that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell sick. You know what? I didn’t become a scientist. I’m out here learning that the Pythagorean theorem exists. I’m learning sign, co-sign, drawing triangles. You know what I don’t do? Draw triangles for a living. You know what both a scientist and a mathematician and literally anybody who makes money needs to do? Pay taxes, legally speaking. That would’ve been nice to know how to file a tax return because the first year I did it, I thought I was going to jail. And it would’ve been nice to know how to make a budget because the first year that I moved to New York City, was working on a Wall Street salary, I was living paycheck to paycheck. That’s bad. And I think about all of the people who didn’t make as much money as I was making living in New York City, which is many people. How are they doing it? Because we’re not taught how to do these things in school.
So of course, the people who know the secrets, the rich people who’ve already got this game figured out, they’re going to pass those secrets down one rich person to the next down their generational line and that same family, just because great-great-great-great-great-grandpa owned a railroad, now the entire family’s just set forever. I don’t necessarily think that makes sense. I think there needs to be class mobility in a place like America, but also just across the world because, what is the point of working hard or dreaming of a better future if there is no class mobility? If the ability to work harder to make more, to have a better life does not exist, what’s the point? So I think that’s really, really important.
And then, in terms of people fearing that it’s too late and like, “Oh, I’ll never be good at this. I’m going to just set my kid up,” I think wanting to set your kid up for success speaks to you being a great parent. Of course you should want that, but it is never, ever, ever too late for anybody to finally figure out their finances, to get good with their money because you owe it as a service to your children as well as yourself to get yourself in the best financial position possible.
Because you know what happens when you are like, “Oh, I’ll start helping to save and invest for my kids, but I’m not going to do anything for myself”? When you become too old to work, that burden will fall on someone else, and likely it’ll fall on your loved ones. And I would hate to be a burden, and I hope people don’t think of it that way. I hope people are like, “Well, I’ve done a good job raising my kid. They love me. They’re going to take care of me.” But you should want to be able to take care of yourself. The hope is then, even if you can take care of yourself, your loved ones love you enough to want to take care of you, but it’s important to want to set yourself up for success as well as your kids.
So I really don’t think it is ever too late to learn about finances, to learn about money. The best day to get started was yesterday, but today is the second-best day. So the sooner you can do it, the better.

Mindy:
I love that. My daughter is a junior now in high school, and her freshman class was the first class in Colorado that was required to take 0.5 credits of personal financial literacy classes to graduate. But I am very excited not only for this class, but going forward, I’d like to see it be more than just 0.5 credit hours to graduate.
And reading your book, you had a really great analogy about playing Monopoly, and I totally identified with your stance on playing Monopoly because I never read the rules. Somebody taught me how they played Monopoly. “Oh, you just go around the board and you collect $200 every time you pass go.” So that’s what I did, and I have never put a house. Can you explain this analogy for audience?

Vivian:
Yeah, absolutely. The way I like to think about it is that life, very literally, is a board game. And most of us learn how to play the board game of life, in this case, Monopoly, the same way that we learn how to tie our shoelaces or learn how to hold a pencil or what kind of foods we like. We learn from our loved ones, our guardians, our parents, and you’re not reading the rule book of life. You are not looking up every single law that you could potentially break on the police department’s website. You’re just doing what the people around you are doing because you’ve learned, okay, if I can have a nice life, I can do this, dah, dah, dah, dah. But the thing is is that some people are taught every single rule and then taught when to use those rules and when to build a house and then to turn that house into a hotel, and should you buy the railroads, and what happens when you get sent to jail, and when you pass go, what are some secret things you can do to make sure that you’re collecting your $200 but still getting to roll again.
There are so many intricacies when it comes to our personal finances that the vast majority of us don’t know about. And even if we do know about, we don’t know how to effectively use. And that’s the difference between knowing the rules and having a strategy.
So it’s not just about understanding, oh, the max contribution of a Roth IRA for the 2023 tax year is X, Y, Z. Frankly, I’m someone who can hardly remember those figures. Every single time I talk about a certain type of account in my content, I got to Google, what’s the contribution limit again? And that’s okay because it’s not the number that matters. It’s not those figures that matter. It’s about teaching somebody how to fish versus just giving them the fish. You want to be able to be financially literate. And I say that not like knowing every fact about finance in the world, but being able to do the research and get to an answer for every question you have.
So you need to understand what something like a Roth IRA does. You don’t need to remember all the facts and figures of, what’s the income limit? How much money can I put into it? What happens this? You can look all of that information up. You don’t need to memorize it. And every year, likely it’s going to change. So what’s the point? But you have to understand that having one can help you save and invest for your retirement, you acquire some tax benefits, and there are some other cool things that you can spend that money on along the way that you can take that money out for penalty free. And you got to know that. And so I think it’s very much about learning how to strategize your life versus memorizing every single rule.

Amanda:
I love that. It’s the teaching you to fish, but it’s also knowing what to look up, right?

Vivian:
Yeah.

Amanda:
So it’s, what is a Roth IRA? Maybe I have to start there. I love that. And then you have another point in the book that I really love that says that rich people think differently. And I love that. Think it’s so true. So can you tell us about how rich people think differently?

