BiggerNews, September: Will Anything Slow Down this Housing Market? with Dave Meyer & Kathy Fettke

David:
Welcome to the BiggerPockets Podcast, show 502.

Kathy:
Because of the money manipulation… The best way to look at it is, if there’s that much more money, it’s not that the value of the house has gone up, it just takes more dollars to buy it because the dollar is being devalued. That’s what’s crashing, the dollar is crashing, not housing. People need a place to live.

Speaker 3:
You’re listening to BiggerPockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors, large and small. If you’re here looking to learn about real estate investing without all the hype, you’re in the right place. Stay tuned and be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from biggerpockets.com, your home for real estate investing online.

David:
What’s going on, everybody? It is David Greene, your host of The Real Estate Podcast. I am here today with a brand new format with my cohost, Mr. Dave Meyer, who I will be introducing shortly. Look, here’s what’s going on, the market is changing rapidly, new laws are being made, new economic policy is being developed, and new players are entering into this space at a pace faster than we’ve ever seen before. Because of that, the need for more information, given more quickly is that much more important.
BiggerPockets has responded to this after hearing your requests for more content, and they’ve come up with another new show. We are going to be sharing with you the state of the market delivered through news articles and with data supported by BP Pro through the data scientist of choice with BiggerPockets, my co-host, David Meyer, and we’re going to be breaking down how you can use this information to help make you more successful with your own real estate purchases. Now, on this show with me today, I have Mr. Dave Meyer and Mrs. Kathy Fettke from The Real Wealth Network.
Gentleman, lady, welcome to the show.

Kathy:
Thank you.

Dave:
Thanks so much. It’s great to be back.

David:
Now, for today’s quick tip. Today’s quick tip is simple, we’ve got a ton of pro only content analyzing today’s market, which you can find at biggerpockets.com/pro. If you’re looking for some of the data that the experts use to make their decisions, it’s been compiled by BiggerPockets and it’s ready and waiting for you to check it out at biggerpockets.com/pro. Also, if you have a question that you want us to answer on a show like this, please submit it by sending an email to [email protected].
If you send your email to [email protected], we will see your question, we will do our best to answer it on this show, and if you send a voice memo, we will actually play your question and then we’ll answer it. All right. Now, it’s time to introduce you to the backup that I brought to get into these topics. I have two people with me here today, the first is going to be Dave Meyer. He’s the vice president of data and analytics at BiggerPockets and one of the OGs of the company. He’s been here for a very long time.
He is a data scientist who heads up all of the data that the number crunchers love to get into. Dave, glad to have you on the show today.

Dave:
Thanks a lot. I am very glad to be back after a long hiatus.

David:
Yeah. You’re coming from the Netherlands, is that correct?

Dave:
That’s right. I live in Amsterdam now, but still investing in Denver and in the US.

David:
You’ve got a YouTube channel that’s picking up some steam where you share some of the data that investors are using to make decisions. Can you tell people before we get into this where they can find out more about that?

Dave:
Yeah, absolutely. You can check out the BiggerPockets YouTube channel. And each Friday, I release a video, it’s only 10 to 15 minutes long, but it’s meant to showcase some news, economic data, anything really interesting that investors really need to know that week to make informed investing decisions. So definitely go check that out.

David:
Awesome. We also have real estate ninja, Kathy Fettke here. She’s an investor herself, the co-founder of The Real Wealth Network, and the host of her own podcast, The Real Estate News Podcast. Kathy, thank you so much for joining us.

Kathy:
Thank you. I want to be an OG too, though.

David:
You are an OG in your own, right, just not probably with-

Kathy:
Thank you.

David:
You’re new to BiggerPockets, but you’re not new to the real estate game. And that’s why we have you here because you’ve got a very well-rounded and insightful perception of what’s going on in the market.

Kathy:
Thank you.

David:
And which market do you primarily invest in, Kathy?

Kathy:
We are mostly focused on the markets that have been growing so quickly, Florida, Texas, now the Carolinas, but we are also in California, which I don’t always recommend, but if you do it right, you can make a lot of money there too.

David:
That’s right, Kathy and I… I’m in Northern California, you’re in Southern California, right?

Kathy:
Yes.

David:
I’m in Southern California a lot more now than I used to be because I started a real estate team down there. And it’s exactly what people say, the weather is amazing and it is really, really busy.

Kathy:
I wish I didn’t love it so much, but I can go surf on my lunch break, so where else could I do that?

David:
That’s the problem. That’s California, folks, is once you’ve started here it’s, where else do you go? You’re kind of stuck. Well, Dave, I know, I briefly mentioned that you have a YouTube channel. Can you share a little bit with what that channel covers, who that channel is meant for, and then what type of information you tend to share on there?

Dave:
Yeah, absolutely. We’ve been trying to respond to the crazy breakneck speed that the housing market is going at right now. And so for the last three, four or five months now, we’ve been putting out new YouTube shows every Friday that try to cover the housing market, macro economic news, any the government policy that might impact real estate investors, and that is what I’ve really come to love talking about and is why I am so excited to be here today and talk with you guys about the crazy housing market.
And I do have a bunch of data that I want to share with everyone, but before we get into that, I would love to just get a pulse from the two of you and understand what you see in the housing market. So if you could, Kathy, in three words or less, could you describe the housing market as it stands in September of 2021?

Kathy:
Low supply, high demand, and prices going up as a result. That wasn’t three words. Oh shoot, I failed.

David:
That’s three points though.

Kathy:
I failed.

Dave:
It was three clauses. I think we’ll allow it. That was still sufficient. And David, what do you think?

David:
I would say rapidly, urgently changing.

