Home Prices Could Stagnate for Years

We may be entering a rare period where home prices stagnate for years. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen real estate prices not appreciate year-over-year, but this reality is becoming increasingly likely every day. With low affordability, high mortgage rates, rising supply, and steady demand, the tables are starting to turn for one of the hottest asset classes of the past decade (real estate). The question is, should you buy fully knowing prices won’t rise anytime soon? J Scott has been investing in real estate for decades. He’s been through the booms and the busts and has maintained a very even demeanor, even in the best and worst of times. So, we brought on a real estate veteran to answer a simple question: Is real estate still worth investing in with stagnant prices, and if so, how do you make appreciation when the market won’t give it to you? J shares why home prices will likely stay flat or even dip for years to come, the strategies you can still use to raise your property values by sizable margins, two types of financing that work best for times like these (and benefit the investor), and when real estate could bounce back. Scared to invest when you don’t know where prices are going? Listen to J’s advice! In This Episode We Cover Real estate price predictions and how long we could go with a sideways market The two things that control home prices and the direction they’re going in Could real estate prices crash in the near future? How to use inflation to your advantage and get more from the banks Two creative ways to finance your next rental that work best in price-stagnant markets One real estate niche that could be bottoming out with significant price discounts And So Much More! Check out more resources from this show on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BiggerPockets.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-1162 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dave Meyer?

  Home prices always go up, but what if they don't? Housing appreciation is the bedrock of real estate investing and in a lot of ways of the entire US economy. But prices aren't really going up right now and they may actually fall for a while. And although no one wants to talk about it, we have to talk about it. This is how to invest profitably while home prices decline.

• 0:28Dave Meyer?

  Hey, everyone. I'm Dave Meyer. I'm a housing market analyst and I've been investing in real estate for more than 15 years. And on the BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast, we help you achieve financial freedom through rental properties. Today on the show, we are talking about a big change in the housing market. Home price appreciation has really slowed a lot in recent years and prices, at least to me, are likely to begin to decline in a lot of markets by the end of the year. Now, to be clear, I am not saying we are headed for a real estate crash. There is no evidence that something like that is imminent and I'm not saying prices will never go up again. In the long run, they very, very likely will.

• 1:08Dave Meyer?

  But prices falling at all is not a dynamic we've seen in a long time. So I want to talk about how investors can take advantage of the very real opportunities this kind of market provides and protects themselves against risk, even if they can't just pencil in growth every single year without analyzing deals. Here to do that with me is my longtime friend, the co-author of my book, Real Estate by the Numbers, and friend of the show and BiggerPockets in general, Jay Scott. Jay, welcome back to the show.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me once again. Glad to be here.

• 1:42Dave Meyer?

  I am glad to have you. I was thinking about this topic and instantly you came to mind as the person to have this conversation with.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  I have been saying, going on three or four years now, that my belief is that real estate prices have substantially plateaued.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  And will stay somewhere in the vicinity of where they are for maybe the next three, four, five, six years. And the reason for that is because historically, what we see is that real estate tracks inflation. If you go from 1900 to about 2014 and you you kind of graph out the inflation trend line and the real estate home values trend line, they basically go from the same starting point to the same ending point. Now, they diverged for a little bit there in in 2008, but they they kind of reconverged around 2013 or 14. Good reason to believe, based on that, that long term housing should grow at about the rate of inflation.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Now, we've seen over the last few years since 2014, and especially since 2020, that we've those those two trend lines have significantly diverged again. So housing has gone much higher than than the inflation trend line. So one possibility is that we see housing prices come crashing back down and and those two trend lines kind of intersect again. But my thesis is that, given where we are in terms of the inflationary cycle, given where we are in terms of supply and demand characteristics in the market, that what's more likely is that inflation is going to continue to go up over the next several years, but real estate is going to stay flat, and those two trend lines will meet up again at some point in the future.

• 3:24Dave Meyer?