Vivian:
Oh, there’s so many different types of ways that rich people think differently, and I outline a lot of them in my book. So please, please go pre-order, go buy. You can find the book at richaf.me. Yes, I made the URL a manifestation. But what I think is really, really key is a sense of entitlement. I always talk about this. My parents came to this country and they were focused on survival because they were immigrants. But I was born here, baby. I got a blue passport. What are you going to do? Where are you going to send me? I am entitled to be an American and live my best life. And I know that. I trust that.
And I don’t mean be entitled by harassing the poor person working at the the cash register at the Burger King. That’s not what I mean. Don’t be a Karen. But what I am saying is rich people understand the value of what they have. No matter how much money, no matter what, they understand the value. They know what they can ask for. They know that they can negotiate. They know that if they get hit with a late fee, all you got to do is call and ask for it to get taken off, and they’ll probably take it off. And I think having a little bit of an entitlement, understanding that your business is worth something, your patronage is worth something, your review on Yelp is worth something, is really important because those moments will help you get the most out of what you have.
And that’s why rich people aggressively negotiate when they’re buying a home, aggressively negotiate at the car dealership. They will go back and forth and back and forth for three hours and then walk away until the guy from the dealership is literally sprinting to chase after them to give them an extra $2,000 off of the MSRP, whatever. It’s important to remember that. You have value as a person and you need to take advantage of that because businesses know it. And when you realize it, you’re going to be able to really, really maximize what you get out of those businesses.

Mindy:
I love that. Another point in your book that I found fascinating and a little surprising was you said that rich people are lazy, which on the surface doesn’t make sense because, how can they be rich and lazy?

Vivian:
Rich people are the laziest. Oh my God, are you joking? Fun fact, I just went on vacation and stayed at this very ritzy resort. And my fiance and I, we are like, “Oh, it’s great. We’ll walk the half mile down to the beach,” whatever. Everyone was taking golf carts all around this property. They did not want to walk. So yes, anecdotally, rich people, very lazy. But even more so, what I mean by that is rich people love to talk about working hard, hustle hard, always grinding, money never sleeps. It’s so gross and cliche, those sayings. But in reality, they want you to work hard. They want you to pump their gas hard. They want you to DoorDash their food hard. They don’t want to work hard. They know that their human bodies can only work a certain number of hours a day.
Typically, you see people working nine to fives. Even if a very ambitious “rich person” is working a 14-hour day like I did when I started on Wall Street, you can only work so many hours before your body just gives out, before your brain is not functioning the way that it probably would at its best. And they know that. So they recognize that it’s better to have your money make you money than to have your brain or your body make you money. They don’t want to be thinking. They do not want to be lifting things. They do not want to be walking. They want to be chilling. They want to chill by their pool. They want to go play a round of golf. They want to go get a massage, as does everybody, because all of us want the best life that money can buy.
And when you come to the realization that at the beginning of your life, you will work hard for money, but if you can get investing sooner rather than later, your money can work hard for you and you can put your feet up, that’s the key lesson that everybody should realize.

Amanda:
I love that because it’s not the hardest worker who becomes richest, right? Otherwise, every janitor, every teacher. I think that’s such a good point. I love that. You also say that rich people don’t care about impressing you, which I thought was really interesting and made me sit and think for a minute because a lot of rich people, they’re the first ones to go grab all the name brand everything. So how is this true and what are they spending their money on?

Vivian:
They don’t care about impressing you because you know they can afford it. I was talking about buying designer goods and what kind of mental math that I’m doing to decide whether or not a piece is worth buying or not. And someone was like, “This girl’s a hypocrite. She’s wearing an Hermes necklace, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.” And I’m like, “Babes, I hate to break it to you. This was $18 and you can find it on my Amazon storefront.” It was a literal joke. It wrote itself because you know that I’ve got the net worth to buy the real thing. When I buy something that looks similar, you just assume I got the real thing because you know I can afford it. I don’t care about impressing people with goods anymore.
I’ve noticed that a lot of people are leaning into the quiet luxury trend, which I’m just like, ugh, gross. But I think it’s true in that rich people still like to flaunt their wealth, but they only flaunt it in a way that is like you can clock it if you are rich yourself. It’s not necessarily even about impressing people. It’s about spending money on things that you personally appreciate. And I noticed that about myself. When I first got to New York, I was spending more money on designer and luxury goods, so much more money than I do now on them because now I can really actually afford them and I don’t need them. What’s the point? That holds my stuff just as well as that tote bag I got for free at that one fair that I went to. They were handing them out. It holds stuff, great. For me, it was almost like a armor, showing people that I belong, I have money, I can do those things, but rich people know they belong.

Amanda:
Yeah, because you had been trying to belong for so long, right? Say that five times fast. You get to college, you’re exposed to all these different things, and now I’ve reached it. I’ve achieved it kind of, right?

Vivian:
Yeah.

Amanda:
Yeah. I love that. And you say something else in your book that I think is really interesting that I also totally agree with is that you can’t save your way to rich. You can’t save your way to rich. So apart from not buying things to impress people and buying things really intentionally and on things that matter to you, what do you mean by you can’t save your way to rich? Is it that they’re out there spending everything or can you unpack that a little bit? .

Vivian:
Yeah. Back in our parents’ day, it was an honor to be a blue collar worker. If you were a trades person, you could work. You could be a plumber, an electrician, whatever. You would be able to do that and your partner likely could stay at home and you would be able to eventually afford a home, your two and a half kids, golden retriever, white picket fence house with the tire swing in the front. You were able to have that. Nowadays though, you can’t just save your way to that dream anymore because the cost of living, the cost of housing, the cost of an education has so grossly outpaced wages.
And it’s important to note that now, even if you are a single person, if you want to get to retirement, if you want to live here happily ever after, you need to be in a two income house. And you’re like, “Bro, I’m not picking up a second job. I don’t want to do that. That sounds so horrible.” No, no, no, no, no. Hear me out. You can have one income from your job or your side hustles, whatever, but your second income needs to come from investing because you can only save as much as you earn, but you can always earn more money. And when you are doing two pieces of the pie being one, maximizing your income from labor, so asking for a raise every year, picking up a side hustle, just increasing the amount of cash coming in the door, you are then able to put more of that cash towards investing. And again, it’s basically giving your money to your secret best friend who can work 24/7, does not need a coffee break, does not need to get medical dental benefits. Your money is 24/7 that can work for you. Is like having a little employee, and your little employee makes money and you make money. And the more money you make, the more money your little employee can make. And eventually, you have two streams of income being one person.