Dave:
That sounds very accurate. Well, so my three, the one that I came into this recording thinking was insane but slowing. And I wanted to just share with you guys a couple pieces of data, because when I look at the data, and I’m an investor, but I’m not out there as much as you two are, when I look at the data, I see that we have been on this insane ride for the last couple of months, but things are starting to just show like they’re slowing down. Don’t get me wrong, things are not going in reverse, and in the broadest sense, they’re still going crazy.
But when I look at the data, I’m seeing that things are starting to change, and I’d love to get your take on this. So just for example, over the last four weeks, Redfin just reported that housing prices are up 16% year over year. In a normal year, that would actually be crazy, that would be the only thing we were talking about, but we know this is not a normal year because just in July, it was actually 22% year over year, so it’s actually starting to come down a little bit.
And don’t get me wrong, things are nuts, we still have 49% of homes going under contract with under two weeks and 52% of homes are selling for above the asking price. So these are still signs of a highly abnormal housing market, but let me just hit you with a couple other things that are showing me or at least suggesting to me that things could start changing. We were at a absolutely absurd days on market number of 15 days on market, but that’s actually trended up to 18, which is still less than half than what we would normally see, but again, starting to head in the other direction.
We’ve seen new listings go up 1% and we’ve even seen the share of homes and had price drops increase from 2.5% to 5%. So I’m not saying things are shifting in this Titanic way, but they are, in my mind, from this data, starting to shift in a way that might return us to a more normal housing market. So I’m curious, David, have you seen anything like this or what’s your take on all this information?

David:
I would say that what you’re describing correlates very closely to what the experience is like representing clients buying houses. I feel like this is not an abnormal pattern. I’m in a unique position because I look at real estate from an investment perspective, but I gather my information from an agent’s perspective. So I’m not just talking about houses that I’m buying, we’re talking about probably somewhere around 30 to 40 people a month that we’re helping, my team is closing, and I’m pretty intimately involved with each of those deals. So in order for us to be successful, I have to know what’s going on in the market because I’m advising those clients on what I think they should do.
What I tend to find is that buyers drive markets. It’s the psychology of a buyer that determines if you’re in a hot market, if you’re in a cold market, and then buyer psychology is affected by things like the news, the eviction moratorium that we can talk about, how they feel the economy is doing, who’s going to be president. All these things affect the way that buyers think and feel, which then affects what happens in the market. They tend to operate, buyers do, like a flock of birds. You ever watched a flock of birds and they’re all going in one direction and then one turns and they all turn at the same time? It’s fascinating how they do that.
There’s very few buyers that make decisions independent of what everybody else is doing. One of the things, and you asked what do I see, is the market will get so hot from everybody looking at houses that they’re all in there at the same time they get discouraged because they all write six, seven, eight different offers and they get turned down on every one of them, and a big chunk of those people say, “You know what? I don’t want to do this anymore.” So they take themselves out of the game, they say, “I’m going to wait,” or, “I’m just burned out.”
That increases the days on market, the houses sit there a little bit longer, which I’m glad you brought up that metric because that might be the most important metric that no investors ever look at when they’re considering whether they should buy to market or what’s happening. So we get this little lull and then a couple of people get their houses in contract, there’s a little bit of hope that goes out, and then the flock of birds comes right back in, it goes up. And I’ve seen this pattern repeat itself for many different things. So when interest rates went up two years ago, maybe 2018 or so, there was a huge like, man, the rates jumped almost a point, maybe three quarters of a point, and everybody just stopped buying. They’re like, “I don’t want to do this anymore.”
And it went on for a couple of months, and everyone realized, “I guess they’re not going back down,” and everybody came in at the same time. So what I try to tell the people who are looking to buy a home is, if you’re going to time the market, that’s the timing you’re looking for. You’re looking for a chink in the armor, you’re not looking for the entire thing to crash like what we saw in 2010. And a lot of people make the mistake of waiting for something that I don’t think is coming right now, which is a complete collapse in prices just because they see things slowing down.

Dave:
That’s a great point. And I do want to get back to this idea of the market crashing because I’m hearing a lot about that right now, but we’d love to get your take, Kathy, on just, what are you seeing in the housing market right now?

Kathy:
On my new show, I just report the news and I don’t get to give my opinion, so I’m so happy I could give my opinion. In our company, we are a national brokerage, we’ve been helping since 2003 people in California in high price markets buy cashflow properties elsewhere because it’s so hard to find so we’ve been in these growth markets for 15 years. Every market is different, so there’s really just no regular anywhere. But what we’re seeing personally is we have syndicated, we have six ground up subdivisions right now all the way from Reno to Tampa. And we have just in our Carson City, Nevada development, we have over 150 people on the wait list trying to get a home. We can’t build them fast enough.

Dave:
Oh my God.

Kathy:
It’s the same in Park City, the same in Tampa, it’s just selling so fast and people are waiting. So that tells me there’s a bit of a supply issue. There would probably be more sales if there was decent inventory out there. When you get to this kind of phase in the marketplace where it’s been such a hot, hot, hot sellers’ market for so long, sellers can get mean and greedy and just put junk out there and put really high prices. And I think, just like David was saying, people get a little frustrated with that like, “I don’t want to buy this property that was worth half this a few years ago and it needs all this work,” and so forth. So with increased inventory, we’d most likely see higher sales.
From just statistical perspective, there is a lot of concern that prices are so high, they’re higher than they were during the last bubble, and we know it was a bubble. Most of the people who owned homes didn’t actually really qualify for those loans to begin with and it drove prices up anyway. It’s a very different market today, people have absolutely qualified for these loans. So when you just look at price points, if you just look at the price index, it’s scary because we are way above the past peak.
But when you look at mortgage debt as a percentage of disposable income, it’s the lowest it’s been since the ’80s. So when you have interest rates that are half of what they were at the last peak, people can afford more of a house. And so then the fear is, well, what if interest rates go up, will all these people suddenly go into foreclosure? That’s very unlikely considering right now we have the highest equity, it’s like $23 trillion in home equity because people who got in over the last 10 years have only seen prices go up and they’re not underwater at all, they’re sitting on a tremendous amount of equity.
And then finally, we have the borrowers who are in these loans, they’re the majority. The people with FICOs over 760, that’s pretty good score. These are good borrowers who pay their bills. It’s three times what it’s been over the past decade. And the debt-to-income ratios have gone down over the past year as people were hunkered down at home, maybe they just weren’t spending as much, they weren’t going out as much and doing things. And plus getting stimulus checks and PPPs, there’s all this money that went to pay off debt. And then finally, the biggest thing is mother demographics, that’s the thing we’ve been following for 20 years is, where are people going? And who are these people? And what are they buying? And what’s their profile?
We know that we have the largest cohort of millennials, are 29 years old today. The first time home buyer age is 31. So even if millennials are delayed in their buying, which we’re not really seeing, maybe 32, 33 is the age, there are…. Let me see, I’ve got this stat here. It’s like 22 million, 24 million millennials that are between 25 and 30, and they’re just moving into wanting to buy a home. And then the people who are at that typical home-buying age, that’s 30 to 34, there’s another 22 million of them.
So there’s a lot of people that are doing pretty well, they’ve saved their money, they’ve got good FICOs and they’re going to be hunting for homes over the next few years.

