Pod Insights BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast The Best Markets to Buy Rental Properties Right Now (2025) About this episode New to real estate investing? Stuck in an area with expensive housing prices or not-so-landlord-friendly laws but want to buy real estate? We’ve got you covered. We’re sharing our favorite 2025 real estate markets for rental property investing, many of which are so affordable even a real estate rookie will have no trouble buying in. But these aren’t just cheap markets; they all have strong fundamentals that drive appreciation and rising rents. We brought the market-picking experts, Ashley Kehr and Henry Washington, back to the show to share their picks and see how they compare to Dave’s. We’ve got “sleeper” markets that are growing but fly under the radar, a new Midwest manufacturing hub that will soon become one of America’s most prized chip-building markets, and the next boom city with great jobs and even better cash flow. Then, we’ll share bonus affordable markets for those who don’t have much money to start. Got some more cash saved and looking to buy in a big city with big upside potential? We’re listing the three big cities we’d happily call home and invest in, with phenomenal housing market metrics and much more affordable prices than New York, Seattle, and the other “big” real estate markets. In This Episode We Cover: The best rental property markets of 2025 that sport appreciation, cash flow, and affordable prices Why Henry thinks this “unsexy sleeper” market could be a phenomenal place to buy The chip-manufacturing Midwest market that could see massive growth One market with a booming economy but still very affordable home prices The “big” cities we’d buy in that are poised for growth and home price appreciation How to find the perfect market for YOU to invest in (free data on HUNDREDS of markets) And So Much More! Links from the Show Join BiggerPockets for FREE Let Us Know What You Thought of the Show! Ask Your Question on the BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets YouTube Free Market Data Ashley’s Free Market Worksheet Join the Future of Real Estate Investing with Fundrise Grab Dave’s Book, “Real Estate by the Numbers” Find an Investor-Friendly Agent in Your Area Real Estate Podcast 1007 - Where We’d Invest in Real Estate in 2024 if We Were Starting from Scratch w/Ashley Kehr and Henry Washington Connect with Ashley Connect with Henry Connect with Dave (00:00) Intro (04:18) Best “Sleeper” Markets (09:29) The Next Tech Market (14:28) Midwest Boom Market (18:56) Most Affordable Markets (21:46) Best Big Cities to Invest In (27:04) How to Find YOUR Market Check out more resources from this show on BiggerPockets.com and https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-1074 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
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Dave Meyer? These are the best markets to buy rental properties right now. You may be hearing that cash flow has dried up, but it is still alive and well in 2025 if you know where to look. Today, we'll reveal three of our favorite markets for anyone looking to progress towards financial freedom through real estate, plus a few bonus markets you really need to know.
0:25 Dave Meyer? What's up, everyone? It's Dave Meyer, back with another episode of the BiggerPockets Podcast, and we've got a fun one today that many of you keep requesting for us to repeat. We actually did a show just like this back in August, one of the most popular ones we did last year. It featured Ashley Kerr and Henry Washington. We each picked our own markets. So to do the repeat of this episode, I've invited Ashley and Henry back again. Ashley, good to see you.
0:51 Speaker 01 Yes, thanks so much for having me.
0:53 Dave Meyer? And fresh off your home city of Buffalo being named the hottest housing market for Zillow in 2025, so.
1:00 Speaker 01 Second year running.
1:01 Dave Meyer? I know. We're not letting you pick it because it's too obvious right now. So we're gonna, we're gonna handicap you a little bit. And Henry, we already know you picked like the best market of the last 10 years, so, and live in it in North Carolina. So we're also not letting you pick that one.
1:15 Henry Washington? Fair enough, fair enough.
1:16 Dave Meyer? So we did this show back in August of 2024. You can go check that out. In that show, we had a data download that accompanied the show and the research that Ashley, Henry, and I did. And we've done the same thing. You can go to biggerpockets.com/resources and download data for more than 300 markets in the United States. It has stuff like rent to price ratio, population growth, basically all the stuff that we're going to be talking about today. You can grab that for free, so go check that out. In today's episode, we're going to pick each of our favorite markets, so I'm eager to hear what you guys have. And then at the end, we're going to do two quick bonus rounds, one for the most affordable market that you like the most, which we're going to define as a median home price of
1:57 Dave Meyer? $200,000 or less. Those still do exist, and it'll be fun to see which ones you pick. And we'll do another one for big cities, because I don't know about you guys, I hear a lot that big cities are too expensive, you can't invest in them. And so we're gonna, I'm gonna challenge you both to do that. So Henry, you picked two out of 300 plus markets that we provided you with some data on. How did you get it down to these two?
