The Best Markets to Buy Rental Properties Right Now (2025)

These are the best markets to buy.

Rental properties right now. You may be hearing that cash flow.

Has dried up, but it is still.

Alive and well in 2025, if you.

Know where to look. Today we'll reveal three of our favorite.

Markets for anyone looking to progress towards financial freedom through real estate, plus a few bonus markets you really need to know about.

What's up, everyone? It's Dave Meyer, back with another episode of the BiggerPockets podcast podcasts. And we've got a fun one today that many of you keep requesting for us to repeat. We actually did a show just like this back in August. One of the most popular ones we did last year. It featured Ashley Kerr and Henry Washington. We each picked our own market. So to do the repeat of this episode, I've invited Ashley and Henry back again. Ashley, good to see you.

Yes, thanks so much for having me.

And fresh off your home city of Buffalo, being named the hottest housing market for Zillow in 2025.

So, second year.

I know we're not letting you pick it because it's too obvious right now. So we're going to, we're going to handicap you a little bit. And Henry, we already know you pick like the best market of the last 10 years, so. And live in it in Northwest Arkansas. So we're also not letting you pick that one.

Fair enough. Fair enough.

So we did this show back in August of 2024. You can go check that out. In that show, we had a data download that accompanied the show and the research that Ashley, Henry and I did, and we've done the same thing. You can go to biggerpockets.com resources and download data for more 300 markets in the United States. It has stuff like rent to price ratio, population growth, basically all the stuff that we're going to be talking about today. You can grab that for free. So go check that out. In today's episode, we're going to pick each of our favorite markets. So I'm eager to hear what you guys have.

And then at the end, we're going.

To do two quick bonus rounds. One for the most affordable market that you like the most, which we're going to define as a median home price of $200,000 or less. Those still do exist, and it'll be fun to see which ones you pick. And we'll do another one for big cities, because I don't know about you guys, I hear a lot that big cities are too expensive, you can't invest in them. And so we're going to. I'M going to challenge you both to do that. So, Henry, you picked two out of 300 plus markets that we provided you with some data on. How did you get it down to these two?

Yeah, absolutely. So when I'm looking at this data set, what's important to me is I want a place where the median home price is under the national average or at the national average. So that means there's areas, quotes, affordability. And then the second thing I'm looking at is I want a place where the median rents are at or above the national average. That means I can buy a house for less than the average, but rent it for above the national average. And then I'm looking for positive population growth over the last five years. Something close to the normal or above doesn't have to be crazy population growth. It just has to show me that people are continuously moving to that area and it's not a dying city where people are moving away from it. Once I have those three data points, then I start to narrow it down a little more based on like what I'm seeing in those markets. So I might remove super coastal cities or I might remove areas where the weather's going to be extreme or like extremely cold, and then I'm going to dive into what's driving the economy in those areas. I'm also going to look at what's the unemployment rate in the area and what is the average income of the people living there. Because when you get that right mix of affordable home prices with higher rents, with an economy that is growing and driving people to want to move to that place, I think it's a great mix of finding a market where you can get some cash flow, but also appreciation. I'm looking for both totally.

If you're going to do this type of analysis for yourself, I think it's really helpful to just sort of narrow down to three or five markets and say, like, I'm going to pick one of these three to five. I'm not going to spend years pondering what is a perfect market because there's no such thing, and just doing what Henry said, making sure that the fundamentals are there and then picking based on where you're going to have a good team, a place you like to go visit, somewhere you have a good gut feeling about. And so that's how I recommend it. It's not this precise science. There is art and some data research you should be doing, but there is a bit more than just looking at data. So with all of that preamble, let's get started. Henry, I'll start with you. What market did you pick?

Yeah, I actually picked two markets mostly because one of them I would probably invest in if my location, like where I currently live didn't matter. And the other one I would invest in, like if I truly had to pick one to actually go buy a property in tomorrow, it would probably be this other market, so.

So you cheated. And did too.