  I've sort of reached a similar conclusion, looking at a different metric, because I think the inflation argument makes a lot of sense, what you just said. There's also sort of the affordability piece of it, too, which, you know, we are at near 40 year historic lows for affordability. And a lot of people point out, say like, oh, the the market needs to crash in order to get back closer, at least, to historic affordability. Not necessarily. I think most of the economists I talk to, either on this show or on on the market, you know, what they point to is like, what can happen instead of a market crash is that prices stay flat and hopefully wages start to increase, maybe rates come down a little

• 4:07Dave Meyer?

  bit, and then you sort of get this gradual restoration of affordability. It doesn't have to be this big event. If prices just stay even, that can still happen over time. So it's like two different, two different. Methodologies, but sort of reaching a similar conclusion.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, and here's the other way I like to think about it, and we can take a 10,000-foot view of it, but at the end of the day, if we want to see higher prices, if we think there are going to be higher prices, we need to argue why we think supply is either going to go down more, or demand is going to increase more. And I think it's unlikely that we see either of those in the near future. Supply is already at, or it was as of a few months ago, it's starting to go up in a lot of markets. But as of a few months ago, supply was basically at a historic low. And demand right now is tremendously high. We're undersupplied on housing. A lot of people want to buy houses, whether it's residential homeowners, whether it's investors, there's a ton of demand. I've heard numbers, something like $200 billion

• 5:05Speaker 01

  to $300 billion of cash sitting on the sidelines looking for a home in real estate. And so, I think it's unlikely that over the next couple of years, we're going to see lower supply and higher demand. So I don't think prices are going to go up significantly. So then the question is, are we going to see prices go down? And for that to happen, we'd have to see the opposite. We'd either have to see much higher supply, or higher supply, and lower demand. And I think it's possible that we're going to see that. So let's talk about each of those sides. So on the supply side, what would it take to see higher supply? The obvious answer, the obvious answer is a recession. So if people are forced to sell for some reason, if people are losing their jobs, if they're having their hours cut,

• 5:50Speaker 01

  if they're having their wages cut, if they can't pay their mortgage, if they have to move to another town to get a better job or a different job, we're going to see supply go up, people are going to be forced to sell their houses. Then we have to ask the question, how about on the demand side? For prices to come down, not only is supply going to have to go up, but for prices to come down, we're going to want to see some less demand as well, because there's so much demand out there right now, that if supply went up a little bit, if 5% or 10% more people wanted to sell their house, there's enough demand out there that it would probably be absorbed, and prices probably wouldn't drop. So I think to see a significant drop in prices, the big thing we would have to see is a big drop in demand.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  And I think there's only two things that lead to a big drop in demand. One, a recession so bad. That investors and homeowners are terrified to buy again. So for anybody that was investing in 2008, we remember this. We saw prices drop by 10, 20, 30, in some places 40 or 50%. And a lot of us who weren't investing, if you weren't investing in 2008, you're probably thinking, wow, prices dropped 50%? How could I not have been buying everything out there? And the answer is, it was a scary time. You woke up every day thinking, how much worse is this going to get? Is this ever going to recover? This could be a 10 or 20-year recession. That's what it felt like back then. And so, nobody, even though we had the opportunity to buy at amazing prices,

• 7:13Speaker 01

  it was hard to pull the trigger because it was so scary. So that's one thing that could happen that could reduce demand. The second thing that could happen that could reduce demand was another thing that happened in 2008 due to the recession, and that's banks stop lending. When banks stop lending, even if people want to buy houses, they're not going to be able to. So my thesis is that it's unlikely prices are going to go up because it's unlikely that supply is going to drop more, or demand's going to go up more. And it's unlikely we're going to see significant drop in prices, simply because for that to happen, we would have to have a major, major recession where people were too scared to buy and banks were too scared to lend. And I think that's unlikely as well. So again, if you look at it in that context, I think it's also a good argument for why I believe prices are likely to be relatively stagnant

• 7:58Speaker 01

  over the next few years.

• 7:59Dave Meyer?