Dave:
Well, first of all, we’re glad that you came on to give your opinion here because you just dropped so much great information for everyone, and there’s a lot I want touch on. But it seemed like a lot of what you were just describing is that you seem to think that the housing market is fundamentally sound and that we’re going to continue on this trajectory, or what’s your outlook over the next couple of months?

Kathy:
Yeah, my outlook is there are… The millennials have been given a bad rap for a long time, And I just kept saying these are-

Dave:
Thank you. That’s what I’ve been saying as a representative.

Kathy:
My hashtag is #millennials are people too. They’re just like me. They are going to get married and have babies and have dogs and they’re going to want to have a home and move out of the big city and have more space for the kids to run around, and that’s all happening. The difference is there’s just a lot more of them now and a lot more coming. And guess what? Millennials are as one, you already know this. I’m a little jealous, I wish I were a millennial. They’re the highest educated ever. The people today who are in their twenties have more access to information than the US government had when I was their age in the palm of their hands.
They’re brilliant, they’re smart, they’re well-educated, the most educated. And the ones who are educated can work from anywhere because they’re very educated in tech, they grew up with it, as opposed to the baby boomers who were just trying to figure out how to Zoom all year. So they can live anywhere. The stats are showing that the increase of people moving 25 miles plus outside of the city centers has grown substantially over this past year because they can work from home more, but they still might need to go to the office once or twice a week. So the suburbs that are 25 miles and further are booming because they weren’t so hot a little while ago, but now, that’s where we’re seeing this massive growth.

Dave:
Wow. Yeah. That’s really, really interesting. And I tend to agree. I know, David, you are probably going to pretend that you’re not a millennial, but I think you might technically qualify as a millennial as well. How do you feel about that? What do you think is going to happen in the housing market over the next couple of months or years?

David:
I don’t like the answer, I can tell you that. I think it’s safer to tell everybody there’s a crash coming. I think most people want to give people the safe answer. You’ll find in the influencer space, you always ask a big name, “Where are you investing?” They never want to tell you because they don’t want to be exposed if their investment… And that’s the case for real estate, it’s the case for stocks and crypto. Every time you get a big person, you say, “Where are you investing?” They never give you details.
And it’s tough to be in this seat. I wish I could tell, “Hang on, save your money. These prices are unsustainable. This is ridiculous. It’s going to crash.” I would prefer it if that was the case, because that’s the environment I like to buy in. I don’t think any wise person who looks at this data can come up with that conclusion, unfortunately. I think we have a huge shortage in housing. We have not built houses. I think that in large degrees, over-regulation by governing political bodies of individual jurisdictions has made it very difficult for housing to be provided at any sort of a reasonable cost.
The only housing prices you can make money at as a builder is higher end stuff. The problem is we need more affordable entry-level housing, which we can’t get, which forces people into apartments, which they’re not going to own, and that creates a cycle. I don’t think most investors that are listening to this are aware of how many houses hedge funds are buying and how much they’re paying for them. These are people smarter than the average American. This is not the same as the greedy bankers who are just giving a loan and then passing it on to somebody else before they had to actually hold that asset on their own books, which that game of hot potato became very dangerous because no one was accountable for the loans that were being given, which led to the crash.
These are people that are directly responsible to the investors in their fund that have a lot of their own money in the game. And they’re seeing how much rents are going up, how much home prices are going up, how much shortage there is. They’re buying a lot of them. And I think that we haven’t paid attention to the information Kathy said of how many people are becoming of home-buying age every year. There’s a huge, huge, mass of them that are getting to the point where they actually want to be able to buy a house, and there’s not enough homes.
One of the things I noticed in Maui where I buy real estate is they shipped all the rental cars off the island during COVID because nobody was visiting. And then at a certain point, everyone realized, “COVID is not going away. I just want to go on vacation and I’ll just go through whatever hoops I’ve got to jump through.” And they all went back to Maui at largely the same time. It’s that psychology of the flock of birds. To rent a car there became nearly impossible and insanely expensive. There was a lot of people and there weren’t a lot of cars.
That is the same thing happening in the housing industry. For some reason, we can understand it when it comes to cars. Well, yeah, the rentals are expensive, but no one’s expecting like a crash in the value of cars because people are paying a lot for them. That more or less is what I see happening with housing, and I think the concern would be, people that are playing by rules from five years ago or 10 years ago where prices were relatively stably increasing and the value of a home was very obvious, that house is worth $400,000, maybe next year it will be worth 410, but it’s still very close. So you wait to find the best deal, you wait to get the thing that looks like the most amazing opportunity, worked.
Well, when everyone else is just going to come in and grab it before you ever even get that chance, that conservative of an approach can actually work against you. I think that there’s a lot of people right now who are on this fence that need to buy a freaking house and find a way to make it work, you can’t be picky. Buy it and rent out the rooms, buy it and develop the basement. Don’t wait for that home run pitch, you may never see it. You need to get on base and then from there, you can play the game.
And I know it’s hard for me to say that because I’m putting myself in an extended position where if people hear that and they get mad, “David just wants me to buy a house, he doesn’t care if I lose money.” I’m literally more worried about you losing money because you never could get a house because of how many other bigger institutions and smarter people are pursuing it so aggressively.

Dave:
Wow. That was an awesome answer. Thank you for explaining that, because I think honestly, the idea, what you just explained in terms of the rental cars just basically gets back to the fundamentals of economics. It comes down to supply and demand. Kathy, you hit on the demand point that we have a huge traunch of millennials coming up that is going to keep a sustained level of demand for the next, I don’t know, five, 10 years, at least for awhile. And then what you hit on, David is the supply side, and we’ve talked a little bit about inventory. But let’s just dive into that a little bit.
You mentioned that we have an under building problem in the US. And just for some context for our listeners here, this goes back multiple decades, but especially since The Great Recession, there were a lot of housing companies that either went out of business or people moved on into another line of work after it. And basically, for the last 10 or 15 years, we have not been building enough houses in the United States to keep pace with the number of people who want to buy a house. And a recent estimate states that about four million, we are about four million homes short of where we need to be in the United States.
So when you use that analogy, David, about the rental cars, that means we are four million homes short of all of the people who want to get into a home. And that is basically the econ 101, when demand is high and when supply is short, prices are going to go up. And so, in my opinion, at least, that’s one of the major reasons why this housing market is going up so rapidly. And one of the reasons I personally don’t believe that it’s going to come down anytime soon because those two things, supply and demand, aren’t really going to change anytime soon, unless you guys think differently.
I’m curious. Do you think there’s going to be some big disruption or all of a sudden we’re going to see some big inventory hit the market, Kathy?