So I cheated into two. Right. So the markets I picked were Oklahoma City.

Love Oklahoma City.

I do too. I really like Oklahoma City and Huntsville, Alabama. Or the two markets I picked. Why I picked Oklahoma City. It's kind of a hidden gem of a big city. Like people kind of forget that it's a thing. And there's a lot of really good economy there. It's got great jobs in higher education because there are several universities close by. It's got great government and military jobs. It's got great health care jobs. It's got great corporate jobs. Sonic is headquartered there and they're spending tons of money on infrastructure and their downtown and Bricktown areas. Population growth is 5.5 over the last five years. So that's pretty solid. So that means people are still moving there. Median home price is 244,000. That's like, that's pretty reasonable for a big city. That's amazing.

For reference, for everyone, that the average across the country is about 420. So not half, but.

Right.

Man, that is affordable by American standards.

The median rent is 1523, which probably doesn't seem super great compared to a $244,000 purchase price. But when you think about as an investor, a lot of the times you're going to buy under market value, even if you're buying on the market. So. And that's the median rent. Right. So the rents are getting higher. So that tells me that you can probably get a decent rent for a fairly inexpensive home price in that area without having to do a ton of crazy work to find the most amazing deal possible. And unemployment 2.8%.

Wow. It's basically as low as it gets.

Yeah. Right. So Oklahoma City, I think is a great big city sleeper market where you can feel comfortable and confident investing in that market. It's not going anywhere anytime soon. Infrastructure is great, jobs are great. I would pick Oklahoma City because I live about three hour drive from Oklahoma City and I've been there several times now. The market I would pick if my location didn't matter is Huntsville, Alabama. You know me, I like unsexy sleeper markets. Like, I want the Things that are under the radar. And people hear Alabama and sometimes they just get turned off because they think of the south and there's nothing great going on there. But Alabama is on the come up. There's tons of aerospace engineering jobs, defense contracting jobs. There's tons of really smart high income earners that are moving and living in Alabama.

Get a job at NASA, make like 300 grand a year and live in Huntsville and pay like $400,000 for like the nicest house. You're living a good life.

You're living a good life. Average home price is $338,000 there. But you've got a lot of high income earners, you've got a lot of aerospace technology engineering jobs, companies that are moving operations to Alabama because of all of the defense contracts. Because you think of these defense contractors, what they do is they get R and D money and they pretty much have to spend that R and D money every year. And so you get a lot of these subsidiary companies who work with defense contractors who now go and open up offices near all these defense contracting companies to try to land some of that R and D money. So you got a lot of great job opportunities. Plus, manufacturing is big, auto manufacturing is big in Alabama. So you've got Toyota, that's got a great place there, Mazda, Mercedes has a place nearby where they're all building cars and they're all growing and expanding their operations there. So it's kind of a sleeper market in terms of lots of great economy where you get people with really good jobs. A lot of these people are going to rent. You got a median rent price of 1776, which is pretty good.

Very patriotic too.

Yeah. Right. So I really, really like Huntsville as a sleeper market. That's probably the one I would pick if location didn't matter to me.

Well, let me just first say you are going to lose this competition for cheating and picking too. But I really like Alabama. It's very affordable, obviously, like everywhere it's very local, but there's some really good markets. We've talked a lot about Tuscaloosa being a really good cash flow market in the US and the thing I like about Huntsville in particular is that it's northern Alabama because southern Alabama is experiencing a lot of what's going on in Florida with insurance costs just like going through, through the roof, being on the Gulf there. So I mean, you're basically in Tennessee, right? And it's like on the Tennessee border. So it's a little insulated from those insurance shocks that I think A lot of people along the Gulf coast are seeing right now. Okay, so we need to take a quick break, but first wanted to thank our sponsor, Fundrise. This week's bigger news is brought to you by the Fundrise Flagship Fund.

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Welcome back.

To the Bigger Pockets podcast.

We are ranking our favorite markets for 2025. Henry gave us Huntsville, Alabama and Oklahoma City. We're moving on to Ashley. What did you pick?