  I do tend to agree with you, Jay. Thank you for that explanation and for similar reasons. I would imagine that people are wondering, what about if rates come down? Could that dramatically increase demand without a corresponding increase in supply? Because like, that's kind of the key, right? It could increase demand, but if supply goes up at the same rate, then prices don't really grow that much.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  There's another intermediate discussion we need to have. You mentioned rates. And so, a big question is, do we think rates are coming down? And what would it take for rates to come down? And I think this is the discussion I have with a lot of real estate investors that they really don't like to hear. But the reality is, I think it's highly unlikely that we're going to see significantly lower interest rates unless we see a significantly softer economy. Unless we see a recession. We're not going to see lower rates. Well, it's, I don't think it's a given for a lot of people because there's a lot of talk now that the Federal Reserve is going to be pressured to lower rates or that the President's going to fire Jerome Powell or Jerome Powell's term is going to end

• 9:05Speaker 01

  the beginning of next year and he's going to be replaced with somebody who's a little bit more, a little bit more dovish on rates and is willing to cut rates. But my personal opinion is, and there's a lot of data that supports this, if the Fed cuts their key interest rate, called the federal funds rate, without a corresponding softening in the economy, it's not going to bring down mortgage rates.

• 9:29Dave Meyer?

  I agree.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  It's very possible that we can see the Fed drop rates. In fact, we saw that three times last year.

• 9:33Dave Meyer?

  Cut rates and mortgage rates went up.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, and mortgage rates went up. And so I don't think it's the Fed dropping rates that's going to lead to mortgage rates coming down. It would have to be a softening in the economy. And if you have a softening in the economy, well, that leads to the other questions of how many people are dealing with job losses? How bad is that softening in that recession? And is it going to trigger other concerns that are going to impact supply and demand outside of just rates?

• 9:59Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, well, I'm on the downer, the buzzkill train with you today. I put on, on the market, I put out a forecast for mortgage rates for the rest of the year. And I said, I don't think they're going much lower than they are today at 6.5%. And that, you know, maybe they will. But I believe that sort of regardless of what the Fed does, I don't think the bond market's going to move. I think that, I've said this before, and you can listen to the other podcasts if you want to get into this. But, but, you know, just so everyone knows, mortgage rates are not controlled by the Fed. The Fed controls the federal fund rate, which impacts short-term lending and borrowing costs. That is one element that impacts the bond market and mortgage costs, but is not the only one.

• 10:42Dave Meyer?

  And I personally just think there is so much uncertainty in the global economy that's going on that... Bond investors are going to need to see a lot more data, a lot more clarity around not just what the federal funds rate is, but inflation, GDP growth, geopolitical tensions. All this stuff needs to be, we need to get some line of sight on where it's going before the bond market's going to move a lot in either direction, in my opinion. And so that's where I think mortgage rates are going the same. But that's where I stand. So I think Jay and I, maybe we're buzzkills, but I think the whole point here is that like, at least to me, I think there are ways, even with rates as high as they are, even if you're going to have sideways prices, that you could still invest in real estate.

• 11:26Dave Meyer?

  So I do want to talk to you about how you might go about that. We've got to take a quick break, though. We'll be right back. Summer bookings sound great until someone slips by the pool, gets hurt on your dock, or damages your property during a long holiday weekend. A lot of short-term rental investors don't realize their standard policy may leave gaps when it comes to short-term rental activity. That's why investors use Steadily. They offer landlord insurance built for real estate investors, including short-term rentals. And if you're a BiggerPockets Pro member, you'll also get 5% off your landlord insurance premiums. Visit biggerpockets.com/landlordinsurance to learn more. Do you ever notice how every passive investment somehow turns into a very active lifestyle?

• 12:09Dave Meyer?

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• 13:31Henry Washington?

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• 13:48Dave Meyer?

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• 14:34Dave Meyer?

  Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. I'm here with Jay Scott talking about how to invest in a world where, you know, home prices might be flat for a while, rates might stay where they are. Jay, does that mean that real estate is dead? Or are there ways that you can still earn a profit?