Mindy:
Okay, so let’s talk about some of these tools that we can use to become rich, to create additional streams of income, to help us generate this wealth and generate more income to invest in.

Vivian:
Yeah, I think, number one, first and foremost is I’m very much of the camp that everybody needs to be asking for a raise every single year. And I don’t mean some rinky dink inflation raise, you’re getting two, 3%. That does not count. No, sorry. That just makes sure that you can still afford eggs. You need to ask for 10 to 15% every single year. And people always bulk at that number. I’m not saying you’re getting 15% every year, but you need to be asking for it. And if you end up getting 8, 9, 10, 12%, great, you’ve still beat inflation and you’re making more money now. That’s awesome.
But if you are in any job for two years and you haven’t been promoted, you haven’t been given a raise, it’s probably time to start looking elsewhere because it has been proven through a long tail research study that if you do not get a raise every two years, over the course of your lifetime, you’ll make 50% less. And that is insane to me because that’s half, half. You want to make half as much money? Imagine having what you currently make. Would you be cool accepting that? I would not. I would not be cool with that. And I don’t think a lot of the listeners would be either. So if you don’t want to make half as much as you deserve in your lifetime, you need to make sure you are getting paid more, a meaningful amount, 10 to 15%, every two years. And if you’re not, you need to look elsewhere because every two years, you got to go up or you got to go out.

Mindy:
Wow.

Amanda:
Yeah, 50%. I didn’t realize that was half. And think of how many people stay in their jobs for 10, 15, 20 years. And it’s more than just getting out of your comfort zone. It’s your entire livelihood and your entire retirement and so many things.

Vivian:
And I will say, back in our parents’ generation, people stayed at companies, they were company man, company women, because they had a reason to be. You would stay at a company for 30 plus years because you had a pension.

Amanda:
Exactly.

Vivian:
The longer you stayed somewhere, the more money your employer was legally obligated to set aside for you in retirement, not your money, their money. They would then invest that money. And regardless of how those investment returns did, you would be owed a dollar amount already calculated for you in retirement so you could bank on that money. The problem became when 401ks were invented, I want to say in the ’70s, late ’70s. I don’t know the exact year off the top of my head, but when they were invented, companies instantaneously started adopting them because they were like, “Suddenly, this is not our problem. It’s your problem. Amazing.” And so they’ve now passed that burden of retirement onto the workers.
And so not only is the 401k worse in every single way, your employer is maybe matching your contribution, but you have to be the one to put your money away for retirement. And what does that mean? That means you have to be paid more. It means you have to have more of a reason to stay somewhere. There’s no incentive keeping you around. So now, people in our generation can’t afford to be loyal, whereas it paid to be loyal back in our parents’ generation. So things have changed, and we have to address that because the way you make strategic decisions in your life is going to differ based on how the rules of the game change.

Amanda:
I love that. And I think that a lot of that old advice is still being trickled down to people because you meet people and you’re like, “Two years? No, that’s too soon. Five years? You’re barely learning the role still.” And I think it’s really interesting because it’s the parents and the grandparents, they’ve grown up with pensions, to your point, and they were taken care of in retirement, and that’s not the truth anymore.

Mindy:
Yeah, I remember my dad impressing upon me, “Don’t job hop. Your resume looks terrible because you quit a job every year, year and a half since you started and you don’t need a three-page resume.” Well, yeah, I do. I don’t actually need a three-page resume. One page is fine. You just highlight the highlights. But yeah, you have to job hop in order to make any money. The new hire budget is much bigger than the retention budget.

Vivian:
Isn’t that crazy too? Because it’ll be so much cheaper to just be like, “Hey, we’ll pay this person marginally more and they already know how to do the job,” versus like, “Oh no, we lost our star talent again. Why does this keep happening to us?” It’s like, you know why this keeps happening to you. You know exactly why.

Mindy:
I know why it keeps happening to you.

Vivian:
Yeah. It’s like literally just pay your employees what they’re asking for. Is that confusing? I don’t get it.

Mindy:
Yeah, no, it shouldn’t be confusing, but it is. All right. Vivian, if someone wanted to get started today on their journey to becoming rich AF, what advice would you give to them?

Vivian:
I think one of the easiest things that you can do in 15 minutes is just signing up for a high yield savings account. So I think a lot of us think of bank accounts as the traditional brick and mortar. There’s a bank on the corner, they’ve got an ATM and maybe they gave you a baseball cap in college. You’re sick. Okay. They’re my bank forever. No, that’s not a good idea. You want to go with a high-yield savings account or a high yield checking and savings account, if you can find access to one, because you literally just get paid more interest to park your money with a bank.
How this works is when you give your money to a bank to put into a checking or savings account, that money doesn’t just sit there. It may sit there in the app, you show the number. Sure. But that money then gets lent out to people, whether that be through mortgages or personal loans or small business loans, what have you. That money gets lent out. And you know for a fact the bank’s making a killing lending that money out. What are you getting? A couple cents every year. Gross. But if you have a high-yield savings account, you can get a lot more in interest.
Is it the amazing solution you can just put your money into a high yield savings account and retire? No, but it is going to help preserve your wealth better than putting it in a regular savings account. And once you have an emergency fund set up in your high-yield savings account, you can really start focusing on high interest rate debt pay down, you can focus on investing. There’s so many other steps, but I would say the very first one is putting your money and keeping it safe somewhere that you’re able to get paid a good interest rate.

Amanda:
Yeah. When I first learned about high yield savings accounts, I thought it sounded like a scam. I’m like, wait, why are they going to pay me interest and this other big bank isn’t? I don’t get it. And right now, some of them are paying like three, four, 5%, which is insane. So what is your favorite high-yield savings account? Because I’m sure some people are sitting there like, “All right, that seems like an easy first step. Let’s do it.”