Well, first I want to make it clear that I did follow instructions.

I've never been good at that. By the way.

I did pick one market and Oklahoma City was on the excluded list of cities we can't choose.

I picked Columbus, Ohio. Oh, so I picked this one because. So I looked at a couple different things as far as like I definitely wanted the median price to be under 400,000 because I'm looking at this as a rookie perspective and to purchase your first investment, I would rather it be less money than more money for your first property that you're going to buy as a rental. So I wanted it to be under that 400,000 threshold. The median rent is 1800 and then vacancy rate. Since I'm looking at rentals, I didn't want that high. I mean some markets had like a vacancy rate of like 16%. So this one's at 6%. And then the unemployment rate isn't too bad. It is 3.3%. First of all, before even getting into those numbers, the first thing I'm narrowing down is landlord friendly states. As an investor in New York, I will never ever invest in a city that is tenant friendly again for rentals. So like, that would be my biggest thing and then I would kind of narrow down from there. So once I looked at the numbers of Columbus, I did some digging into what actually would make it attractive for people to live there or to move there. So Amazon actually is doing a $10 billion investment into their data center infrastructure. There's also some kind of huge development grant that's happening. It's like $292 million development. It's going to be residential units, office space, everything like that. And it's anticipated to be completed by 2026. Then I was like, if there's a university or a school there too. So if you ever need to pivot to college housing, that may be an option. So Ohio State is there?

Yeah.

Columbus is one of those markets that I feel like has just been booming. Once that chips act got announced and intel said they were going to start manufacturing processors there, it's just been like a free for all. I actually drove there myself to see if I wanted to go invest there. It's a very strong market fundamentally. My only knock against it personally was like my buy box is like something that I can at least break even cash flow on. And it was hard for me to find that just because there seems to be a lot of investor activity in Columbus already.

Yeah, I've heard a lot of people talk about it and you'll find it in the forums to a lot of mentions of Columbus, Ohio.

Lots of investor activity there. Lots of older homes too. Lots of older multifamily. So you have to take into consideration like truly what your buy box is and watch out for those maintenance and capital expenses in a. In a market with a lot of older properties.

The property I'm sitting in was built in the 1800s, so.

Really?

Yeah. All the houses here like that old? Yes.

That is something I've experienced now that I do some investing in the Midwest. Henry's right. Like a lot of them are from the early 1900s, late 1800s.

And it's tough because like you obviously.

Don'T want to get something that is a lot of capex and a lot of deferred maintenance. But they're also like some of the nicest areas. Old homes are traditionally built in the most Desirable areas close to downtown or close to some attractions. And they have a lot of charm, which I like. And so you kind of, it's kind of finding the balance. I personally try and look for ones that as long as the bones are good and the internal components are upgraded, no knob and tube, for example, you know, new plumbing, that kind of stuff, I think you can still do it. But Henry's 100% right. You need to be very careful with these types of things.

Yeah, it's not a complete turn off. I'm just saying you got to pay attention to like if you can find one where somebody's already come in and done that work for you, that's amazing. But I mean, lots of boilers, you know, things that aren't normal across the rest of the country, that can be expensive if you have never dealt with them before.

And like one thing to do, like if you're not sure about that is when you do your home inspection, ask the inspector. Can you tell me one year from now, five years from now and ten years from now, what do you think is going to need to be replaced? And they can actually kind of help you like plan that out. Like, okay, a roof probably in five years, new furnace and 10 or whatever that may be to kind of like, like help ease the navigation of figuring that out for yourself too when you're looking at a property.