2:20 Henry Washington? Yeah, absolutely. So when I'm looking at this data set, what's important to me is I want a place where the median home price is under the national average or at the national average. So that means there's air quotes affordability. And then the second thing I'm looking at is I want a place where the median rents are at or above the national average. That means I can buy a house for less than the average, but rent it for above the national average. And then I'm looking for positive population growth over the last five years, something close to the normal or above. Doesn't have to be crazy population growth. It just has to show me that people are continuously moving to that area and it's not a dying city where people are moving away from it. Once I have those three data points, then I start to narrow it down a little more based on like what I'm seeing in those markets.
3:05 Henry Washington? So I might remove super coastal cities, or I might remove areas where the weather's going to be extreme or like extremely cold. And then I'm going to dive into what's driving the economy in those areas. I'm also going to look at what's the unemployment rate in the area and what is the average income of the people living there? Because when you get that right mix of affordable home prices with higher rents, with an economy that is growing and driving people to want to move to that place, I think it's a great mix of finding a market where you can get some cash flow, but also appreciation. I'm looking for both.
3:42 Dave Meyer? Totally. If you're gonna do this type of analysis for yourself, I think it's really helpful to just sort of narrow down to three or five markets and say like, I'm gonna pick one of these three to five. I'm not going to spend years pondering what is a perfect market because there's no such thing. And just doing what Henry said, making sure that the fundamentals are there. And then picking based on where you're gonna have a good team, a place you like to go visit, somewhere you have a good gut feeling about. And so that's how I recommend it. It's not this precise science. There is art and, and some data research you should be doing, but there, there is a bit more than just looking at data. So with all of that. Let's get started. Henry, I'll, I'll start with you. What market did you pick?
4:25 Henry Washington? Yeah, I actually picked two markets, mostly because one of them I would probably invest in if my location like where I currently live didn't matter. And the other one I would invest in, like if I truly had to pick one to actually go buy a property in tomorrow, it would probably be this other market. So.
4:42 Dave Meyer? So you cheated and did too.
4:43 Henry Washington? So I cheated and did too. Right. So the markets I picked were Oklahoma City.
4:47 Dave Meyer? Love Oklahoma City.
4:48 Henry Washington? I do too. I really like Oklahoma City and Huntsville, Alabama. Were the two markets I picked. Why I picked Oklahoma City? It's kind of a hidden gem of a big city. Like people kind of forget that it's a thing and there's a lot of really good economy there. It's got great jobs in higher education because there are several universities close by. It's got great government and military jobs. It's got great healthcare jobs. It's got great corporate jobs. Sonic is headquartered there and they're spending tons of money on infrastructure in their downtown and Bricktown areas. Population growth is 5.5 over the last five years. So that's pretty solid. So that means people are still moving there. Median home price is 244,000.
5:31 Dave Meyer? That's.
5:32 Henry Washington? Like, that's pretty reasonable for a big city. That's amazing.
5:36 Dave Meyer? A reference for everyone that the average across the country is about 420. So not half, but.
5:42 Henry Washington? Right.
5:42 Dave Meyer? Man, that is affordable by American standards.
5:45 Henry Washington? The median rent is 1523, which probably doesn't seem super great compared to a $244,000 purchase price. But when you think about as an investor, a lot of the times you're going to buy under market value, even if you're buying on the market. So. And that's the median rent, right? So the rents are getting higher. So that tells me that you can probably get a decent rent for a fairly inexpensive home price in that area without having to do a ton of crazy work to find the most amazing deal possible. And unemployment, 2.8%.
6:16 Dave Meyer? Wow. It's basically as low as it gets.