Vivian:
Yeah. My favorite high-yield checking and savings account is through SoFi. The reason why they’re my favorite is because it’s not just high yield savings. They actually do high-yield checking as well. So even money that’s just sitting around for one week waiting to be paid to your landlord or cover your wifi bill or buy your groceries, you can earn interest on. And I just think you should always be earning interest because your money has value, you have value as a customer and you should be entitled to that interest.

Mindy:
I love that. I didn’t even know they had a checking account. All right, Vivian, thank you so much for your time today. I loved your book Rich AF. And if somebody were looking for you online, where would they find you?

Vivian:
You can find me all across social media as Your Rich BFF. And if you are interested in checking out the book and ordering your own copy, you can head to richaf.me.

Mindy:
Awesome. Thank you so much today, Vivian, and we will talk to you soon.

Vivian:
Thank you so much for having me.

Mindy:
Okay, that was Vivian TU, founder and CEO of Your Rich BF Media and the host of Networth and Chill. And that was a super fun interview. Amanda, what did you think of the show?

Amanda:
I loved it. Vivian’s funny. She is funny. I feel like her personality just radiated through the microphone.

Mindy:
Yes, I love her. Take no prisoner’s attitude. Take no guff from anybody. She’s just going to tell you like it is. And you know what? That’s I love most about the book and her podcast and just her social media presence. She’s not fake. She’s just, here’s the reality of the facts of money. Here you go. Here’s information for you and you can take that and apply it to your life. I really, really like her no-nonsense approach.

Amanda:
Yeah. And I think that her name really encapsulates her way of educating too, right? Your BFF. You feel like you’re FaceTiming with your BFF when you talk to her, when you read her book. It’s so digestible, you feel like you’re talking with a friend. And I think that makes the money lessons and the framework throughout the book that much more digestible.

Mindy:
Yeah. And she’s not lecturing you. She’s just giving you information. Yep, absolutely love it. So you can find Vivian all over social media at Your Rich BFF, and don’t forget to go pick up a copy of her book that just came out called Rich Af.
All right, that wraps up this episode of the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. Amanda, if people were looking for you online, where would they find you?

Amanda:
You can find me shewolfeofwallstreet.com, my website, or any social media platform, Shewolfeofwallstreet, and that’s Wolfe with an E.

Mindy:
All right, that wraps up this episode of the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. She is the Shewolfeofwallstreet, Amanda Wolfe. And I am Mindy Jensen saying, take care, teddy bear.

Speaker 4:
If you enjoyed today’s episode, please give us a five star review on Spotify or Apple. And if you’re looking for even more money content, feel free to visit our YouTube channel at youtube.com/biggerpocketsmoney.

Mindy:
BiggerPockets money was created by Mindy Jensen and Scott Trench, produced by Kaylin Bennett, editing by Exodus Media, copywriting by Nate Weintraub. Lastly, a big thank you to the BiggerPockets team for making this show possible.

Skylar Olsen, Zillow chief economist, joins ‘Money Movers’ to discuss her outlook for housing in 2024 and more.

Knowing what to look for when buying a rental property will save you time and money while reducing stress. In this article, we outline seven considerations that you can’t afford to overlook.

Consideration 1: Location

Location, location, location is consideration No. 1 when buying a rental property. 

Is the property close to amenities such as shopping? How about public transportation? What about local schools? Is the area safe? Is it family-friendly? 

Know which location(s) meet your requirements, and only consider properties within those areas. 

Consideration 2: Property Condition

Assess the property’s age and current condition to estimate ongoing maintenance needs and potential renovation costs. 

You must factor in the cost of upgrades or repairs to meet market expectations and enhance rental appeal. Should you require assistance, consult with a contractor and/or home inspector for professional guidance. 

This careful evaluation helps you forecast long-term profitability and maintain a competitive edge in the local rental market.

Consideration 3: Market Rent Rates

Investigate local rent rates to gauge the property’s earning potential. From there, compare these rates with similar properties in the area to calculate competitive pricing. 

Understanding market trends ensures your rent aligns with tenant expectations while maximizing your income. Regularly monitoring these rates helps adapt to market changes and sustain profitability over the long term.

Tip: Our rental property calculator comes in handy here.

Consideration 4: Legal and Zoning Regulations

Don’t assume that you know the legal and zoning regulations in the area you’re buying. Instead, you must do two things:

• Verify that the property complies with local zoning laws.
• Understand landlord-tenant laws, including any rent control measures. 

Compliance with all regulations is crucial to avoid legal complications and ensure smooth operation of your rental property.

Consideration 5: Tenant Demand

Without research into tenant demand, you may believe that you’ve found the perfect rental property. However, additional research is always needed to ensure that tenant demand is there (and is likely to remain).

High-demand areas often yield better rental rates and lower vacancy periods, contributing to a more stable rental income. Conversely, low-demand areas are hypercompetitive and have high vacancy rates. 

Consideration 6: Financing and Expenses

Examine financing options and calculate total expenses, including your mortgage, taxes, insurance, and maintenance costs. While you may not have exact numbers, depending on where you are in the buying process, accurate estimates are a must. With these numbers in hand, you can better choose a financing plan that aligns with your investment goals and cash flow requirements. 

During ownership of the property, regular financial reviews help you effectively manage costs and maximize return on investment. For example, you may find that refinancing your property allows you to save money on interest. Or perhaps a home equity loan positions you to purchase another property. 

Consideration 7: Future Value 

One of the primary benefits of real estate investing is the potential for appreciation. While there’s no guarantee of this, history shows that there’s a good chance your property will gain value over the years. 

When buying, consider the property’s potential for appreciation based on past market performance. Do the following:

• Analyze market trends and future development plans in the area that could enhance property value.
• Evaluate economic stability to determine the growth prospects of the region.
• Monitor housing market indicators such as supply and demand and foreclosure rates.