All right, well, very good choice. I think if you can find solid cash or you want to invest for appreciation only. Columbus is going to be a really, a really good one. My market that I picked, we'll move on is another Midwest market. Not surprising if everyone listens to me. I am, I call myself long on the Midwest. It means I don't think it's going to be the highest performer next year or three years, but I think 5, 10, 20 year horizon. The Midwest is really good fundamentals, mostly based on affordability. Home prices are very expensive throughout the country. And you see over time people tend to gravitate towards places that are more affordable because businesses move to places that are more affordable and they offer tax incentives. And for me, when I look at markets, job growth is number one, affordability is number two. And the Midwest has a lot of those things. So I picked what is often cited as the fastest growing population wise market in the Midwest, which is Indianapolis, Indiana. Have you guys ever been there, spent any time there?

I went to a wedding once and it was in August and it was so hot, it was outside. Everybody would go into the bathroom. They had those bathroom trailers because it was the only air conditioning.

Really. I didn't realize Indianapolis was that hot. Or maybe it was just like a free thing. That's like a cool day where Henry is maybe just in Buffalo. You have no tolerance. Oh my God, it's above 60. Sweating. Well, I like Indianapolis. Super affordable market at 270,000. But the fundamentals here that I love are just the employment growth. Like to me when there's a lot of jobs, people start moving there to that people start getting paid more. You see an unemployment rate of just 3.6%. And if you really want to get nerdy about it and look into what jobs are growing, you see it really across the board. It's a well diversified economy. But I like seeing that one of the fastest growing industries in Indianapolis was financial activities. So banking and stuff. That is pretty stable industry. High paying jobs. Professional and business services are going quickly. Education and health services which are really recession resistant jobs. I really like all of that. And if you look at, at the Trump administration's policies, they're really trying to restart American manufacturing. And if that happens, I think you're going to start to see a lot more growth in the Midwest. And so that's another reason I'm picking Indianapolis. And in addition to just being sort of like manufacturing, they have huge players like Eli Lilly. One of the biggest pharmaceutical companies is based out of their salesforce. Big tech company has a huge employment there. There's racing Cummings like so there's a lot going on there. I think similar to what Ashley said. It's just kind of like a centralized place and it's a very landlord friendly state. So that's why I picked Indianapolis.

Yeah, Indianapolis is a lot cooler than I thought it was going to be before I went there. The downtown area, I mean you've got the Lucas Oil Stadium right down the street from where the Indiana Pacers play. Eli Lilly's office isn't far from there either. And so it's, it's, you can tell there's a lot of money being poured into the area, but there's a lot of job diversity and job growth. Lots of great infrastructure. I was really pleasantly surprised with Indianapolis.

270,000 for median home price. Pretty solid. You know, you have to imagine with all the growth going on there that that's going to be going up similar there.

Lots of older homes.

Yeah, for sure.

One thing I learned about the area is it's some of the best golf in the country.

Oh, tell me more.

So many golf courses, so many Pete dyed design courses. There's actually A golf course? Right, right. There's like nine holes of the golf course are right inside the track where they raced Indianapolis 500.

So I saw. I've only been once and it was for a conference, but when I was flying in, I was like, is that real? Because you fly right over the, the racetrack and there's golf holes in there. It's so cool.

Absolutely. There is. Yes.

All right, Well, I think it's a great market, Henry. Whenever we do our, our lake effect cash flow road trip, we're, we're stopping in Indianapolis. Sounds great to me, Ashley. You don't know, but now you have to come on this trip too.

Oh, I remember it from last time. I was already going to invite myself.

Yeah, good. Well, no, you were always officially invited. I just figured you didn't want to come.

All right, so those are our favorite markets. We are going to take a quick break, but when we come back, we're going to do a speed round to talk about our favorite affordable markets and our favorite big cities. We'll be right back.

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We're back on the Bigger Pockets podcast.

Me, Henry, Ashley, talking about our favorite markets. We're moving on to our favorite affordable markets. We set the limit at half the median home price. Median home price in the US is about 420,000 right now. So you got to find a market. 210 or less. Henry, you went first last time. So Ashley, why don't you give us yours?

Okay, so I picked Sioux City and I selected this because it was under 210,000. But also it was really hard to find a market that didn't have a really high unemployment rate, like somewhere like 16%. And then Sioux City was 2.7%.