Kathy:
Well, you never know. Technology is improving every day, and maybe we can just 3D print a bunch of homes, but then you’ve got to provide water and utilities, who knows. But what I do know is that I was very lucky back in 2010, I got a call from a developer who said we can pick up land for almost nothing, “Can you syndicate? Can you raise money?” I’m like, “Yeah, let’s partner and do that.” And we bought land for 10 cents on the dollar. I wish, hindsight, right? I wish I had bought all the lands.
But anyway, on one, we bought 4,200 lots in Tampa. It has taken us nine years to get to a point where we could actually sell those homes. Building homes is not fast, it’s not easy. Now we can’t even get the labor, it’s very difficult to get some materials. We’re just about to break ground on our homes in Park City and we couldn’t get the lumber, so it’s just been really hard to get anything built with the supply chain issues that we’ve had over the past year, and again, lack of labor. And permitting, oh my gosh, it’s just so hard. We thought that building in Florida would be easy and it’s been very, very difficult, just as many restrictions there as anywhere.
So maybe Texas is an easier place, but basically, it hasn’t been easy to get up and running. And back in 2010, when we were buying the land, we were buying it from bankrupt builders, they had financed the land when everything fell apart, they gave that land back to the bank. They went bankrupt. You’re not going to just get up from that and go buy a bunch more land. So builders were being very cautious, we were being very cautious for years because we didn’t want to overbuild, we didn’t want to be stuck with inventory, so we built to demand. That’s where this all went wrong, is people were not planning for this boom of millennials that was pretty well forecast.
We knew the largest group of millennials was 29. My daughter’s 29, she had the hardest time getting into college. There’s a lot of competition for that age group, and that’s what they’re going to be facing now. Add to that that our Federal Reserve has just changed all the rules. It used to be that we would follow the jobs and the demographics and we’d follow the fundamentals of economics. But when the rules are changed, it’s really confusing for everybody. The rules have changed in the sense that a lot more money has been thrown into the system and a lot of people have found new money, basically.
I ran into a guy surfing yesterday who said, “I almost bought a home with you. I had $50,000, I was going to buy a home. But instead I invested in Tesla, now I have $400,000.” That’s money that he could put down on a house now. And maybe overbid by a couple of hundred thousand, because what the heck? It was pretty easy to make. It’s a lot of money circulating, trillions, trillions and more being printed. And when you throw that much money, it’s like we’re all sitting around playing monopoly and there’s a limited number of squares and hotels and things that you could buy on that board.
But then the banker comes in and brings in another bucket of money and then a few months later, another bucket of money and that same money circulating around the board game, but the number of things for sale is the same. Well, guess what, we’re all going to keep bidding more and more because we can, the cash is available. So that’s really what we’re looking at, is a massive influx of money. Historically, that has driven asset values up when you’re talking about housing or stocks, all have to do is look and see at charts that show that to be true.
And this is unprecedented, which means, boy, is home prices doubled over the last 10, 15 years, what are they going to do in the next 10 to 15 years?

Dave:
Yeah, that’s a really good point. I like the monopoly analogy. It’s so true. You’re just flush with cash, a lot of investors, whether you’re a real estate investor or not, are looking for places to put in money. And frankly, outside of the stock market and real estate market, a lot of the traditional options like a savings account or the bond market are really unattractive right now. And so at least in my view, that’s where investors are going to start putting their money, it’s either going to be in the stock market or in the real estate market. And another major reason that we’re seeing real estate prices go up so much.
David, I’m curious, do you think there’s anything that could slow down the housing market right now?

David:
Yeah. I just don’t think it’s practical to expect it to happen. This is exactly where my mind goes because so much of my net worth is held in real estate, almost all of it. So there’s a quote, I think it might’ve been Warren Buffet, I don’t want to be wrong where he said, “Keep all your eggs in one basket and watch that basket very carefully,” as opposed to the-

Dave:
I’ve never heard that. I like that.

David:
… the typical, “Oh, I’ll just diversify and that’s all you have to do to be careful.” We don’t use that with… We marry one person and we focus on that relationship, we don’t go marry 12 people and say, “Well, if six of them leave, at least I have six wives left.” It’s not a great wealth building principle. I think to Kathy’s point, I wish more… This is almost all that I talk about when I get on other podcasts now, because I believe it’s this important that people understand what’s happening around them. Because if you’re just working your nine-to-five, driving your truck, working your job, doing whatever you do, you don’t know what’s happening in this wealth building realm of people that are managing vast amounts of money and their psychology.
There is so much money being printed largely because what the US government has now done every time we hit any form of adversity like shutting the economy down because of COVID, like the banking crisis, anything, is we just print more money. We say, “Ah, we’re slowing down, throw more gas on the fire.” We should normally have these cycles where there is a break. People keep saying, “Well, every eight years, every 10 years, there’s a dip. I’m going to wait.” And it should work that way. It’s just every time it gets to the point where we should slow down, we just hit more nos and we get the car going faster. Eventually, I think the car will probably burn up.
That’s what we’re doing to our monetary supply. I don’t know what point that’s going to happen, I’m not pretending to know. I’m not one of those people that’s just telling you, “Oh, chicken little, the sky is falling.” But that will happen at some point. What people need to understand is there’s a desperation by people that manage money to get a yield for their investors. So when we keep interest rates artificially low, which the government has done, it creates a need for people that have money that want to live off the interest. Let’s say you’re like 65, 70, you wanted to retire, and you can’t because you’re not getting any issues on your nest egg.
Well, you’re going to give that money to someone else to get it for you. Or you’re 30 and your company IPO-ed, and you’ve got a bunch of cash and you don’t know what to do with it. Well, you’re going to give it to someone else. They have to put it somewhere and they end up putting in a real estate because the fundamentals are so strong. And that’s what is causing prices to go up. It’s not like 2006 where it was bad lending that was allowing prices to go up. So that’s the first point I just want to make regarding why it’s so hot.
It’s not artificial means, it’s we’ve literally just made too much money and it needs a home. It has to flow somewhere and it’s flowing into real estate and it’s flowing into tech, which is why Tesla went from that $50,000 investment into a $400,000 investment. That person benefited from the exact same macroeconomic functions as real estate would. What it would take for it to go down, first off would be more supply. We would need enough houses for the people that want to buy them. It’s that simple.
Now, I don’t know the data, Dave, you might be able to find this, but my guess would be, there are less people dying every year and their house is going back on the market than there are people becoming of home buying age. So there’s more people like Kathy’s daughter that are turning 29, 30 that want to buy a house than there are that are dying and taking themselves out of the market, because you got to remember, when a normal person sells a home, they’re then going to go buy a house too, most of them.
So it’s not like inventory ever hits the market unless somebody dies for the most part or a foreclosure, which is very rarely happening. So even if it stayed the same, we have this big shortage, but the shortage is going to get worse because more and more people are coming along. So that’s the first thing. Interest rates rising will not stop this from happening. And I can explain that very clearly. If you’ve got 10 houses and 10 people that want them, you hit a relative, what’s the fancy scientific word for an ecosystem where it’s really stable?