Your goal is to generate a positive return on investment (ROI) month after month as a landlord, while also owning a property that appreciates. This will make your investment well worth the money. 

Final Thoughts

These are seven of the most important considerations when buying a rental property. While other details will come to light along the way, an early focus on these will point you in the right direction.

Are you ready to take the next step? Before beginning your search for the perfect property, read our eight-step guide. It provides even more information on how to make an informed, confident investment. 

Find an Agent in Minutes

Match with an investor-friendly agent who can help you find, analyze, and close your next deal.

Nick Bailey, Re/Max CEO, joins ‘Closing Bell Overtime’ to talk housing prices, the state of the real estate market, what’s ahead for 2024 and more.

David Greene:
This is the BiggerPockets Podcast. What’s going on everyone? It’s David Greene, your host of the BiggerPockets Real Estate podcast, coming to you from Kauai, and that’s one of the things I love about real estate is I get to bring you guys questions from our listener base from everywhere in the world. My hope is that more of you can get to the same position and we’re going to share some advice today that will help you do just that. Today’s Seeing Greene episode has a lot of good stuff, including what a home equity agreement is and if one should be used. The best ways to reinvest the cashflow that you’re making from your current portfolio today and how you should be thinking about it and a live call with one of our listeners where we go back and forth.
Helping them determine if they should take the money they’ve made in real estate and improve the properties they have or if they should buy new properties and if so, what to be thinking about when going back and forth with that decision. A lot of people in today’s market have equity and they’re trying to figure out how they should use it, and sometimes that means buying more real estate, but sometimes that means improving the real estate they have. I especially like this topic because a lot of people have equity and they’re tapping into it with HELOCs, but they’re not sure if they should use that HELOC money to scale into a bigger portfolio or improve what they’ve got. So we tackle that and more on today’s episode of Seeing Greene.
We’re going to bring in our first guest in a second, but before we do a quick tip for you all. You’re going to hear more about it in the next question, but I am a firm believer, especially if you’ve got a short-term rental that tapping into your equity and using that money to improve the property, improve the decor, add amenities to it, make it look nicer, get better pictures taken, is a quick way to get a return on your capital that can then be used to pay the equity line of credit back down. I don’t love in today’s market taking $200,000 out of a house at a pretty high interest rate and using that for the down payment on a property that you then have to get another loan for the other 80% and stacking up debt when rates are higher.
I’m a much bigger fan of a get in and get out strategy, kind of like using a jet ski instead of a battleship. Take out some equity, fix up your house, improve the revenue, and then pay the equity loan off with that revenue and then, ask yourself how you can do it again. How can you recycle that same 20 or $30,000 to improve the properties you’ve got and win in the short-term rental wars? All right, let’s get to our first guest today. Let’s welcome Stacie to the studio. Stacie, welcome to Seeing Greene. A little bit of background about you. You’ve got a single family property, a duplex, and a piece of property in the Austin area, in New Braunfels, Texas. So funny story here, I almost invested in New Braunfels myself about five years ago and wish I would have, because I would have done very well.
I fell prey to that same problem of, well, when I first heard about it was this much and now it’s $50,000 more. I don’t want to get in too late and made the same mistake that I tell everybody else not to make because I learned it in that example. So congratulations on doing the right do and having a New Braunfels property. So, tell us what’s on your mind today.

Stacie:
Thank you. Yes, so considering those properties we have and our long-term strategy of buy and hold, which we’re a 100% in on, so we have this property in New Braunfels. We actually bought it site unseen and it was a very good purchase for us. It’s zoned multifamily. It’s one block from the Guadalupe River, so it has a single family home on there where we have a long-term renter, but we have the opportunity to develop it because it’s already zoned for multifamily. It’s half an acre lot. Then, we have this plot, this quarter acre plot in Lago Vista near Lake Travis that was given to us from family that also has development opportunity.
So we have these two properties that we own, that have development opportunities, but also, we’re tempted to buy our next investment property. So we’re at the point of trying to decide do we stay the course, leave those properties as is because we have a long-term renter in New Braunfels, we’re cash flowing about $600 a month there, so it’s well paying for itself and then some. Then, we have this lot that’s just sitting there vacant that we’re trying to figure out what to do with. Our duplex in South Austin is cash flowing about $2,100 a month. So we have two long-term rentals there. We’re not looking to develop or do anything with that right now. So we’re at that kind of inflection point.
Do we buy our next investment property or is now the time that we actually do some forced equity and develop the New Braunfels property or build something in Lago Vista?

David Greene:
Alrighty.

Rob:
My first question here is what is the reason that you want to get into the next property? Is the reason you want to get into the next property simply for the sake of growth and you’re like, “Hey, I just want to add to the portfolio. I don’t really need the cash flow,” or do you want to get into another property because you want more cash flow because you need an extra couple of hundred bucks every month?

Stacie:
We don’t need the extra cash every month. We want to grow the portfolio and we also want to invest sort of, I know it’s not about timing the markets, time in market, but it still feels like now is a good time before everyone is back in the market, should rates come down. So we’re kind of feeling that, wanting to get the next property because we do want to grow the portfolio, but also, when is it time to actually develop these properties that we’re sitting on too? So we’re kind of don’t know which way to go necessarily.

Rob:
I think if you’re not pressed for the cash flow and you’ve got a lot and you’ve got a property that is zoned for more property, I’m a big fan of making as many streams of income off of one property as possible. So, if you have the steam and if you have sort of the dedication and I guess the open mind to just go through a new construction, then I think you should do it. A big fan, I actually think that new construction is just the best way to combat a lot of things that are happening right now because yes, you will be getting something at a higher interest if you buy a property. So for me, I’m like, I think if you can go and build something at your cost without the markup of someone … if you go and buy a new construction off of Redfin, you’re paying their cost and you’re paying a premium for it, right?
So if you can go and build something at your cost, it’s not really that same markup as getting it off the MLS and when you refi out and get your money out, you’ll have a higher interest rate on that of course, but it won’t hurt quite as bad as having gone and purchased a property straight off the MLS, if that makes sense. So if you have the ability to wait it out for let’s say 12 to 18 months, then I definitely think building from the ground up is a really smart thing to do right now.