• 14:50Speaker 01

  I don't think that means real estate is dead. In fact, what I've been saying for as long as I've been doing these podcasts with you, Dave, and before you, David Green, and Brandon Turner, and Josh Dorkin, I've been saying this for literally over a decade now, that we shouldn't be banking on appreciation. Even if we think we're going to see significant appreciation over the next several years, we shouldn't be putting our faith in that. We shouldn't be running numbers based on that. We shouldn't be making purchase decisions based on that. A very smart person that I saw speak at a conference a couple of weeks ago said it best. He said, "Don't pay $3 for an asset that's worth $1 in the hopes that it goes to $5."

• 15:34Dave Meyer?

  Yes, yeah.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  That's not a good investing strategy.

• 15:38Dave Meyer?

  That's speculation.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  A good investing strategy is buying a property that's worth $1 for 50 cents, and maybe you get lucky and it goes to $5. But you're buying it for the inherent value on the day you purchase it, not the potential value a year, two years, five, 10 years down the road.

• 15:58Dave Meyer?

  Because you are so consistent about this, this is exactly why I wanted to have you on to talk about this. You have been preaching this strategy for as long as I've been listening to you for a long time.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  I have. And let me tell you something. It means that buying real estate today is harder.

• 16:13Dave Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  And in some ways, less profitable than it has been in the past, or at least less profitable short-term than it has been in the past. But when you look at real estate, the benefits that real estate provides outside of appreciation, again, maybe we'll get lucky and maybe, maybe prices will go up. And we don't even have to get lucky. If you're going to hold a property for 10 years or 15 years, it's going to go up in value. There's been, there's been no 10-year period in history where real estate hasn't gone up in value. So we will get the appreciation. It just may not be next week, or next month, or next year. But there are other benefits to real estate that we should be focused on in a market where prices are flat, or even where prices might be coming down, that still can

• 16:56Speaker 01

  be beneficial to buy real estate in a market where you're concerned prices are coming down. Because we don't know. I mean, I remember back in 2020, people thinking that it was the end of the world and real estate was going to crash, and everybody was sitting saying, "Okay, as soon as we see a 10% drop, or a 20% drop, or a 30% drop, I'm buying." And here we are, four years later, and prices have gone up 50%.

• 17:19Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, you missed the biggest bull run in real estate, probably, in history.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  Exactly. So even if we're quote-unquote "certain" that prices are coming down, we don't know that for sure. Okay, so what are these other reasons to buy real estate besides appreciation? Number one is cash flow, and...

• 17:36Speaker 01

  That's the thing that we're not going to see nearly as much of today as we would have seen three or four years ago when interest rates were really low, or 15 years ago when values were really low. To get good cash flow, you either need low values or relatively high rents to value, or you need low interest rates. We're not going to get that today. So, we may not be buying for cash flow, but the key is you want to buy properties that generate at least enough cash flow that it's going to pay all of your expenses and your mortgage every month. You don't want to be losing money Correct. each month, because that's not sustainable. It might be sustainable for a couple of weeks or a couple of months, maybe even a year or two, but most of us can't sustain losing money every month for the next 10 years. So buy properties that they don't necessarily

• 18:19Speaker 01

  have to have a lot of cash flow, but enough that they're maintaining themselves. They pay for their, all their expenses and their mortgage every month. So that's number one, is cash flow. Number two is principal pay down. So one of the best benefits of real estate is the ability to get large loans against your, your asset. You can buy a house, you can get a loan for 60, 65, 70, 75% of the value, and your tenant is now paying that loan for you. And so over time, over five, 10, 15, 30 years, your tenant is paying off that loan. So that $300,000 property that you bought for $50,000 because you got a $250,000 loan, well, your tenant has now paid off and that $250,000 loan is now your

• 19:04Speaker 01

  equity. So loan pay down i- is a huge one. And then finally is the tax benefits. And we don't talk about this enough, but there are tremendous tax benefits in real estate, even with single-family houses. So we, we talk about, or I've talked about a lot in the past, that over the course of my career, the rental houses I've ho- I've held have generated about a 15%

