Thanks Jeremy.I'm going to leave my w-2 job and focus on my health and shaking off the burnout I've been feeling. 

I've always found inventory rates (and how they've moved over time ie previous 1-2 years) to be the starting point for where a market's health is at.

The bottom line is this: Concealment is not asset protection, proper (time consuming and expensive, I know) management, and good, prudent, practices (ditto), WHICH ARE ADHERED TO, and insurance (expensive), are needed for asset protection.

Unfortunately, that is an expensive time-consuming process.

I think broader consumer taste is killing malls, which includes online shopping, but also even where people are choosing to live and how they are spending their time/money, more broadly.I worked for a company that bought a failing mall back in 2012 (online shopping was "killing retail" then too), redeveloped most of it into more open air power center and sold.  

remember, these are NOT conforming loans, so all the consumer protections one might be used to having aren't there.

We've averaged around 7% for mortgage rates for the past two years now…I think if we can see a settling somewhere in the 6% range, if not sub 6%, we will see nice consumer confidence not only for home values, but rent values as well.

As well as they expect free health care . 

Very time consuming of course.  

There was an article published in Sept 2024 that showed the average consumer would save over $10,000 by working with a broker vs a direct lender over the life of their loan.