6:18 Henry Washington? Yeah, right. So Oklahoma City, I think is a great big city sleeper market where you can feel comfortable and confident investing in that market. It's not going anywhere anytime soon. Infrastructure is great. Jobs are great. I would pick. Oklahoma City because I live about three hour drive from Oklahoma City and I've been there several times. Now, the market I would pick if my location didn't matter is Huntsville, Alabama. You know me, I like unsexy sleeper markets, like I want the things that are under the radar. And people hear Alabama and sometimes they just get turned off because they think of the South and there's nothing great going on there, but Alabama is on the come up. There's tons of aerospace engineering jobs, defense contracting jobs. There's tons of really smart, high income earners that are moving and living in Alabama.
7:02 Dave Meyer? You get a job at NASA, make like 300 grand a year and live in Huntsville and pay like $400,000 for like the nicest house. You're living a good life.
7:10 Henry Washington? You're living a good life. Average home price is $338,000 there, but you've got a lot of high income earners. You've got a lot of aerospace, technology, engineering jobs, companies that are moving operations to Alabama because of all of the defense contracts. Because you think of these defense contractors, what they do is they get R and D money and they pretty much have to spend that R and D money every year. And so you get a lot of these subsidiary companies who work with defense contractors who now go and open up offices near all these defense contracting companies to try to land some of that R and D money. So you've got a lot of great job opportunities. Plus, manufacturing is big. Auto manufacturing is big in Alabama. So you've got Toyota that's got a great place there.
7:51 Henry Washington? Mazda, Mercedes has a place nearby where they're all building cars and they're all growing and expanding their operations there. So it's kind of a sleeper market in terms of lots of great economy where you get people with really good jobs. A lot of these people are going to rent. You got a median rent price of 1776, which is pretty good.
8:11 Dave Meyer? Very patriotic too.
8:12 Henry Washington? Yeah, right. So I really, really like Huntsville as a sleeper market. That's probably the one I would pick if location didn't matter to me.
8:21 Dave Meyer? Well, let me just first say, you are going to lose this competition for cheating and picking too. But I really like Alabama. It's very affordable. Obviously, like everywhere, it's very local, but there's some really good markets. We've talked a lot about Tuscaloosa being a really good cash flow market in the US. And the thing I like about Huntsville in particular is that it's northern Alabama, because southern Alabama is experiencing a lot of what's going on in Florida with insurance costs, just like going through the roof, being on the Gulf there. So, I mean, you're basically in Tennessee, right? And it's like on the Tennessee border. So it's a little insulated from those insurance shocks that I think a lot of people along the Gulf Coast are seeing right now.
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12:41 Dave Meyer? Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. We are ranking our favorite markets for 2025. Henry gave us Huntsville, Alabama, and Oklahoma City. We're moving on to Ashley. What did you pick?
12:53 Speaker 01 Well, first, I want to make it clear that I did follow instructions.
12:56 Henry Washington? I've never been good at that, by the way.
12:58 Speaker 01 I did pick one market, and Oklahoma City was on the excluded list of cities we can't choose.
13:06 Speaker 01 I picked Columbus, Ohio.
13:09 Dave Meyer? Oh, I like it.
13:11 Speaker 01 So I picked this one because so I looked at a couple of different things as far as like, I definitely wanted the median price to be under 400,000. I'm looking at this as a rookie perspective and to purchase your first investment, I would rather it be less money than more money for your first property that you're going to buy as a rental. So I wanted it to be under that 400,000 threshold. The median rent is 1,800 and then vacancy rate, since I'm looking at rentals, I didn't want that high. I mean, some markets had like a vacancy rate of like 16%. So this one's at 6% and then the unemployment rate isn't too bad.
13:52 Speaker 01 It is 3.3%. First of all, before even getting into those numbers, the first thing I'm narrowing down is landlord friendly states. As an investor in New York, I will never ever invest in a city that is tenant friendly again for rentals. So like that would be my biggest thing. And then I would kind of narrow down from there. So once I looked at the numbers of Columbus, I did some digging into what actually would make it attractive for people to live there or to move there. So Amazon actually is doing a $10 billion investment into their data center infrastructure. There's also some kind of huge development grant that's happening.
14:36 Speaker 01 It's like 292 million dollar development. It's going to be residential units, office space, everything like that. And it's anticipated to be completed by 2026. Then I was like, if there's a university or a school there too. So if you ever need to pivot to college housing, that may be an option. So Ohio State is there.
