1275: Fannie Mae's Chief Economist on Housing Market & Real Estate Dynamics in 300 Markets with Local Market Monitor's Ingo Winzer

Thanks for your support, Jason. I appreciate yours and Carrie's support and your whole network. It's really been very beneficial to me and a whole lot of others. I encourage everyone to use your resources that you have. But thanks. Thanks, Jason.

Welcome to the Creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You're about to learn a new slant on investing, some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world's most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multimillionaire who's actually been there and done it. He's a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who's owned properties in 11 states, had hundreds of tenants and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to your financial Independence Day. You really can do it. And now here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Welcome to episode 1275. This is your host, Jason with a very rough voice. So please excuse that. I've got Adam here with me for the intro portion of the show. And then we're going to talk with Ingo Windsor. Today, an interesting interview about monitoring over 300 local markets. Yesterday, for the first time ever, I decided to give my voice a complete rest for the entire day. I hardly spoke five words the entire day and it was really nice, actually. It was like being at a silent retreat. So anyway, Adam did the show. Good job yesterday, Adam.

Well, thanks. I knew it was bad when you started sending me texts instead of talking about voice box.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I don't like to type very much. So today we'll jump into a really good interview here in a moment with Dodging the Hurricane. And I guess it just got a little much and I got a little bit sick. I, you know, it's interesting. I was sick last year one time in December and then, but really I escaped being sick for quite a few years and sort of, I don't know, maybe, maybe I got to pay a little more attention to the germs. You know what we've got to do in this world? We've got to stop shaking hands. I mean, it's a polite gesture, but it's really impractical. Talk about the spread of cold and flu viruses. Wow.

Need to start doing some forearm bumps or fist bumps or something else.

I think we should do like the Japanese do and do that bow. I think the bow is really quite nice.

I highly doubt that'll catch on here.

You don't think it'll catch on, Americans? Yeah, I doubt it'll catch on, but it's really nice. You know, when I went to Japan, they kind of bow at you, and it's very courteous. I like it. Anyway. Hey, so before we get to today's interview, Doug Duncan, the chief economist for Fannie Mae, was quoted in an article on Housing Wire that really, I think, just nails it. I mean, we've been talking about this quite a bit, and it is the point that one of the biggest challenges with the housing market and what is causing sales to be slower than they would is simply lack of inventory. If there are no homes to sell, you're not going to get as high a sales rate. And that's going to reverberate through the economy in lots of different ways. All of the appliance manufacturers, all of the construction workers, all of the people employed around the housing industry, it is just a giant, giant industry. So, Adam, let's dive in and take a look at this article where Doug Duncan really points out a very, very significant thing. And I don't think we really need.

To worry much about what he says.

About mortgage rates in the past two weeks or anything, but, you know, they try to stimulate the with low mortgage rates, and that's fine to a degree, but it doesn't solve the problem if there's no inventory. All it does is cause prices to go up radically. As we've seen, we need more inventory.

Yeah, he's talking in here and he said that annually we're producing 300,000 less units of single and multifamily housing than we should, given our current profile. That is an enormous number.

That is a huge deficit, 300,000 homes. And by the way, some experts say that's five or six hundred thousand homes less than we need. These are not exact things that you can determine because you have to take into account the population, the housing demand, the various demographic cohorts, and the inventory, the housing stock that already exists that really needs to be replaced.

Yeah, when you're starting with a terrible number, it's never good to go. Go on from there.

Well, but if you want the, if.

You want the truth, that's what you need to do. And you know, a lot of these markets that we go into around the country, I mean, this housing stock is just age, aging, aging, and it really needs to just be replaced. Many times we postpone necessary replacement of that housing stock. And I'm just saying we as a, you know, as a society, as the market, and what happens is you know, sadly, we've seen, and I just saw a video that was just tragic about what happened in the Bahamas with Hurricane Dorian. You know, that we're forced to replace this housing stock by a natural disaster. So it's a significant problem, this inventory shortage.

Yeah. And we have the boomers who are aging in place like we've talked about before, and we have Gen Xers who are aging, quote, unquote, in place, but instead of doing new construction, they're just going up. You know, they're tearing up, they're doing add ons. Yeah, they're adding on another floor or, you know, maybe a backyard apartment or something like that. But they're not selling their house. They're doing mini construction rather than new construction for that property.