David Greene:
All right. I will weigh in on this too. I love the question. It comes up a lot where I live in the Bay Area, you typically see this in more expensive areas, where the question is do I build an ADU or do I buy a new house? And the tricky thing is you can’t finance the build. If you could finance the build, it would almost always be an easy, “Yeah, just improve the property you’ve got.” The problem is you got to put a lot of capital down to do it. So I like to try to simplify this turning into apples to apples as much as I can. And I asked the question of, for the capital I’m going to put into this thing, how much cash flow am I going to receive?
What’s the ROI on that and how much equity am I going to build? What’s the return on investment on that? So if you were to add to the property that you already have, how much money would you have to put down to do this and do you think it would increase the equity

Stacie:
For the New Braunfels property, we probably would have to put down about 200,000 in capital to build an ADU, at least an ADU, right? A prefab ADU would probably be about 200,000, all in. For the Lago Vista property, we’re looking at probably 250 upwards to half a million of capital to put in to develop that property, because it is raw land, it’s going to require a lot more clearance and work to get that property ready for building. So I don’t think we would do both at the same time. I think we’re kind of anxious to really look at … I think the New Braunfels property has the most potential because it is such a growing area and the location of it is prime, being a block from the Guadalupe River. So I think there’s a lot of upside to developing New Braunfels from all that I can tell.

David Greene:
So if you put the $200,000 into New Braunfels, would you add equity to the property?

Stacie:
Yes, I believe we would add equity to the property.

David Greene:
How much do you think you’d be adding?

Stacie:
I think we probably would be adding … we bought it two years ago. We have probably about … I’m going to say about 40,000 in equity in just the past two years in the property. So if we add an ADU, we’d also have to configure the front house a bit too to put the ADU in. I don’t know, but I’m going to guess that we would probably add about … immediately about a hundred, 150,000 in equity in that property. Does that sound about right, the numbers I’ve shared?

David Greene:
I don’t know the area. Yeah, it could. It could work. What about the cash flow? If you build an ADU for $200,000, what will it rent for?

Stacie:
Yeah, because right now, we’re renting, all in P and I is like 1800. 18, 1900 we’re renting for 25 on the single family home, so we’ve got nice cash flow there. We can build up to 1,000 square foot ADU without it being considered a second principal structure on the property. So 1,000 square foot, we could probably rent that, I’m going to say around 18, 1900 in today’s market for 1,000 square feet.

David Greene:
Okay. Would this increase the property taxes on the property if you add to this work, make it worth more?

Stacie:
Most likely.

David Greene:
And then where are they at New Braunfels like two and a half percent or so?

Stacie:
No, it’s right around 2%. It’s like 1.97, something like that. Yeah.

David Greene:
So that is a pretty healthy return. I mean, you’re having additional property taxes and there’s going to be more insurance, but still, I believe you said it was 1800, you think that you’d rent it for?

Stacie:
Yes.

David Greene:
So let’s say you keep say, 1400 of that to invest 200,000. That’s not a bad deal there. You’re not too far off from the 1% rule. The downside would be you’re spending $200,000 to add $100,000 of equity, so you’re actually losing equity in a sense because you’re transferring that money from your bank account into the property. You’re going to lose $100,000 of value there, but you’re going to gain the extra cash flow of say, $1,400 a month or $1,300 a month. Now, here’s why I framed it that way. I think your job here, Stacie, is to ask yourself with this $200,000, if I put it into a different investment vehicle, could I get better than say 13 or $1,400 a month and avoid losing a $100,000 of equity? Could you put $200,000 into building a new home construction that you might gain $100,000 of equity at the end instead of losing it?
That’s a $200,000 swing, or maybe you get better cash flow, maybe the cash flow is not as good, but you don’t lose as much equity. Have you looked into opportunities like that?

Stacie:
I haven’t, no.

David Greene:
Okay. That’s how my mind goes to it. What if you paid cash for something that was $200,000, maybe a fixer upper, you fixed it up and then, you refinanced out of it, you could do it again, or you could buy a million dollar property, put $200,000 down, so you’ve got those. In my mind, you’ve got the three options. You put it as a down payment on something, you pay cash for something or you put it into the property you have. Rob, what are you thinking?

Rob:
Yeah, I guess I’d really want to … and we’re not going to be able to solve for this on this episode unfortunately, but I’d want to know what kind of equity we’d be adding because I think it’s, I’m not going to say rare, but I feel like if you’re building something on your property such as an ADU or a secondary unit, I feel like the equity that you’re building should be pretty commensurate with the amount of money that you’re investing, right? So it’s like I think if you were going to spend 200 but you’re only getting a $100,000 in equity, then yeah, I would agree with David. I probably wouldn’t do that.
I’d go find somewhere where I’d get the one for one ratio on that, but I do wonder if you would get that full equity out of adding an addition to the property. If the answer is yes, I would go that route and then build it and then, do a cash-out refi and try to get as much of that money back, because if you do that and you get a pretty significant portion of your money back, then your ROI skyrockets in that point. I’m a big fan of this strategy solely because you get to stack income streams on one property and it really makes a huge difference. I had a property in LA. When I bought it, it was $400 mortgage. I’ve since refinanced, it’s like 4,200 now, but I now rent out the main home, which goes for … anywhere from 3,500 to $5,000 a month.
I’ve got an ADU in the backyard that goes for anywhere from 2300 to $3,000 a month, and I even have a third unit that I don’t rent out, but I used to, and that was another $2,000 for that unit. So when you added it all up, it was like $8,000 on one property and your profit margins on that are just so healthy. Your landscaping bills are all consolidated to that one property. All of your bills are just consolidated into this one business, and that’s why I’m a big fan of building up basically as many income streams on one property as possible, assuming that your equity that you put in is one for one on the investment that you put in.