Holy moly. 16%. That's like higher than it was during the Great Recession.

Yeah, there is a lot of them that had really high ones.

Yeah, that's serious unemployment. All right, good choice then. Henry, what do you got?

I picked the same thing. Sioux City. There wasn't a ton of options there, but God, you're such a cheater. Median median home price of 190. But the thing to watch out for is the population is only 144,000. So a little bit of a red flag. But vacancy, 5.87%, which was pretty good. Unemployment, 2.7%. It was the best option of the options of an under $210,000 price point.

Yeah, the vacancy rate too, I just double checked. It was actually super high on the other ones too, that were 210,000 also.

Well, it's not the best because the one I picked is the best.

Which is Rockford, Illinois. I actually started looking at this before I started researching this show because realtor.com came out and said it would be the hottest housing market for 2025. And I started just like digging into it a little bit. I wouldn't say it's a suburb of Chicago. It's like 90 miles away, so it's. I don't know many people who would commute that far. But it's also like sort of equidistant to Milwaukee. And so there's a good amount of industry there. The median home price is just 188,000, which is really nice. And the vacancy rate to your point was just 7.3%, which is not amazing, but not terrible. And the unemployment rate is 5.4% now, 5.4%. Probably a little bit higher than normally I would choose. But I did some extra homework and started looking at the history of their unemployment rate. And it was eight a couple years ago and it's actually been steadily going down. Meaning that there is strong job growth in the area. Just a little tip for people to remember that you don't just need to look at things at a point in time, but try and look at an overall trend. Because if their unemployment rate has been trending down like it has been, that can be a generally a good thing for an area. So that was my quick, affordable market. Rockford, Illinois. We're now going to do our second speed round, which Was big cities. So basically the opposite? Well, I guess it kind of turned out to be the opposite. The first one was based off price, but there aren't a lot of big cities where you can buy for under 210,000. So this criteria, Henry will start with you. Is over 2 million. And I want to know what you picked.

Over 2 million. I picked San Antonio, Texas.

What do you like about it?

I like San Antonio. I just. It seemed like everybody was just having a good time in San Antonio. I don't know what it was. Everybody was having a blast. When I went to San Antonio, Texas.

What were you doing there? Were you like out of bachelor party?

No, no. I was speaking at a real estate event.

Oh.

But it was just. It just seemed like everybody was having a great time. I went to the downtown area, walked around for a little while. It was super cool. Lots of history, obviously, but 265,000 as a median home price, which is really reasonable. Population of 2.6 million. But a 265,000 median home price, I thought that was like, hard to find, hard to come by. Plus you have unemployment at 3.9% and population growth at 7.69% over the last five years. I just think those are pretty good numbers for a big city.

I like San Antonio. I thought there's a lot of fundamentals and I feel like people don't realize this. It's the eighth biggest city in the country. It's huge compared to. Yeah, it's really big. And it's close enough in my mind to Austin that you're going to get a little bit of that tech money runoff going on. It's its own city in its own right. It's much bigger than Austin, actually. But, you know, you just see a lot of investment into Austin and it's driving distance. It's like, you know, I think it's like under 100 miles. So.

Yeah. So 45 minutes.

Yeah. So I. I think it's a good market. It has been in a little bit of a slump like a lot of Texas and Florida, but long term fundamentals are very strong there. All right, big city. Ashley, what do you pick?

I picked Minneapolis.

Oh, interesting.

So this one actually had a population of 3.6 million, but the median price was 371,000. So that wasn't that bad. Five year growth, 4.25%. Vacancy rate was a little bit higher than some of the other markets we looked at today at 0.68%, but still not awful. Then unemployment, 2.7.

Whoa.

They are considered Landlord semi friendly, so not all the way landlord friendly.

There are some rent controls in Minneapolis.

Yeah, the last thing about them, too, is they're putting a lot of money into the Mississippi river waterfront and have, like, this big build initiative where they're putting a lot of money into the city and the waterfront area.