Dave:
Equilibrium.

David:
Equilibrium. That’s what I’m looking for. Thank you. Thank you. There you go. Equilibrium. Now, let’s say interest rates go up and they make housing unaffordable for 20% of people. Well, now you’ve got eight people to buy a house, but 10 houses for sale, that pushes prices down because those sellers have to compete for that buyers because there’s not enough. When interest rates go down, maybe that makes 12 people available to buy the 10 houses. Well, that’s going to make prices go up. We’re at something more like there’s 20 people for 10 houses. It’s ridiculous.
So even if rates go up and make them an affordable, you still have 15 people for those 10 houses. It’s not going to make the prices go down, it’s just going to mean that wealthier people are the only people that can get the real estate, which is really the problem in the first place, is real estate was the average Joe’s means of getting wealthy and getting ahead and getting out of the rat race. It was by the sweat of your brow and the grease of your elbow you could build yourself out of this W2 thing.
And the more that we have a shortage of inventory and the harder it is for the regular person to get a house, the harder that is to become, and wealthy people will be the only ones that buy homes. So there really isn’t anything that could slow this down other than a mass exodus of people leaving the country, if that happened and there wasn’t anyone to buy homes, way more supply being built, or like Kathy said, something more like houses are printed and you could buy one for $8,000. And that could supply some of it, but you still have the problem of the land. You’re not putting 3D houses where Kathy lives in Southern California.
You’re not putting them where I live in Northern Cal, you’re not putting them in Hawaii. You’re going to be sticking these houses in Kansas somewhere. So people will be able to buy real estate, but it won’t be the most desirable area. You’re still going to have the demand for the areas that are the best. So with that being said, at least if you’re listening to Kathy and I’s perspective, it is not wise to wait for a massive crash. It’s more wise in my opinion, to say, “How do I restructure my personal life, my own spending, what I prioritize with my money,” so that real estate is higher on that list instead of waiting for it to be convenient to buy real estate.

Dave:
Yeah, that’s great. And I do want to get back to this point about what people should do right now, but also just want to stress a point because I hear this a lot and you just mentioned this, that people seem to feel that crashes in the housing market is a normal thing, and that it’s something that happens with a lot of regularity. And that’s just not really the case. And I know now I’ll knock on millennials, myself being one of them, but people who grew up, I graduated in 2009, right during the middle of the recession. A lot of people around my age are scarred from that and feel like this is a normal thing that you see these massive drops in housing prices.
But if you look back 50, 60, 70 years, there are very, very few times when the United States has seen decreases in housing prices and turned in nominal dollars like non-inflation adjusted. And even adjusting for inflation, there’s maybe a handful of times that we’ve seen housing prices actually decline with the Great Recession being by far the most dramatic and longest of all of them. So I just want to provide that context for people that unlike the stock market, which does tend to be a little bit more cyclical, real estate prices even adjusted for inflation tend to go up and don’t really have these regular prolonged periods of decreases.
So I just think it’s important to reiterate that because people keep seeming to wait for something that doesn’t really happen all that often. And I tend to agree with you, David, that if the prices were going to go down, you would have to see either just a huge glut of inventory, which is not going to happen, a massive decline in demand, which is demographics aren’t going to change, or the Fed would have to raise interest rates at a breakneck speed, which they’re not going to do. And so, I don’t know, I just tend to agree that none of those things seem very likely, of course it could be wrong, but those seem pretty unlikely to me. Anyway, that was my little rant.

David:
The last piece I’ll make to put like a bow on this topic is that, like you said, Dave, that was the worst housing crisis in my lifetime and anyone I know’s lifetime. I don’t know what happened in the 1800s in Oklahoma, maybe during the great Dust Bowl it was worse. But in our lifetime, this was the worst we’ve ever seen. And we recovered from it in two to three years. For the worst punch ever, and you just get right back off the mat in two to three seconds and you’re back in the fight, lets you see the resiliency of the real estate market.

Dave:
That’s so perfect. Sorry, Kathy, go ahead.

Kathy:
I was just going to say, if I can share some advice my dad gave me when we were sitting around a dinner table when I was very young, and I don’t know why I remembered this, but back then he was the breadwinner, my mother raised the five kids. And I remember him looking around and saying, “You’re not going to have this. When you grow up, both parents will need to work because of inflation, because of the manipulation.” It was happening already. In 1971, we were taken off the gold standard. When money had to be tied to the amount of gold we had, there was a limit to what could be created and printed. And that changed in 1971.
And he could see the future. And he said, “You’re going to have to have both parents work.” I think we’re in a situation now where it’s like, okay, you’re both parents and the kids, or you’re going to have to go in with another couple, somehow it just because of the money manipulation… And the best way to look at it is if there’s that much more money, it’s not that the value of the house has gone up, it just takes more dollars to buy it because the dollar’s being devalued. That’s what’s crashing, the dollar is crashing, not housing.
People need a place to live. Most people prefer to live indoors. There’s a demand, there’s a need for it. What is crashing is the dollar, and how do you protect yourself from that? Fortunately, we still have this amazing opportunity to borrow debt so cheap, so cheap today and be able to acquire an asset that stays as a fixed payment. And you can live there for 30 years or rent it out for 30 years at the same payment while we already know rents are going up.
So if you don’t buy, you’re stuck in a situation where you’re going to be paying more for your housing every year. If you are able somehow, get a friend, whatever, get a fourplex, rent three units out. When Rich and I started, we bought, it was a five bedroom house, when he ended up being sick for about six months, we rented out every room in the house and it paid the entire mortgage. You can get creative and make it work. The biggest crisis is if you do nothing and watch your savings just deplete as the value of that dollar goes down.

