Timing the real estate market in the midst of a pandemic

[Steve Chan]

I just watched this insightful video from Ken McElroy. He does a really nice job of benchmarking the economic impacts of this pandemic compared to past recessions/depressions.

https://youtu.be/N-SG-n-C5IE

Does anyone think buying Multifamily in 2020 will be a good strategy for financial growth?

[William Hochstedler]

That's the most sensible analysis I've seen yet.  I would add a couple of things:

I think we will see some exuberance of pent up buying/selling during the first part of Ken's lag.  There is a lot of active demand that has been deferred until buyers can shop more freely.  This will give the market a boost in Q3 & Q4.

The other thing that nobody seems to agree with me on is that the economy was sucking air going into this whole thing.  The stimulus from the 2017 Tax bill has nothing left and was providing a lot of boost to economy in 2018 and 2019.  This was the time that we should have been tightening interest rates, but they were kept artificially low because inflation was more of a benchmark target than any sort of rainy day reserve.  Much of the real estate activity over the past two years has been largely driven by factors that have all been used up prior to Covid.  The rest of it was consumer confidence and unemployment rates (jobs).  So what's left?

So the big question in my mind is what's everyone doing for the next 12-24 months?  I didn't just sell $200M in 2019! So I can't sit on the sidelines waiting.