Catherine BellEmpowering Women to Create Financial Freedom Through Passive Income, Real Estate, and Social Impact

Invest Smarter: Stress Test Your Deals & Survive Downturns! #shorts

3 Mar 2026 · 0 min

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In this YouTube short, Catherine Bell and a co‑speaker discuss a disciplined approach to real‑estate investing that emphasizes stress‑testing each potential acquisition. They outline two core practices: (1) using conservative underwriting metrics to ensure a deal can survive a severe economic downturn, and (2) validating projected rent increases by placing test advertisements in the target market. The speaker explains that the test‑ad response determines whether a deal proceeds—an “epic fail” response leads to passing on the property, while a strong (parabolic) response signals confidence to move forward. Catherine offers supportive feedback, reinforcing the value of planning for the worst while hoping for the best.

Who is Catherine
Bell? Yeah. No, that's amazing. And taking a look at that. And I love that you build it in so that you, you're planning for the future, hoping for the best, but planning for the worst, which is really amazing. So, yeah, keep going. You're amazing.
Yeah. And then, you know, one of the other things that we do when we're buying a property is we actually do a stress test on our deals. Not only do we have those conservative underwriting metrics so that we believe we could handle a heavy economic downturn, in addition to that, we do test ads. So if we say, okay, we're going to raise our rents from 450 to $490, we will literally place test ads in that market and we'll gauge the amount of response there is. Because if we say we're going to fill in 100 lots at this community, we better have a really, really good response rate on the amount of lot rent and home rent that we're going to be charging in those markets. So, so we actually do the rent raised amount, we put test ads on it, and then usually what happens is the response is either an epic fail and then we just pass on the deal because we wouldn't be able to move forward because we wouldn't be able to fill all the lots, or it's a parabolic response, which is what we usually see.