David:
That’s a great point. And that’s the same thing I tell people is my real estate, I didn’t make great real estate decisions, I just got my money into something that went up. Your real estate could be appreciating by 3% a year and you could still be losing money because inflation is at six or 7% a year. And it’s a wild thought, but that’s the case. Now, one other things that stop people from moving forward, at least from what I can see is real estate has an Achilles heel, and that’s you’re dependent on your tenant as your loan source of income.
It’s not like buying a business like I’d say, if you were to buy a Footlocker or a champs sports where you sell shoes, you sell t-shirts, you sell socks, you sell sports gear, you have all these different things you can sell. So if people don’t want shoes, you can still sell other things. But when we buy real estate, the only way we get income is from those tenants, especially if it’s residential real estate. And during COVID, the government stopped landlords from being able to evict non-paying tenants.
And I think it scared a lot of people that what if? That worst case scenario reared its ugly head for a brief minute there, and we realized, “Oh man, this is what I was afraid of and now it happened and I don’t want to buy more real estate, or I knew someone that had this happen to them and I don’t want to get involved.” And that was a pretty big disrupting factor, I think. It didn’t stop the people that had enough in reserves to move forward, it didn’t stop me, but if you were someone who’s like skating by, that was a really scary thought.
Recently, that eviction moratorium has been ended. The Supreme Court overruled the president’s desire to extend it and said that’s unconstitutional. So Dave, do you mind sharing with us a little bit of your understanding on what happened there and any information you have that would help investors to understand it better?

Dave:
Sure. Yeah, absolutely. So I think most people are probably aware of what’s going on, but let me just take two or three minutes here and give the timeline and just remind anyone who might not be familiar with what’s been going on here, and then I’d love to kick it back to you guys and get your opinion on this. But basically, last September, the CDC, the Center for Disease Control issued a moratorium on evictions stating that they didn’t want people to be evicted during the pandemic and that could make the pandemic even worse.
And pretty much since that got started, it was challenged in court, and it went back and forth. There was a couple of rulings, but basically, a lot of people who were in landlord associations and different groups were saying that the CDC lacked the constitutional authority to make such a ruling. And so we saw this go all the way up to the Supreme Court. And in July, the Supreme Court actually ruled in favor of the CDC. They said on a five to four ruling that the moratorium could continue, but only till for the remaining time that it was already allowed, which was till the end of July.
And one of the, actually one of the justices who agreed with the CDC, Justice Kavanaugh, said though, in his ruling, he basically said, “We will let it go until the end of July, but if you try and renew it, we’re going to strike it down.” Basically did that. Even with knowing that, the CDC went forward again and tried to extend the moratorium from the end of July to October 3rd. And then just about a week ago, the Supreme Court came out and did what they said they were going to do, they struck down the moratorium.
And at least to me, this has been going back and forth and back and forth for months, but this feels like the end to me. The Supreme Court has spoken and unless Congress acts, it’s really unlikely that there is going to be another federal evictions moratorium at least anytime soon. So with that, hopefully that’s some helpful background for people, but Kathy, I’d love to hear your opinion on what you think this means for the rental market or just what this means in general now that the moratorium is gone.

Kathy:
Yeah. What it means in general is the scary part that you can have a legal contract with somebody and that the government can come in and make that void. So how do you go into a contract thinking I’m safe? So I completely understand why it happened. We’re in an unprecedented situation. Certainly, can’t just kick people out onto the streets in the middle of a pandemic when they’re not allowed to work. I get it, some solution had to be there. But having the landlord bear the burden of that isn’t fair.
So I do hope that it’s looked at, that in the future if we’re in a situation like this, that it’s equitable, that maybe it comes in the form of housing vouchers or something, but not landing on say a first-time investor who makes a contract with the bank, they have to get a mortgage and pay it. And then they make a contract with their tenant who’s going to pay them, that’s business. And when suddenly one piece of that has a federal law around it, the other doesn’t, that’s just too hard for the average person. Landlords are not always these institutional funds, it’s eight.
Eight million Americans own one rental property, and these are just mom and pops trying to create a future for themselves, trying to have a retirement. So I just hope that it’s looked at differently in the future if this happens again. It has been frustrating because so many jobs are available that people could go back to work and pay their mortgage, but I’ll stay out of the political stuff.

Dave:
That’s a good perspective. David, what are your thoughts?