They're adding an extra room or whatever. So let's talk about the boomers for a moment and the aging in place issue, Adam, because that is hugely significant. You know, a lot of our listeners have asked me over the years about assisted living and, you know, basically nursing home facilities and buying properties to use as assisted living. And I looked at that in detail. I went to a weekend seminar where we went out and visited some of these properties that was in Phoenix, Arizona a few years back. And I'll tell you something that is, as I've said before, this is not new information. Number one, the graying of America has been a trend that people have been seeing for decades. It's not like it's a surprise. So the supply has been factored into the market largely, number one. And number two, the promoters of these assisted living properties, and you know, I know many investors who have invested in them. I personally have not have. Highly, highly. Just terribly oversimplified the whole concept of running an assisted living facility. I mean, the demands and the liability with insurance and cities and the regulatory environment, it's just unbelievable. Yes, money can be made in everything. But you better plan on being an expert and you better plan on lots of obstacles and hurdles. I just see these promoters out there just massively oversimplifying this and, you know, caveat emptor, let the buyer beware once again.

Yeah. And we were talking about how, you know, the huge number of 300,000 less units per year being created, they're saying this aging in place for the boomers and some of the Gen Xers is keeping 1.6 million houses off the national market. You know, when you start adding all of these numbers together, it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. And it's just a really deep hole that we're gonna have to dig ourselves out of if we're going to get back to affordable housing for people.

Yeah, well, it's even more amazing than that because now granted, there's always a bit of a disagreement as to exactly when various demographic cohorts start and end, you know, the birth years and so forth. But many would say that baby boomers are between 1943 and 1960. That's the year they were born. Right. And before that is the silent generation. Okay, the demographic cohorts. And then after that is Gen X, my generation, and then your generation, the millennial generation. Adam, what you see is even more significant than that. My mother is not a baby boomer, okay. She's part of the silent generation, the older than baby boomer generation. And she's aging in place. Okay. She's not moving into, you know, assisted living facility or anything like that. Same with my aunt who's been on the show, Aunt Joan. Same thing. You know, these people, they don't have help. They're independent, they live in their own house. And so when you talk about baby boomers aging in place, the silent generation is also aging in place. All right? It's.

Yeah, yeah. And especially as the lifespan. Well, hopefully as the lifespans keep getting longer and longer, we're going to have to shift when we expect people to start moving out of their house and into facilities. Because I mean, it's as it bumps back, we can't keep looking at the same data and thinking that it's not going to change as the longevity of the United States and the world changes. But I haven't seen a whole lot of that going on.

Well, yeah, so lifespan and also as we've talked about before, health span. So you've got the greatest generation, which probably almost all have passed on, the silent generation still, even many of those aging in place, place and the baby boomers. So this whole assisted living thing is just, it's just kind of over promoted and overrated a bit. A lot of it's been priced into the market. And when something is priced into the market, the opportunity dissipates. So once again, good old fashioned, normal long term rental homes are such a great thing. And income property or not income property, but real estate in general, whether it be, you know, a house you're looking for for yourself or a rental that you own or an apartment, you'll just see that scarcity is just built into the equation. And it's such a great asset to have because think about it, some of you listening, own your own businesses of Course not if. But you do, and you sell a given product, and the likelihood is that you have to go out and market your product or service. But real estate takes hardly any marketing at all. You just do what my mom does when she rents one of her houses, she just sticks, signs up. Okay. You know, she's the extreme. Do it yourself. Or as I call her, and she puts signs up and the world beats a path to her door. It's just amazing, the level of scarcity. And that is great for us as income property investors. But getting in the game, you're gonna think, gosh, these properties are so expensive. They were so much cheaper 10 years ago, eight years ago. Yeah, I know. I was there.

Okay?

I was there. Listen, I was also there in the 90s, they were cheaper then, too.

Okay?

And in the 80s and in the 70s, they were even cheaper than that. And in the 50s and the 60s, you know, if you want to see how significant this is, just read good old William Nickerson's books. Okay? Bill Nickerson. And you know, he's sort of the original real estate investor guru guy, right? He wrote a bunch of books on investing and, you know, he talked about prices like, wait for it, I had to pay $8,000 for this rental property. You know, $9,000. I know. And these are not sea glass crappy properties he's talking about either.

Okay.