David Greene:
That’s the key there, Stacie. I don’t love the deal if you’re putting in more money than you’re gaining in equity. Hearing that, what’s going through your mind.

Stacie:
Yeah. No, that makes a ton of sense. I’m not 100% on all the numbers. This is as far as I’ve been able to get, but I will dig deeper in terms of the actual equity we’d be able to get out of that property. Yeah, and just to throw a curveball here, right? Our house in Los Angeles, we’re in the San Fernando Valley, we’re in Encino up in the hills. That’s why my internet is a little spotty. I mean, we were originally going to keep this house and sell it or not sell it, but use that as sort of our investment property here, rent it out. Our latest thinking was to sell this house to buy more properties in Texas.
So we’re trying to treat all of our homes as sort of part of the portfolio and how do we leverage them to the maximum, and I know David, you’re up in Northern California, but I don’t know, we were sort of starting to think that we just wanted to get out of California.

David Greene:
Shocking. I’ve never heard anybody say this.

Stacie:
Yeah, never, right?

David Greene:
Yeah. It’s something to think about because you probably have a lot of equity there. I don’t think it would benefit you to sell it and put the money into Texas, unless you know where you’re going to put the money, and it sounds like you got to figure that problem out first. Where are we going to deploy our capital and how are we going to deploy it? I don’t think it’s going to be as simple as let’s just build onto what we already have. There may be something where I would want to take some of that cash and look for a way to buy something that was maybe distressed that I could fix up and add value to it, although it’s not bad building an ADU in that area where you know you’re going to have tenants, you know the values are going to be going up.
It’s not going to hurt you. I just hate those high Texas property taxes, right? If the property value does go up, those taxes hurt out of the cash flow you’d be getting.

Stacie:
They do, and insurance is going up too, so that’s every year, steadily insurance is going up.

David Greene:
That’s right. Well, thank you Stacie. This was a good question. I think more and more people are asking this question because rates are high, so it’s not an automatic, yes, I should go buy another property. Now, the rates are getting really high. It’s hard to make them cash flow. So we’re starting to ask questions like this, so thank you for bringing this up.

Stacie:
Thank you guys.

David Greene:
Thank you, Stacie.

Rob:
Thank you.

David Greene:
All right, thank you Stacie for joining us today. I just dropped Rob off at a Chipotle, so I’ll be flying solo for the rest of today’s episode, but big thank you to Rob for joining. I was so appreciative that I actually left him with a dollar so he could get some extra guac on that burrito that he loves so much. His tip for getting the most out of one property is a great takeaway and I appreciate him sharing that. If you would like to have Rob and I, or me or anyone else in the BP universe answer your specific questions, head over to biggerpockets.com/david where you can submit them and that will make me like you. If you’ve submitted a question to Seeing Greene, you can consider yourself my friend, and when we see each other at BP Con, I will take a picture with you, hug you and say something nice.
I hope you’re getting some value out of today’s conversation and our listener questions so far, but we’ve got more coming up after this section. I like to take a minute in the middle of our shows to share comments that you all have left on YouTube or when you review the podcast. Our first review comes from 1981 South Bay. “Love the Seeing Greene episodes. I love these episodes and it’s a great addition to have Rob on the series. My wife and I have been listening to Bigger Pockets for two years. We finally just bought our first two duplexes and are planning to acquire more properties. We could not have done it without this podcast and the community. Thank you, David, Rob, and the entire BP community.”
Well, thank you South Bay for a five-star review. That’s freaking awesome. I hope some of our listeners go and follow your lead and also, if you’re in the South Bay of the Northern California Bay Area, we’re basically neighbors. I live about an hour away from you, so make sure that you reach out on Instagram. Let me know you are the one who left that comment and let’s see, if we can get you coming up to some of the meetups that I do in Northern California. We’ve got some comments here from the Seeing Greene episode 840 that came directly off of the YouTube channel. The first one comes from Dan Cohan. “Thanks for sharing this awesome video. I really relate to the struggles of estimating renovation costs, especially when you’re investing in real estate from far away.” And then Laura Peffer added, “Yes, please do an entire show on To Cash Flow or Not to Cash flow.”
Well, you’ve spoken and we’ve listened. We actually did record a show on when it’s okay or maybe not okay to buy non-cash flowing properties and I will talk to our production staff about putting a show together that says, is cash flow the only reason to invest in real estate or is it okay to not invest in it? Maybe we’ll have a back and forth where we have the cash flow defenders and the appreciation avengers or however we’re going to call that. In case you missed it, go back and listen to episode 853, which was released on December 6th where we break down three negative cashflow deals. All right, let’s get into the next question. All right, our next question comes from Roy Gottsteiner. He is a foreign national living abroad, so he’s having a difficult time getting financing.
He can only get 60 to 65% loan to value ratios and no access to products like FHA or HELOC. Roy started four years ago investing in North Carolina and Ohio and currently has a portfolio of 10 single-family housing rentals. He does mainly BRRR and long-term traditional rentals and recently started doing some medium terms. Roy says, “Hi David. These episodes are extremely helpful and are helping me to constantly adjust my thinking based on the current market dynamics as well as my own position in the investing journey, so thanks for everything. I built a portfolio of 10 units, which cashflow two to $3,000 a month. I’m 35 and I have a great job, so I don’t need this income and intend to reinvest all of it.”
“I’m trying to think of the best way to use that money to further enhance my progress towards financial independence. Here’s some options I had in mind, but happy to hear your thoughts. If there’s anything else I need to be thinking of. Investing it regularly into a stock index and dollar cost averaging for a long-term hold. Dollar cost averaging basically means you just keep buying stock even if the price is dropping. It’s funny that we came up with this phrase, dollar cost averaging to say, well just keep buying even if the price is going lower because eventually it’s going to go up and you will have bought it at a lower average than the prices when they were high. Number two, paying off mortgages on my investment properties to reduce leverage and increase cashflow.”
“Number three, save the money and try finding a creative finance deal with a 30,000 dollar entry each year. My last purchase was a sub two with a 42,000 dollar entry, and it was a great one. Looking forward to your sage advice.” All right, thank you for that question. I appreciate that. I can answer this one pretty quick. I don’t love the idea of paying off your mortgages, especially because if you bought them and you have 10 of them, they probably have pretty low rates right now, so you’re not saving a ton of money doing that. You also have to pay a ton of mortgage off before you actually don’t have to make the payment when it’s owned free and clear, so you don’t really see the return on that money for years.
It might be 10, 15, 20 years of trying to pay these things off before you actually get rid of that interest on your mortgage. So what will happen is you’ll build the equity in it faster, but you won’t put money in your bank faster. So I don’t love that idea and I don’t love investing into the stock index, because I don’t want to give advice about something that I don’t really understand and I don’t know that there’s any solid advice I can give anybody when it comes to investing in stocks. I also just think you’ll do better with real estate long term. So your third option, saving the money and trying to find a creative finance deal like the one you did last time is pretty good.
And here’s why I like that. If you don’t find the creative finance deal, you just have more reserves and you’re never going to find me upset about someone who has a lot of reserves, especially considering the economy that we are going into. In the past, success was all about scaling and acquiring. How many doors can you get? That was the cocktail party brag, I have this many doors. In the future, I believe, it’s going to be, what can you keep? How can you hold on to the real estate you’ve already bought? And reserves can be a huge factor in saving you there. All right, moving into our next question. This comes from Chris Lloyd in Hampton Roads, Virginia.