David:
I think first off, I don’t disagree with the government’s decision to stop forcing people out of their homes during a pandemic, assuming that the CDC’s information was correct. I understand why they did it, they were trying to stop the spread of the virus. It would have been better had they said, “Look, the government is going to not let you evict people, which is not fair to you. So while we’re not letting you evict a tenant, we’re also going to pay their mortgage or their rent for them through section eight.”
That would have been fair had the government come in and said, “Okay, fine. We’re going to stop you from evicting non-paying tenants, but we’re going to foot the bill. We’re not going to you eat it and until you that you can’t.” And that doesn’t always happen. So this reminds me of this one-sided approach that you see often with the way that policy is made, to when an NFL team signs a player to like a five-year contract, and then that player has an amazing second year. They just go off the charts good.
Then the player says, “I’m holding out and I’m not playing year three unless you give me a raise.” And they hold the team hostage to pay them the contract. What everyone will say is, “We’ll pay him what he’s worth. He’s over performing, he should get a better contract.” And it seems to be fair on its face until you look deeper and you say, “Well, what about all the players that didn’t perform? Did the team get to come back to them and say, “We’re not going to honor our contract to you, we’re not going to pay you for year three because you’re doing bad?”
No, that player gets their money regardless of how they perform. So it is one sided. If you’re a business person, if you want to be the one that owns the asset, like the owner of the team, there will be many times where the system’s going to work against you. And that doesn’t mean that it never works against the tenant. So I take this information and I use it for my own investing strategy. If you look at the areas that tend to be the most landlord friendly, the California’s, the New York’s, they’re also the areas that appreciate the most.
You got to take the good with the bad just like if you’re an NFL team and you want the player that performs the most, maybe they’re the biggest diva and they bring the most headache with them a lot of the time because they’re the best, which means that certain teams can afford a player like that. They have enough wealth around them that if that player holds out, it doesn’t destroy the whole team. They can get by, they can take that risk. Whereas other teams literally just don’t have enough slack that they can take that risk.
So if you’re the investor that doesn’t have a lot of reserves, that can’t play the long game, you need cash flow right now, if you have a tenant that doesn’t pay, you’re going to go to foreclosure, you’re living that thin. You can’t invest in those areas, or maybe you shouldn’t invest in those areas. The California’s, the New York’s, the Chicago’s, those areas that are going to protect tenants over the landlord, you’re not in the stage of your growth where that makes sense for you to be. And that’s okay.
Now, there’s other people that have enough wealth accumulated, they can handle a year and a half of a tenant not paying, they can ride that storm and then enjoy the appreciation that comes later, that should be investing. And this actually creates opportunity for them because as nobody else wants to buy into these markets, because you can’t get rid of your tenant, prices come down, there’s an opportunity for long-term growth that you can buy in.
The worst thing is to hear this news as a landlord and say, “That does it, I’m not going to buy a house. It’s stacked against me. I don’t want to own an NFL team because there was a player that held out one time.” The right way I think is to take the information BiggerPockets is giving and say, “Does this work for where you’re at? Does this player make sense for your team? Does that property makes sense for your portfolio where you are?”

Dave:
That’s a great analogy. I would have never thought of that in a million years, but thank you for putting it in those terms. I do want to mention also that, Kathy, you had said that you understand why the government do what they did, and I agree. I think that the intent behind moratorium makes sense. You don’t want to throw people out on the street. And I do believe that evictions should be the last resort.
But I think what’s crazy is that it seemed that around the beginning of the year, both administrations, the previous administration and the current administration started to realize that this approach wasn’t working, and they allocated $47 billion over the course of two stimulus packages, one from the previous administration, one from the current administration, to help pay back landlords, and to make people whole and to come up with a different approach. But I read something earlier that is insane, that less than 10% of that money is actually been given out.
And so I don’t know if that’s going to speed up or not, but I would recommend it to any investors out there or any tenants who are struggling out there to look into that, if that is still out there, because there are still billions and billions of dollars allocated for just this purpose to help make both renters and landlords whole. And it does seem like it could be a good situation. Again, no one wants an eviction, that’s a bad situation for everyone. And maybe it can be avoided if you can look into some of the programs that have already been allocated and might make a difference for you or your tenants.
All right. Well, is there anything else you guys wanted to add about the eviction moratorium or should we move on to our final round here?

Kathy:
Oh, I just wanted to say that we did a survey at Real Wealth and we have over 59,000 members now, nowhere near BiggerPockets, but we’re still proud of it. And we had a lot of people come back and say anyone who had bought through our network and owned rental properties through our network, and it’s primarily in the Southeast and in landlord friendly places, actually we have one person out of everyone who said they were affected, but they were in a situation where they could handle it. So we’ve always said have six to 12 months reserves set aside for emergencies, and this certainly was one.
Our members were just not affected by it. We did have all the responses of people who were affected were in California. So I found that interesting. That was that’s first off. But also with the national multi-family housing, oh, RentTrack, I believe it’s called, they have had the same rent collection as they had in 2019 and 2020. So in multi-family is very interesting, at least looking at, again, the multi-family housing RentTrack, I’m probably saying that wrong, they’ve had great collections.
So I’m not sure who the 6.4 million households are who are behind on rent, I don’t know if those landlords are negotiating with them. I personally, in my world, I have not seen this issue.

David:
I would just add that I think the area that people are investing in, is it landlord friendly, is it tenant friendly, is probably given more weight than it should be, because if you get to the point where you need the laws in your favor as a landlord, you’ve already had some either things go wrong or bad decisions that you made. It’s true that you can’t evict somebody during the moratorium, but it isn’t true that they don’t have to pay their rent or that they’re off the hook. All the consequences of not paying your rent will still hit these tenants that have chosen to ride this out.
It’s not like they just got away with it, which is how it’s often talked about. If you’re investing in areas or you’re screening your tenants wisely and you’re picking people that have something to lose that don’t want their credit score hammer, that don’t want an eviction on their record, that don’t want their whole life disrupted, or they just have the integrity of like, “I’m going to figure out how to pay my rent, and if I can’t, I will willingly leave,” this stuff never even comes up.
So I own California properties, I’ve never had an eviction other than the first house I ever bought, which I’ve talked about many times on the podcast, because I did terrible with picking that tenant, it’s never come up because I have houses in areas with people that don’t want to have to go through the court system and all that. So when this happens, it exposes, did you take some shortcuts in your system? And it’s very easy to just blame the government, blame the system, blame the law, blame whatever as to why people got negatively evicted, but a lot of that is fixed by just having a stronger screening system.
And so when this type of thing happens, that’s what I encourage people to do is to say, “Hey, before you go blame everyone else, let’s look at ourselves first and say, where did we take some shortcuts that let this catch up with us.”

Dave:
All right. Great. Well, thank you for both of your perspectives on this. I would love to just end this. This has been a lot of fun, first of all, I’ve been really enjoying this new format, and thank you guys for coming and joining me here. Before we go, I would love to know, what is one thing you’re looking out for in the news, or economics, or the housing market over the next month, Kathy, that investors should pay attention to?