14:58 Dave Meyer? Yeah, Columbus is one of those markets that I feel like has just been booming. Once that CHIPS Act got announced and Intel said they were going to start manufacturing processors there, it's just been like a free for all. I actually drove there myself to see if I wanted to go invest there. It's a very strong market fundamentally. My only knock against it personally was like my buy box is like something that I can at least break even cash flow on. And it was hard for me to find that just because there seems to be a lot of investor activity in Columbus already.
15:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, I've heard a lot of people talk about it and you'll find it in the forums too. A lot of mentions of Columbus, Ohio.
15:38 Henry Washington? Lots of investor activity there. Lots of older homes too. Lots of older multifamily. So you have to take into consideration like truly what your buy box is and watch out for those maintenance and capital expenses in a in a market with a lot of older properties.
15:53 Speaker 01 The property I'm sitting in was built in the 1800s. So
15:56 Dave Meyer? Really?
15:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, all the houses here is like that old. Yes.
15:59 Dave Meyer? That is something I've experienced now that I do some investing in the Midwest. Henry's right. Like a lot of them are from the early 1900s, late 1800s. And it's tough because like you obviously don't want to get something that is a lot of capex and a lot of deferred maintenance. But they're also like some of the nicest areas. Old homes are traditionally built in the most desirable areas close to downtown or close to some attractions. And they have a lot of charm, which I like. And so you kind of it's kind of finding the balance. I personally try and look for ones that as long as the bones are good and the internal components are upgraded, no knob and tube, for example, you know, new plumbing, that
16:40 Dave Meyer? kind of stuff. I think you can still do it. But Henry is 100% right. You need to be very careful with these types of things.
16:46 Henry Washington? Yeah, it's not a complete turn off. I'm just saying you got to pay attention to like if you can find one where somebody's already coming and done that work for you. That's amazing. But I mean, lots of boilers, you know, things that aren't normal across the rest of the country that can be expensive if you have never dealt with them before.
17:02 Speaker 01 And like one thing to do, like if you're not sure about that is when you do your home inspection, ask the inspector, can you tell me one year from now, five years from now, and 10 years from now, what do you think's going to need to be replaced? And they can actually kind of help you like plan that out like, okay, a roof probably in five years, new furnace in 10 or whatever that may be to kind of Like help ease the navigation and figuring that out for yourself too when you're looking at a property.
17:30 Dave Meyer? All right. Well, very good choice. I think if you can find solid cash or you want to invest for appreciation only, Columbus is going to be a really, a really good one. My market that I picked will move on is another Midwest market. Not surprising if anyone listens to me. I am, I call myself long on the Midwest. It means I don't think it's going to be the highest performer next year or three years, but I think five, 10, 20 year horizon, the Midwest has really good fundamentals, mostly based on affordability. Home prices are very expensive throughout the country. And you see over time, people tend to gravitate towards places that are more affordable because businesses move to places that are more affordable and they offer tax incentives.
18:14 Dave Meyer? And for me, when I look at markets, job growth is number one, affordability is number two, and the Midwest has a lot of those things. So I picked what is often cited as the fastest growing, population wise, market in the Midwest, which is Indianapolis, Indiana. Have you guys ever been there? Spent any time there?
18:34 Speaker 01 I went to a wedding once and it was in August and it was so hot. It was outside. Everybody would go into the bathroom. They had those bathroom trailers because it's only air conditioning.
18:46 Dave Meyer? Really? I didn't realize Indianapolis was that hot or maybe it was just like a freak thing. That's like a cool day where Henry is. Maybe just in Buffalo, you have no tolerance.
18:56 Dave Meyer? Oh my God, it's above 60. I'm sweating. Well, I like Indianapolis, super affordable market at 270,000, but the fundamentals here that I love are just the employment growth. Like to me, when there's a lot of jobs, people start moving there to that. People start getting paid more. You see an unemployment rate of just 3.6%. And if you really want to get nerdy about it and look into what jobs are growing, you see it really across the board. It's a well diversified economy, but I like seeing that one of the fastest growing industries in Indianapolis was financial activities. So banking and stuff, that is pretty stable industry. High paying jobs, professional and business services are going quickly.
