Quote from @Torrean Edwards: Early in my investing career, I had some success, but then the crash happened.

It's pretty easy to see that real estate proces peaked around 2007-2008 and then crashed during the Great Recession.Around 2011-2012 prices started to recover and got back to their pre-Crash highs around 2015-2016, but really 2018-2019 when adjusted.So, why are newbies reading books written BEFORE 2019 and thinking that you can still successfully invest using the EXACT advice in these relatively "old" books?

It was a great crash course on the basics of a RAL business from location, staffing, patient selection, and branding.

@Anthony Klemm here's copy & paste info that hopefully answers your question(s):--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Real Estate Crash of 2008-2010 caused real estate prices to crash across the country - but didn't affect rent amounts.

They've seen the peaks and valleys (08 crash and now post covid crash) and they've done unbelievably well investing there. 

Quote from @Doug Smith: When we started this company, I had been a special assets officer (handling non-performing loans for banks trying to extricate them from the deals with as little damage to them as possible) during the last big crash.

I highly recommend starting with a basic househack, easy barrier to entry and gives you a crash course in being a landlord who lives on site.

But then as the home prices kept going up, they decided to get out of the market, thinking that there would either be another crash or home prices had gotten too high at that point.

A chimney on the property completely collapsed—taking part of the roof with it and crashing through the neighbor’s house.

If you look back at posts from 15ish years ago it was a lot of sales, marketing and wholesaling because that's what many were doing through the crash.