Kathy:
Over the next month? Again, it is hard to find inventory. It really is, and everybody’s chasing it, and now you’ve got these big tech firms that are becoming the new wholesalers, but they’ve got really fancy sophisticated systems to do it. It is definitely getting harder to do the deal and find the deal. We have a rental fund, a single-family rental fund that we’re operating a little bit like the institutional single family rental funds are doing, which is, we’re expecting lower cashflow.
And I hate to even say that out loud, but based on the fact that we really do believe inflation is going to be a factor in the future, we’re looking more at the benefits of loan pay-down and tax benefit, and appreciation, and cashflow is a little lower, but with rents going up over time, that could change in the future where the cashflow would be where it is today as rents go up. So I guess what I’m saying is you can’t be as picky as you used to be. I was buying in 2009 when prices were… we were buying $30,000 houses.
So if you keep going, “Oh, I want to wait for it to be better,” it may just be that you’ve got to change your strategy.

David:
I would say that anybody who hears what Kathy said and immediately thinks, “Heresy, how dare you say cashflow isn’t the only reason to invest?” The reality is from my perspective, that cashflow is a defensive metric. It doesn’t build wealth. Cashflow stops you from losing your property. If you look at how long it takes to build wealth with the extra money you have leftover at the end of the month, it is a ridiculously slow process that is dwarfed by what you mentioned, appreciation, loan pay down, and the tax benefits of the money you make in real estate.
So you don’t score points with cashflow, it’s defense. And if you’re going to take away from defense with cashflow, you just have to add to defense with reserves. Make sure you’re living beneath your means, make sure you have more money set aside. If you wanted 200 a month in cashflow, but you’re going to settle for 50 bucks a month in cashflow, save $150 out of other things that you’re buying in the month, and you’ve more or less made that net zero. And it’s just as safe as it was before and you’ll still get the benefits of the long term.
As far as what I’m looking for in the news, I’m watching what’s going on in the Middle East. When there is uncertainty in the broader picture, people tend to freeze. You’ve heard like fight or flight, well, there’s also freeze. Those are the three things we do when we get scared. And I’m looking to see if it gets worse, if we go to war, or if there’s rumors of war. If that causes the flock of birds to freeze, and that’s going to create a window for people who are having a hard time getting in to be able to jump in. So I’m tracking that. And if it does look like it gets worse and people get worried about us going to war, a lot of people will stop looking.
It’ll take out some of the demand, and that’s an opportunity for those that have been trying to get something under contract and couldn’t, to be able to get in there.

Dave:
Nice. Thank you. I’d say that for me, you hit on it a bit, Kathy, I’m really looking at inflation right now because I think a lot of investors underestimate the impact inflation has on basically everything in the economy, but particularly real estate has a very unique position when it comes to inflation and how you can hedge your money using real estate. And while the inflation rate has been going up, the rate at which it’s going up, it’s starting to decline. So I’m curious to see where we’re going to settle in and where inflation might sit over the next couple of months because I think that will have a big impact on how I personally do my own investing and what I would advise other investors to do as well.

David:
All right. Well, thanks for that, Dave. I think that’s some wise advice. Kathy, I’m going to give you the last word. Is there anything you want to leave us with?

Kathy:
Honestly, I’m just so happy that BiggerPockets has moved into a space of offering data on your website and on these shows because the market is changing so fast and people really need to pay attention to the future and not base things on the past, even if the past is just like six months ago, it’s changing that fast.

David:
That’s a great point, Brandon and I say that all the time, literally the rules of the game are changing. And that is why we’re putting out more information and making more of a push to get this in front of people, because you have to pay that much more attention with all the new rule updates that you see happening with the overall economy. So thanks both of you for offering your insight here. I’m hoping that those of you listening to this, like this new format where we get into the news and we get into data, we try to bring some reason to the chaos of what’s going on in the market right now.
I’ll remind you, if you enjoyed this show, if you want to continue the conversation, if you have questions that we didn’t cover, please go to biggerpockets.com/502. That’s because this is show 502, where you’ll find the show notes and there’s actually a forum on that webpage on the website that you can ask questions, you can answer other people’s questions, you can keep the dialogue going. If you have a topic you want us to cover, please email that to [email protected].
So if you email like a voice memo and just send it to them, we can play your voice memo, then we can answer that question on the air. Or if you just email it in written form, we can include that as one of the topics that we will cover, look for data as well as news articles, to support your question and dig into it. Really what we’re trying to get at is if you have hang-ups, if you have objections, don’t let those be the reasons that you don’t take action. Get them out of your head onto the paper, get answers for them so that you can take action, and let us help you do that.
Kathy, Mr. Meyer, thank you guys very much for showing up today, for offering your experience, your insight, your knowledge that you have, and for caring about helping other people climb the same hill that both of you did.

Kathy:
Thank you so much.

Dave:
Thanks.

David:
For those that are interested, Kathy, where can people find out more about you?

Kathy:
Realwealthnetwork.com is our website, it’s free to join. There’s lots of information and education there and referrals too to our national brokerage. And then of course, the Real Estate News Podcast and the Real Wealth Show.

David:
And Mr. David Meyer, where can people find out more about you?

Dave:
Well, despite being a millennial, I am painfully bad at social media, but you can find me on the BiggerPockets YouTube channel where I put out a show every Friday, or you can just message me on biggerpockets.com, I’m on there all the time.

David:
Awesome. And what are your two Instagram handles?

Kathy:
@kathyfettke

Dave:
Don’t have one.

Kathy:
Uh-oh.

David:
Dave, “The Anti-Millennial” Meyer, and Kathy “The Young For Her Age” Fettke.

Kathy:
Yay. Yes.

David:
And I am @davidgreene24, a very boring and weird label on social media for someone that’s not a professional athlete. Brandon makes fun of me for that all the time that I shouldn’t be 24, but at this point, I think I can maybe-

Dave:
No, that’s good. Well, maybe if we do this again, if people like this and we do it again, I will create an Instagram before the next show.

David:
Wow. The power of BP. We’re getting Dave into social media.

Dave:
I know no one cares, but that’s a big promise.

Kathy:
I will promise to follow you.

David:
You’ll have at least two followers.

Dave:
I already got one. I already got two. That really eases the anxiety of us creating the Instagram account.

Kathy:
Now, I better put some good stuff on mine. Oh, okay.

David:
All right. Thank you two very much. This is David Greene for the first inaugural state of the Market Real Estate News Podcast, signing off.

Speaker 3:
You’re listening to BiggerPockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you’re here looking to learn about real estate investing without all the hype, you’re in the right place. Be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from biggerpockets.com, your home for real estate investing online.