19:39 Dave Meyer? Education and health services, which are really recession resistant jobs. I really like all of that. And if you look at the Trump administration's policies, they're really trying to restart American manufacturing. And if that happens, I think you're going to start to see a lot more growth in the Midwest. And so that's another reason I'm picking Indianapolis. And in addition to just being sort of like manufacturing, they have huge players like Eli Lilly, one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies is based out of there. Salesforce, big tech company, has a huge employment there. There's racing, Cummings, like, so there's a lot going on there.
20:18 Dave Meyer? I think similar to what Ashley said, it's just kind of like a centralized place and it's a very landlord friendly state. So that's why I picked Indianapolis.
20:27 Henry Washington? Yeah, Indianapolis is a lot cooler than I thought it was going to be before I went there. The downtown area, I mean, you've got the Lucas Oil Stadium right down the street from where the Indiana Pacers play. Eli Lilly's office isn't far from there either. And so it's, it's, you can tell there's a lot of money being poured into the area, but there's a lot of job diversity and job growth, lots of great infrastructure. I was really pleasantly surprised with Indianapolis.
20:51 Dave Meyer? Two hundred and seventy thousand for median home price, pretty solid. You know, you have to imagine with all the growth going on there that that's going to be going up.
20:59 Henry Washington? Similar there, lots of older homes.
21:00 Dave Meyer? Yeah, for sure.
21:01 Henry Washington? One thing I learned about the area is it's some of the best golf in the country.
21:06 Dave Meyer? Oh, tell me more.
21:07 Henry Washington? So many golf courses, so many Pete Dye designed courses. There's actually a golf course right, right, there's like nine holes of the golf course are right inside the track where they raced Indianapolis 500.
21:17 Dave Meyer? So I saw, I've only been once and it was for a conference, but when I was flying in, I was like, is that real? Cause you fly right over the, the racetrack and there's golf holes in there. It's so cool.
21:28 Henry Washington? There is, yes.
21:29 Dave Meyer? All right. Well, I think it's a great market, Henry. Whenever we do our, our Lake Effect, Cash flow, road trip, we're, we're stopping in Indianapolis.
21:37 Henry Washington? Sounds great to me.
21:37 Dave Meyer? Ashley, you don't know, but now you have to come on this trip too.
21:40 Speaker 01 Oh, I remember it from last time. I was already gonna invite myself. Yeah.
21:44 Dave Meyer? Good. Well, no, you were always officially invited. I just figured you didn't want to come.
21:51 Dave Meyer? All right. So those are our favorite markets. We are going to take a quick break, but when we come back, we're going to do a speed round to talk about our favorite affordable markets and our favorite big cities. We'll be right back.
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27:23 Dave Meyer? All right, we're back on the BiggerPockets Podcast. Me, Henry, Ashley, talking about our favorite markets. We're moving on to our favorite affordable markets. We set the limit at half the median home price. Median home price in the US is about 420,000 right now. So you got to find a market 210 or less. Henry, you went first last time. So Ashley, why don't you give us yours?
27:46 Speaker 01 Okay, so I picked Sioux City and I selected this because it was under 210,000. But also, it was really hard to find a market that didn't have a really high unemployment rate, like somewhere like 16% and then Sioux City was 2.7%.
28:04 Dave Meyer? Holy moly, 16%. That's like higher than it was during the Great Recession.
28:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, there is a lot of them that had really high ones.
28:11 Dave Meyer? Yeah, that's serious unemployment. All right, good choice then. Henry, what do you got?
28:17 Henry Washington? I picked the same thing, Sioux City. There wasn't a ton of options there, but.
28:21 Dave Meyer? You're such a cheer.
28:22 Henry Washington? Median median home price of 190, but the thing to watch out for is the population's only 144,000. So a little bit of a red flag, but vacancy 5.87%, which was pretty good. Unemployment 2.7%. It was the best option of the options of an under $210,000 price point.
28:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, the vacancy rate too, I just double checked it was actually super high on the other ones too. That were 210,000 also.
28:49 Dave Meyer? Well, it's not the best because the one I picked is the best.