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Return year over year. And that's inclusive of the cash flow. It's inclusive of the cash benefits. That's inclusive of the principal pay down. But a significant portion of that is the tax benefits. A significant portion of what I'm earning is the tax benefits. And the nice thing about tax benefits is it basically keeps money in your pocket so that you can invest in other things. So you're not giving that money to the government as soon and sometimes not at all. And that allows you to invest and compound your money more quickly. So tax benefits are a huge benefit. So again, even if you're not getting the appreciation or you don't expect to get the appreciation, there's still a lot of great benefits to investing and there's no reason to stop investing at any time if you can get one, two, or three of those other benefits.

• 20:13Dave Meyer?

  The way I think about it is those three provide a really nice floor for your investment because they're very low risk. If you are analyzing your deals correctly and you're producing positive cash flow, you shouldn't have risk in that because you're accounting for all of your expenses. And I know some people go on social media and they're like, cash flow is not, you know, you might have cash flow until your hot water heater breaks. Well, if you're not accounting for the hot water heater breaking, you didn't have cash flow in the first place. You had bad math. You were just not thinking about this the right way. But if you have real cash flow amortization and tax benefits, those things, they don't care about market cycles. Like sure, there are times when rents go down, but those are very few and far between.

• 20:58Dave Meyer?

  There are times when vacancies go up a little bit. That can happen, but it is, you know, those are minor things. They're relatively low risk. And then, as Jay said, that's what allows you to earn a return while you're holding on to the property for 10 years, like you said. And then properties will at least keep pace with inflation over the long run, you know? And then sometimes you might get these beneficial times where they do, we might not, we don't know. But like then you put you in a position, so you're already earning a decent return, a strong return, and then you have the opportunity to maybe earn some amazing return if it so happens to in your area or macroeconomic conditions allow it.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  And let's talk about something else. I mean, when is it a good time to borrow money? Obviously you want to borrow money against good assets anytime, cash flowing assets anytime, but the best time to borrow money is in an inflationary environment. If we have a decent amount of inflation, borrowing money today is going to be paid off in dollars that are worth less in the future. Inflation means our money is going down in value. And so if we expect that we're going to see a good bit of inflation over the next year, or five years, or 10 years, now's a great time to be borrowing money because that's another benefit that it's hard to calculate exactly how much it helps us, but I promise you, it helps us. And so I personally believe that we are heading into what's likely to be an inflationary

• 22:24Speaker 01

  part of the economic cycle. I think that over the next five to 10 years, we're going to see higher than average inflation, regardless of what the government does, regardless of what the Federal Reserve does, because that's just where we are in the cycle, both our debt cycle, our currency cycle, the economic cycle. And so if you think we're going to have a good bit of inflation over the next five to 10 years, having a lot of debt, good debt, is going to be an extra benefit.

• 22:52Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, inflationary cycles hurt the lenders, not the borrowers and these kinds of situations.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  100%. I wouldn't want to be lending money over the next 10 years, but I definitely want to be borrowing.

• 23:01Dave Meyer?

  Definitely not long-term lending. You know, short-term lending is a little different, but yeah, long-term lending. So this all makes a lot of sense to me. One thing I thought you would mention though, Jay, is, and we should talk about it, is like the distinction between what in our book we wrote together called market appreciation, which is like macroeconomic forces. And then there's this other thing that some people call forced depreciation, some people call it value add, whatever it is. But the idea of buying an asset that is not up to its highest and best use, renovating it and bringing it up, what do you think about doing that in this type of market?