Chris Lloyd:
Hey David. My name is Chris Lloyd from Newport News, Virginia. And here’s my question. I currently have a property I was looking to renovate and I plan to fund this renovation using a HELOC. I’ve got two properties with some good equity in it and I found out recently that I can’t qualify for a HELOC because I’ve been self-employed for less than two years. Took my business full-time a little over a year ago. So I’ve been looking in other ways to finance this project and came across home equity agreements. This isn’t something I’ve really heard talked about on the podcast and I was wondering if there was a reason why. If this is a newer product, if it’s just getting traction or if this product is absolute junk, I don’t know. So I’m asking what instances would this make sense for someone to use and when and would it not make sense?

David Greene:
All right, Chris, thank you for that question. Appreciate it. My advice would be, no, I don’t think you should take on a home equity agreement unless you’re in dire financial straits. And even if you are, I’d probably prefer that you sold the house, took your equity and moved on to something else. All right, our last question is going to come from Nick Lynch and it’s a video question.

Nick Lynch:
Hey David, this is Nick Lynch from Sacramento, California. Thank you for everything that you and BiggerPockets do. I love you guy’s content. I’m hoping to buy my first home in the greater Sacramento area of California when my current lease ends April 30th of 2024. My question for you is what would be the best method to get in to my first home and into investing at the same time, given how high the prices are in California. I’m considering house hacking, house hopping, or simply buying a primary residence I’m comfortable living in long-term and using the remainder of the fund that would have after a down payment to maybe invest in out-of-state property that could capital more easily.
My biggest concern with house hacking or house hopping in California, that the property is so expensive, it would take a very large down payment to get those properties to cash flow even after living in them for a couple of years. Thanks, David. Appreciate the help.

David Greene:
All right, Nick, glad you reached out. We actually do a lot of business in the David Greene team in the Sacramento area, and we help people with stuff like this all the time. The key to house hacking is not about paying the mortgage down or buying a cheap home. The key to house hacking successfully, and by that I mean moving out of it and having it cash for later. What I often call the sneaky rental tactic because you can get a rental property for 5% down or three point a half percent down instead of 20% down if you live in it first, is finding an actual property with a floor plan that would work. We’ve helped clients do this by buying properties with a high bedroom and bathroom count because that’s more units that they can create to generate revenue.
We’ve also had people that we’ve helped doing this when they rent out part of the home as a short-term rental or a floor plan that can be moved around where walls are added to create more than one unit in the property itself. The key is not to focus on the expenses and keeping them low, but to focus on the income and getting it high. So when you’re looking for the property, what you really want to do is look for a floor plan that either has a lot of bedrooms and bathrooms and has sufficient parking and is also in an area that people want to rent from, or you want to look for a floor plan where the basement that you could live in and you rent out maybe two units above or two units above and it has an ADU.
Something where you can get much more revenue coming in on the property which you have more control over. I call that forced cashflow than a property that you just bought at a lower price because that’s not realistic. If you’re trying to buy in a high appreciation market like Northern California where wages are high and the market is strong, you are less likely to find a cheap house. Reach out to me directly and I’ll see if we can help you with that and start looking at properties with the most square footage and then, asking yourself, how could I manipulate and maneuver the square footage to where this would be a good house hack. Great question though, and I wish you the best in your endeavors.
All right, everyone that is Seeing Greene for today, I so appreciate you being here with me and giving me your attention and allowing me to help educate you on real estate investing and growing wealth through real estate because I’m passionate about it and I love you guys. I really hope I was able to help some of you brave souls who took the action and ask me the questions that I was able to answer for everyone else. And I look forward to answering more of your questions. Go to biggerpockets.com/david and submit your question to be on Seeing Greene. Hope you guys enjoyed today’s show and I will see you on the next episode of Seeing Greene.