28:54 Dave Meyer? Which is Rockford, Illinois. I actually started looking at this before I started researching the show because Realtor.com came out and said it would be the hottest housing market for 2025. And I started just like digging into it a little bit. I wouldn't say it's a suburb of Chicago. It's like 90 miles away, so it's, I don't know many people who would commute that far. But it's also like sort of equidistant to Milwaukee. Um, and so there's a good amount of industry there. The median home price is just 188,000, which is really nice. And the vacancy rate, to your point, was just 7.3%, which is not amazing, but not terrible. And the unemployment rate is 5.4%.
29:35 Dave Meyer? Now 5.4% probably a little bit higher than normally I would choose, but I did some extra homework and started looking at the history of their unemployment rate. And it was eight a couple of years ago, and it's actually been steadily going down, meaning that there is strong job growth in the area. Just a little tip for people to remember that you don't just need to look at things at a point in time, but try and look at an overall trend. Uh, because if their unemployment rate has been trending down like it has been, that can be a generally a good thing for an area. So that was my quick affordable market, Rockford, Illinois. We're now going to do our second speed round, which was big city.
30:17 Dave Meyer? So basically the opposite, well, I guess it kind of turned out to be the opposite. The first one was based off price, but there aren't a lot of big cities where you can buy for under 210,000. So this criteria, Henry, we'll start with you is over. Two million and I want to know what you picked.
30:35 Henry Washington? Over two million, I picked San Antonio, Texas.
30:37 Dave Meyer? What do you like about it?
30:39 Henry Washington? I like San Antonio. It I just it seemed like everybody was just having a good time in San Antonio. I don't know what it was. Everybody was having a blast when I went to San Antonio, Texas.
30:48 Dave Meyer? What were you doing there? Were you like out of bachelor party?
30:51 Henry Washington? No, no, I was speaking at a real estate event.
30:53 Dave Meyer? Oh, that's.
30:53 Henry Washington? But it was just it just seemed like everybody was having a great time. I went to the downtown area, walked around for a little while. It was super cool. Lots of history, obviously, but 265,000 as a median home price, which is really reasonable. Population of 2.6 million, but a 265,000 median home price. I thought that was like hard to find, hard to come by. Plus you have unemployment at 3.9% and population growth at 7.69% over the last five years. I just think those are pretty good numbers for a big city.
31:22 Dave Meyer? I liked San Antonio. I thought there's a lot of fundamentals and I feel like people don't realize this. It's the eighth biggest city in the country. It's huge.
31:30 Henry Washington? Yeah, it's massive.
31:31 Dave Meyer? Compared to, yeah, it's really big and it's close enough in my mind to Austin that you're going to get a little bit of that tech money runoff going on. It's its own city in its own right. It's much bigger than Austin, actually, but you know, you just see a lot of investment into Austin and its driving distance. It's like, you know, I think it's like under 100 miles. So.
31:52 Henry Washington? Yeah, so 45 minutes, man.
31:53 Dave Meyer? Yeah, so I think it's a good market. It has been in a little bit of a slump like a lot of Texas and Florida, but long-term fundamentals are very strong there. All right. Big city, Ashley. What do you pick?
32:04 Speaker 01 I picked Minneapolis.
32:06 Dave Meyer? Oh, interesting.
32:08 Speaker 01 So this one actually had a population of 3.6 million, but the median price was 371,000. So that wasn't that bad. Five-year growth, 4.25% vacancy rate was a little bit higher than some of the other markets we looked at today at 4.68%. But still not awful than unemployment, 2.7.
32:29 Dave Meyer? Whoa.
32:30 Speaker 01 They are considered landlord semi-friendly, so not all the way landlord friendly.
32:36 Dave Meyer? There are some rent controls in Minneapolis.
32:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, the last thing about them too is they're putting a lot of money into the Mississippi River waterfront.
32:46 Dave Meyer? Oh.
32:46 Speaker 01 Um, and have like this big build initiative where they're putting a lot of money into the city and the waterfront area.
32:52 Henry Washington? San Antonio already has a Riverwalk, so we're better.
32:57 Speaker 01 There's no potential for growth then. You want to get in before that attraction is there.