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm surprised it didn't flow out naturally. But yeah, so I kind of disregarded appreciation, but as you said, there really are two types of appreciation. There's the marketer, natural appreciation, the thing we can't control, and then the forced depreciation, the thing we can control. You buy something that's run down for 50 cents on the dollar. You put in 30 cents on the dollar and now it's worth the full dollar. You've basically, you've built equity by fixing up that property. And I think there is a ton of benefit there. I think there's, there's a lot of benefit there, probably more than a lot of points in history

• 24:18Speaker 01

  for the sole reason that we've seen a lot fewer transactions over the last five years, 10 years, because interest rates have been low, sellers haven't sold as much. So we have a lot of owners who have held their properties for longer than the average period of time. And the longer a homeowner owns a property, most homeowners don't do a good job of keeping up with repairs and, and maintenance, et cetera. And so if homeowners are keeping their properties for longer, when they do sell them, they're going to be more distressed. And so I suspect over the next couple of years, as we start to see these properties hitting the market that were purchased in 2015, 16, 17, 18, they're going to be more distressed than the typical home that we're accustomed to buying.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  And that distress is going to allow us to do a couple of things. One, hopefully buy it a little bit cheaper than, than we otherwise could. But two, add that value through renovations, through, through improvement of the property so that we can force the value up there as well.

• 25:18Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, I am seeing this as a big opportunity right now for all the reasons you just said. I also was looking at some study recently and some data that shows that during these kind of sideways markets, or when we get into more of a buyer's market like we're getting into now, the housing market splits a little bit. And a lot of times really great assets, even if, you know, in your neighborhood, in your city, if prices are flat or maybe even declining a little bit, certain assets are still going to keep growing or they're going to hold their value. And usually that's like things that are really nicely renovated and that are move-in ready. Meanwhile, the properties that start to lose their value are the distressed ones.

• 26:01Dave Meyer?

  We got away from this during COVID where everyone was just buying anything that they could get their hands on, including distressed properties. And that premium that you usually pay for a nice stabilized asset sort of went away. People were paying that same premium for distressed assets. Now we're sort of going back to that normal time where there's an appropriate level of discount on distressed assets and that increases the potential margin, I think, for flipping. Sure, but also just it could be a burr or it could just even be buying a rental property that needs a facelift, you know, and giving it that facelift, driving up rents and increasing the value.

• 26:45Dave Meyer?

  No, I a hundred percent agree. All right, well, I do want to hear from you, Jay, some other strategies that you think would work well in this environment, but we got to take one more quick break. We'll be right back. For my wife's birthday, I wanted to make her a new website for her landscape design business. So I researched a lot of different options. I tried out a couple, but honestly, it was really overwhelming. It was pretty time consuming and still the site wasn't coming out the way I wanted it to. Then I tried Hostinger and everything was super simple. I asked Hostinger's AI to build a clean site for her business and it had a working version up in minutes. No coding or designer needed.

• 27:25Dave Meyer?

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• 30:39Dave Meyer?

  Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. I'm here with longtime BP community legend, Jay Scott. We were talking a little bit about value add as a great way to invest right now. Jay, what are some other things you would think about? You know, average listener of BiggerPockets, average investor, what are some approaches you think could work in this environment?

• 30:59Speaker 01

  One that I really like is seller financing. I think that there's going to be an opportunity. I don't like talking about this concept of subject to where you take somebody else's loan. There's a lot of risks around it. I'm not suggesting anybody jump into it lightly, but there's this idea of a distressed seller sometimes has the ability, if their loan gives them the ability, to basically sell a property and the loan at the same time, basically allow the buyer to take over the loan. And so, we have a lot of sellers, we have a lot of homeowners that got loans back in 2020, 2021, 2022 at 2%, 3%, 4%, and the value of that property today isn't just the property, but the loan

• 31:44Speaker 01

  itself. Anytime you can inherit or take over a loan that's at 2% or 3% or 4%, where new loans are at 6% or 7%, there's a lot of value in that. And so, if you're working with a homeowner that has the ability to transfer their loan, to basically allow you to assume their loan, or if you can find a way to legally take over the loan, notify the lender that you're doing it, get approval, there's a great opportunity for buyers today to basically get built-in financing that was as good as we had a couple of years ago. So, that's number one. Number two, I really like option contracts. So, an option contract is basically this idea of you go to a seller and you basically, you don't buy the property

• 32:26Speaker 01

  today, but you give the seller some amount of money to give you the right to buy that property at some point in the future.