You know, these are decent properties and indecent neighborhoods with reasonably low crime rates back then. So it's just the scarcity equation is just built in. It's such a wonderful asset class.

Yeah. And especially the national association of Realtors saying this lack of inventory has actually caused 93 out of 178 housing markets to appreciate 5% or higher in the second quarter. So I'm assuming that's year over year based on this. But I mean, it's.

That's in a quarter.

That's really amazing.

I'm going to assume it's year over year.

It's probably year over year. It doesn't say that, but certainly 5% appreciation and way more than that has happened in a quarter. So.

And guess what the chief economist of the NAR says we should do in order to prevent greater price appreciation.

What does Lawrence Yoon say?

Shockingly, I mean, this is going to blow everybody's mind. He says we need to bring more homes to the market. Jason, it's that simple.

Oh, yes, it is. That's what we've been talking about. We need more inventory.

It's that simple. All you got to do.

Yep. That is all you got to do. But it's hard to do that with the environmental restrictions, the cost of construction. Now, let's talk about one more thing before we get to our guest. And that's the labor component that has been really hurting the housing market. Right. Or hurting the inventory in turn, the housing market, this labor shortage.

Right, right. The number of units being built a year kind of blew our mind. It was back before the Great Recession, we were looking at 2.2 million units a year being built, and that has dropped all the way to 600,000. And it stayed that way for a while. And he said, one of the bigger problems as we try to ramp back up is that those workers who built 1.6 million homes either retired, went back to their home country, or said, you know what? Construction isn't sustainable. I'm going to go find a job in a different industry, you know, maybe becoming handyman or.

Or just something else altogether.

Anything else altogether. Going back to school, getting into student loan debt, who knows? But they saw the Great Recession and said, you know what? Home construction isn't as safe as I thought it was. I'm gonna go do something else. And it's gonna take a while before you can convince the number of workers it takes to build 1.6 million houses to come back.

And this is why, as I talked about the other day, by the way, I hope by Monday's episode, my voice will be normal folks. So please excuse it. This is why my interview that we just published with Chris Porter at John Burns Real Estate Consulting, it really just. I got to drive that point home again. We have got to start accepting as normal and good manufactured housing in this country houses. I mean, not all of them, not the whole house, but the components of houses should be built in factories, on assembly lines, and moved to construction sites. The idea, and Chris and I joked about it the other day on that episode that we say that the biggest innovation in home construction in the last hundred years has been the nail gun. I mean, that's almost true. It's kind of snarky, but it's almost true. You know, it's just ridiculous that we're still building houses the same way. Pretty much. Pretty much the same way for the last hundred years. There's hardly any difference. We need to be building houses in factories. It could be done much more efficiently.

It could be.

And much less expensively. But it just. I don't know why.

It's just.

It's sort of a mystery as to why it doesn't really happen. If anyone has an opinion about that or any thoughts on it, please go to jason hartman.com ask and tell us what you think. We'd love to hear from you. Jason hartman.com Ask and the last thing before we get to our guest is remember the contest. Okay. We are doing a contest. Make your videos. We talked about that on a prior episode. You can win some great prizes, tickets to Profits in Paradise and the grand prize bonus being a free cruise. Okay. So be sure to join the contest. And let's go to our guest.

It's my pleasure to welcome Ingo Windsor to the show. He is the founder of Local Market Monitor. As you've heard me say many times over the last 15 years, all real estate is local. All real estate is local. And that's what we want to do on this show. We want to drill down to help you understand and unravel what is going on on a local level rather than the amateurs who talk in sound bites in the major news media talking about the U.S. housing market.

I just don't know where that is.

There's about 400 markets around the country. Let's dive into some of them. Ingo's company covers about 320 of them, I believe. Ingo, welcome. How are you, Jason?

Thank you very much. Yeah, we, we cover 320 markets. We don't go all the way up to 400 because there's not all the data we like on all the markets.

Got it. Well, hey, give us the broad view and let's kind of go down the funnel, if you will. Let's look at some markets. But what's going on on a national basis?