San Antonio already has a riverwalk, so we. We're better.

There's no potential for growth. Then you want to get in before that attraction is there.

Minneapolis is one of those sneaky cities. There's all sorts of really big companies there. Target, Medtronic, there's a lot of big companies. I've honestly never spent any time outside of the glorious airport, but people who live there love it, too. It's just one of those places where people really say it as a high quality of life. So I personally really like investing in places with high quality of life. I think they're. They have, like, strong demand, especially around young people, good renters, that kind of stuff. All right, for my big city, I picked Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I actually started looking at this based off Reddit because I love following Reddit, and people were just talking about how Philadelphia is such a great city, and when you actually dig into the numbers, it is pretty compelling. You're starting to see, I think, sort of like a resurgence in housing markets across the Northeast. You're seeing this in places in New Hampshire and Vermont. You see this in Rhode island is one of the hottest places. And Philadelphia, for being a city with, like, a ton of economic engines, the median home price is just 366,000. So trying to buy in a big city, you guys pick good ones. But it's pretty rare to see something that cheap. The unemployment rates at 3.6%. Population growth for the Northeast is really good. It's not, like, amazing for the Southwest, but for a big city in the Northeast, it's really solid. Vacancy rates are low. And I just hear great things again about the quality of life there, which, like I was just saying, sort of, I lend value to that. So I picked Philadelphia.

They also have four pro sports team. Yeah, like, one of the few cities that actually have four of them.

Oh, that's true.

When you go there, too. They're. All of their stadiums are right together. It's like this whole little complex thing, and they're all right there. It's pretty cool.

I never really thought about that as a metric, but it's definitely a major economic engine. All right, well, thank you both so much for doing your homework. Clearly, Ashley is the winner because, Henry, you're disqualified like two or three times.

Now I know this is rigged because every time you say that it to me. But Henry definitely had the better markets this time.

I don't know. I give points for following directions.

I've never been a rule follower. I marched my own beat.

That's why you're an entrepreneur. But if we didn't need to make a podcast episode, I would have sent you home from school today.

But thank you both. This was really insightful and hopefully for everyone listening, you learned a little bit about how we take a look at markets. If you're going to do this kind of work for yourself, my recommendation is always to look at the data. You can get it for free. Again, go to biggerpockets.com resources, pick the criteria that really matter to you, narrow it down to three to five and then really start working on your team and actually start analyzing deals in these markets to see if they work for you and your strategy. Because like on paper things in Texas, for example, they all look great. I think Oklahoma City is another one. Looks great. On paper. It is still a good market, but insurance costs are super high in Oklahoma City. So really just go in and look at the numbers and you're going to start to see which market of the five you sort of select as your short list are going to work for. You are going to find the deals that you're looking for also too.

On that point, Dave, if you're going to pick a market that you actually want to get to, you might also look at where direct flights can get you to based on the markets in your direct list because you don't want to pigeonhole yourself into a long drive if getting there is important to you.

Dude, I'm getting crushed on that right now. I picked a market when I was still living in Amsterdam. Now I moved back to the States and I can't get direct flights to the market I'm investing in. I'm like, I'm going to sell all this stuff.

Yeah, man, it's important.

I hate layovers. It's like my number one pet peeve is layovers. I don't want to do it.

The last thing I want to add is if you go to biggerpockets.com rookie resource. We actually have a market analyzer template in there that you can use. That kind of talks about all the different data points we looked at today. Things to consider when analyzing a market.

Ah, great tip. Thank you so much. Thank you all so much for listening to this episode of the BiggerPockets podcast. Ashley and Henry, thanks for being here. We'll see you for another episode in just a couple days. Thanks for listening.

Thank you all for listening to the Biggerpockets Real Estate Podcast. Make sure you get all our new episodes by subscribing on YouTube, Apple, Spotify or any other podcast platform. Our new episodes come out Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I'm the host and executive producer of.

The show, Dave Meyer.

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