• 32:32Dave Meyer?

  Interesting.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  So, you're basically buying the option to buy the property at some point in the future. And you can decide, that point in the future could be six months, it could be a year, it could be five years, and that gives you time to decide, do I really want to buy this? Can I do with this property what I expect to do? Is it going to perform the way I expect it to perform? Is the market going to go where I expect it to go? For anybody out there that is looking to do a deal, this works especially well with commercial deals, with multifamily deals, but it can also work with single-family deals. If you're looking to do a deal, but you're a little bit skittish, you don't know that you're necessarily going to be able to do exactly what you want to do with the property. You don't, you're not comfortable that that now's the right time to buy and you'd love

• 33:17Speaker 01

  to have six or 12 months to kind of think about it and see where the market goes. An option contract can be a great way for you to take advantage of that and to to control the property without necessarily buying it today.

• 33:29Dave Meyer?

  I have heard this more in the commercial space and I think it makes a lot of sense because sellers might just be more willing to do this than they have been in the last five plus years, I don't know, that we're in this situation. Do you think it works in residential as well?

• 33:44Speaker 01

  It does. And I've seen it working residential. It tends to work better when you're dealing with somebody who is well versed in in how to structure deals. So if you're buying from an investor, for example, so I have literally sold a half dozen properties on option contracts. I've had other investors that have come to me and said, hey, I might want to buy this property. I want six months to to basically learn the area or to figure out if I really want to move forward. They pay me some amount of money to to give them the right to buy it at a certain price for the next six or 12 months. And in every case, they've ended up moving forward. And so that's been good for me because I've ultimately gotten the property sold. It's been good for them because they had the six or 12 months to to do their due diligence

• 34:28Speaker 01

  and decide if they really wanted to move forward. So yeah, it can definitely work with single family residential as well. But again, it works best when you're working with other investors selling investment property.

• 34:38Dave Meyer?

  You mentioned seller financing, which is kind of like these assumable mortgages. But I just think like, it's kind of shocking, I think, for most people that don't study this stuff, but 40% of homes in the US are owned free and clear, something like that?

• 34:52Speaker 01

  A little bit more.

• 34:53Dave Meyer?

  Yeah. And so I think, you know, a lot of those are owned by older folks and I have not really bought into this idea of the silver tsunami in the past where people say like, oh, it's going to flood the market. But I do think people who are willing to do seller financing, that actually might go up in the in the future, even just for regular people. One, because they're going to want to get rid of their house. They don't have a mortgage, but. That kind of predictable income for someone who's retired is actually super valuable. Like if you're saying, hey, I'll pay you 5% interest on your home, like that's actually, could be a great deal for someone who's in retirement. And so this could be like this mutual, this emerging mutually beneficial circumstance where a lot of younger investors want to buy these properties from people who could

• 35:38Dave Meyer?

  use, you know, mailbox money essentially.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I kind of merged together seller financing and subject to into kind of one thing earlier and I was talking more about the mortgage side of things, but absolutely, seller financing has, has some great opportunities coming forward, moving forward. Again, because a large portion, somewhere in the low 40s, as you mentioned, a percentage of properties are owned free and clear and a lot of those are older owners. And I, I've, I learned a long time ago that when you're buying a property, the first question to ask the seller is what are you going to do with the money? And a lot of times they don't know. And if they don't know what they're going to do with the money, well, they're open to suggestions. And that suggestion of, well, how about if you loan it back to me at 5, 6, 7%?

• 36:26Speaker 01

  If they don't have anything else to do with that money, that seems like a pretty good deal, especially when they know it's, it's collateralized by this thing that they just ended up living in for five or 10 years and they know, and they know worst case, they're going to take it back and, and it's not the worst thing in the world.