33:02 Dave Meyer? Minneapolis is one of those sneaky cities. There's all sorts of really big companies there. Target, Medtronic, there's a lot of big companies. I've honestly never spent any time outside of the glorious airport. But people who live there love it too. It's just one of those places where people really say it has a high quality of life. So I, I personally really like investing in places with high quality of life. I think they're, they have like strong demand, especially around young people, good renters, that kind of stuff. All right. For my big city, I picked Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I actually started looking at this based off Reddit because I love following Reddit and people were just talking about how Philadelphia is such a great city.
33:44 Dave Meyer? And when you actually dig into the numbers, it is pretty compelling. You're starting to see, I think, sort of like a resurgence in housing markets across the Northeast. You're seeing this in places in New Hampshire and Vermont. You see this in Rhode Island is one of the hottest places. And Philadelphia, for being a city with like a ton of economic engines, the median home price is just 366,000. So trying to buy in a big city, you guys pick good ones, but it's pretty rare to see something that cheap. The unemployment rate's at 3.6%. Population growth for the Northeast is really good. It's not like amazing for the Southwest, but for a big city in the Northeast, it's really solid.
34:28 Dave Meyer? Vacancy rates are low and I just hear great things again about the quality of life there. Which like I was just saying, sort of I lend value to that. So I picked Philadelphia.
34:39 Speaker 01 They also have four pro sports teams.
34:43 Dave Meyer? Yeah.
34:43 Speaker 01 Like one of the few cities that actually have four of them.
34:46 Dave Meyer? No, that's true.
34:47 Speaker 01 When you go there too, they're all of their stadiums are right together. It's like this whole little complex thing and they're all right there. It's pretty cool.
34:55 Dave Meyer? I never really thought about that as a metric, but it's definitely a major economic engine. All right. Well, thank you both so much for doing your homework. Clearly Ashley is the winner because Henry, you're disqualified.
35:05 Speaker 01 Now I know this is rigged because every time you say that it's me, but Henry definitely had the better markets this time.
35:14 Dave Meyer? I don't know. I, I give points for following directions.
35:19 Henry Washington? I've never been a rule follower. I'm marched to my own beat.
35:22 Dave Meyer? That's why you're an entrepreneur. But if we didn't need to make a podcast episode, I would have sent you home from school today.
35:32 Dave Meyer? But thank you both. This was really insightful and hopefully for everyone listening, you learned a little bit about how we take a look at markets. If you're going to do this kind of work for yourself, my recommendation is always to look at the data. You can get it for free. Again, go to biggerpockets.com/resources, pick the criteria that really matter to you, narrow it down to three to five, and then really start working on your team and actually start analyzing deals in these markets to see if they work for you and your strategy. Cause like on paper, things in Texas, for example, they all look great. I think Oklahoma City is another one. Looks great on paper. It is still a good market, but insurance costs are super high in Oklahoma City. So really just go in and look at the numbers and you're going to start to see which market of the five you sort of select is your shortlist
36:17 Dave Meyer? are going to work for you, are going to find the deals that you're looking for.
36:20 Henry Washington? Also too, on that point, Dave, if you're going to pick a market that you actually want to get to, you might also look at where direct flights can get you to based on the markets in your direct list, because you don't want to pigeonhole yourself into a long drive if getting there is important to you.
36:34 Dave Meyer? Dude, I'm getting crushed on that right now. I picked a market when I was still living in Amsterdam. Now I moved back to the States and I can't get direct flights to the market I'm investing in. I'm like, I'm going to sell all this stuff.
36:43 Henry Washington? Yeah, man, it's important.
36:45 Dave Meyer? I hate layoffs. It's like my number one pet peeve is layoffs. I don't want to do it.
36:50 Speaker 01 Uh, the last thing I want to add is if you go to biggerpockets.com/rookieresource, we actually have a market analyzer template in there that you can use that kind of talks about all the different data points we looked at today, things to consider when analyzing a market.
37:04 Dave Meyer? Ah, great tip. Thank you so much. Thank you all so much for listening to this episode of the BiggerPockets Podcast. Ashley and Henry, thanks for being here. We'll see you for another episode in just a couple of days. Thanks for listening.
37:17 Speaker 03 At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are, with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters, so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich, together. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.
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