Who else feels like the last two years you got punched in the face by Real Estate?

[Shiloh Lundahl]

In August 2022 I was with a group of investors at a property we had recently purchased in Costa Rica. It's a beautiful property up in the mountains. We were there looking for another property that we could buy together on the beach that we could rent out as a short-term vacation rental.

We we're living it up and having a fantastic time zip lining, eating delicious food, and seeing the monkeys in the wild.

it seems like from the moment I returned from that trip in August 2022 the real estate market completely changed. Interest rates doubled within a six month period of time and property sales almost completely stopped. 

Rents started to come down and I had to leave a lot more money in projects that I was in the middle of.  And not only that, my cash flow on my new properties was low or sometimes zero. In fact, a couple of them became cash flow negative a little. People weren't renting properties as quickly, and there was an increase in vacancy. Luckily, I did have equity in all of my properties. And that is probably what has saved me over the last year or two. 

In 2020, 2021, 2022, And even some of 2023 We were closing on the sale of probably 10-20 properties a year from our portfolio and we were buying roughly the same number. But 2024 was a pretty big standstill year. I think we only closed on the sale of four properties and we purchased about seven or so.

The only thing that probably kept us afloat was the fact that we had a lot of equity in our portfolio, and I was able to sell some of the equity to raise capital to stabilize our portfolio. I think that's one of the reasons that I didn't post very much on BIggerPockets, it's because I was just trying to keep my head above water.

But now it's 2025 and things are stabilizing and I have a much more positive outlook on the future.

Let me know if any of you had a couple of difficult years recently and how you were able to turn it around if you did.