• 36:40Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, I mean, it does make a lot of sense. And so I think with both of those, right? The options seller financing, I guess the overarching strategy is like finding the right seller. It's not even, you know, it's motivated seller, sure, you always want to find that. But it's also just like someone who's willing to get a little bit creative. It's almost even a more sophisticated seller in a way where they're willing to like see you as an investor, they'll understand your goals and objectives in a, in a more. Holistic way and then willing to get creative on how to structure something that's mutually beneficial.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  This goes back to our conversation earlier about why, why do we want to buy real estate in general, even in a market where we're not sure that we're going to see appreciation. One of the reasons is it's weird to talk about now because we've kind of been in a situation where all other asset classes that we're looking at, the stock market and gold and crypto, everything's been doing amazingly well for the last decade. And so it's hard to imagine a world where real estate is kind of the most consistent and best performing asset. But realistically speaking, if you ignore the last five or 10 years, real estate has been a whole lot more consistent in its growth and its returns than any other asset class on the planet.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  If you look at the growth in real estate values over the last 120 years, there's only been one or two times, and those one or two times were literally just a blip on the graph, where real estate values have gone down. You can't say that with any other asset class. Gold has its ups and downs, equity markets, stock markets has its ups and downs, crypto obviously has ups and downs. Real estate has been tremendously consistent. And so if you can kind of get out of the mindset that the stock market's only going to go in one direction and crypto's only going to go in one direction, real estate is the one thing that is more likely to go in one direction than any other asset class.

• 38:36Dave Meyer?

  I think the lack of volatility is really overlooked. And that, that historical framing makes a lot of sense, that everything's been so good. It's like, oh, the stock markets and your estate, like, look at the returns, they're the same. But you got to zoom out a little bit more. And if you look back to, you know, 70s, 80s, 90s, like, real estate has continued to perform.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think that's probably one of the benefits to starting now, because at some point, we're going to see the stock market falter. We're going to see crypto likely see another major. Potentially long-term dip. And when that happens, people are going to be asking that age-old question of what should I be doing now? Where should my money be going? And for a couple of years now, I don't think real estate has been like the most obvious answer. But for a long time in the past, it was. And I think in the near future, we're going to get back to that. Hey, real estate has, I mean, I got shiny object syndrome with the stock market and with gold and with crypto. But hey, real estate has been pretty stable and consistent for the last 120 years. I think I should be thinking about that

• 39:44Speaker 01

  again. And I think a lot of people will get back there again. But I think we might have another year or two where real estate is not high on a lot of people's lists for quick and easy money.

• 39:56Dave Meyer?

  All right, last question, Jay. Then we got to get out of here real quick. Multifamily real estate values are down a lot. Is it time to buy? Or are you still waiting?

• 40:04Speaker 01

  I love multifamily. It's been a really tough few years. So, starting in March of 22, when interest rates went up, multifamily kind of saw the bottom pulled out from under it. And we've been in a recession in multifamily for the last few years. A lot of people who are just looking at single-family values don't realize it. But multifamily and other commercial asset classes, self-storage and office and some industrial have been struggling the last few years. But one of the nice things about real estate is every asset class is a little bit different. And one can be going through one part of a cycle, while another can be going through another part of the cycle. And I think we're pretty much at the bottom

• 40:45Speaker 01

  for multifamily right now, at least for large multifamily. And I think we're starting to see some indication that we're on an uptrend. And I think a lot of that is related to the fact that there was a lot of building, a lot of overbuilding for a number of years. But that building has slowed down considerably. And it looks like we're going to see a lot less supply of new multifamily over the next few years. And with less supply, as we talked about earlier, we're likely to see prices tend to go up. There's going to be as much demand as there's always been, maybe even more. But supply is going to dwindle over the next couple of years, it looks like. And so I think multifamily is going to be a great place to be for at least through 2028, 2029.

• 41:26Dave Meyer?

  Awesome. Well, Jay, thank you so much for being here. We always appreciate it.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 41:30Dave Meyer?

  And thank you all so much for listening to this episode of the BiggerPockets Podcast. I'm Dave Meyer and we'll see you next time.

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