Well, it's interesting because obviously very recently people have been talking more and more about the possibility of recession or at least an economic slowdown. And that's going to have an effect probably on real estate in all markets. Now it's going to have effects in different ways, depending what kind of a market you're in. There are some markets where over the last few years real estate has been hot and where prices have been going up very rapidly and probably are close to peaking. We'll have to find out what happens both the local economy in those markets and with the national economy to figure out what's going to happen with prices in those markets once they have peaked, will they go down as they did in the 2008 recession? I think that happened to be an anomaly. Prices sometimes go down, but they don't always go down in all markets. So this time around we're going to see different kinds of price Movements in different kinds of markets. So depending on the market you're in, you may be facing greater risk or the risk may be relatively small.

Right. And you know, one of the other things we should point out, and we, we kind of just mentioned this briefly before we started today, is that another amateur thing that goes on in the mainstream media is that they only talk about prices, appreciation, depreciation, and for the income property investor, it sort of leaves them lost. Because, you know, we want to talk about income and rental data too, and you cover that a little bit, but you don't love the data you get. Right. Speak to that for just a moment because it's obviously a multi dimensional thing.

Right.

It's not just about, I mean, with, you know, my portfolio, I really wouldn't care if prices went down. I'm just all about buy and hold and I'm, I'm investing for income. But hey, if they go up, I'll take it. It's better.

Yeah, yeah, no, yeah. One of the things we do look at it at is rent data. And unfortunately it's, it's data that comes from the government. So it is comprehensive data. It's good data. The promise is always a couple of years old by the time we.

What is that data? Tell us what that data comes from, why it's old. Let's talk about the rental side of it a little bit. Because it's tough.

Yeah.

As you were saying, the rental sub is really interesting because rents behave differently than prices. You can be in a market where prices are soaring, but rents tend to move along with income rather than with shortages of housing. So, you know, rents will rise a bit. If prices are rising very rapidly and sideways, they rarely, rarely fall. You know, even during the recession, this past recession, rents in some places fell, but not a whole lot, not much. They behave differently than home prices, which is good and bad. It's bad in the sense that, you know, in a hot market you're not going to see rents rising 10% a year. On the other hand, you're also not going to see him falling 10% a year. So this is one of the reasons why rental property is such a good deal because it's actually a relatively low risk investment.

It is as long as you're not investing for appreciation. As long as the listeners follow my commandment number five, which is thou shalt not gamble. You've got to buy the property. That makes sense the day you buy it. And if it doesn't make sense the day you buy it, you don't buy it. Otherwise, if you do, just understand you're being a speculator, okay, you can take 10%, 20% of your net worth. If you're wealthy and speculate, fine. You might win, you might not, but it won't change your lifestyle. Now the other thing I want to say about that, and you, you put it so well, make sure listeners, you go to Jason hartman.com and in the search bar, type in the three dimensions of real estate. The three dimensions of real estate, where I unpack what Ingo just said a little bit more as to how many times rental income and prices will be non correlating indicators. They'll just do the complete opposite thing. Because in a hot market where prices are rising, everybody wants to buy. They want to get out of the renter pool. And so you see these low rates, the houses are very affordable, the market is hot, the renter pool shrinks. And in the other side of the market where affordability is low, times are bad, as most people would say. And it's a buyer's market. You know, people just stay put, they rent, sometimes they lose their house through foreclosure like they did in the Great Recession. And then there's even more renters in the renter pool. So it's an interesting thing when you look at comparing rents to prices.

Right?

Yeah.

And one of the things that people don't appreciate is how much the entire environment for renters is changing because of the economics of the US Economy. The economy is creating more renters because fewer people have the amounts of money that they need to buy a home, partly because of a large amount of student debt that younger buyers are holding. And also because in large markets there is a greater share of jobs moving into the larger markets. One reason is that there are greater efficiencies for health care providers and for other kinds of businesses to, to concentrate in markets that already have a concentration of stuff. So you're seeing in some markets a growth in renters. In other markets, smaller markets, more what used to be industrial markets, you're seeing the opposite, that there are fewer renters. So the whole dynamic of renting is changing from what it used to be. And people need to be more aware of what's going on with that.

Yeah, yeah, very good point. And you know, the demographics of renters are changing. We see aging baby boomers who are more than happy to rent, which is a surprise. Usually they all wanted to be homeowners and, you know, pay off their mortgage and stay in place as long as they could.

Right.

So yeah, it's Kind of a really a different dynamic. Okay, that rental data though, where does it come from? You know, is it from tax returns? Certainly when you look at multi family housing, there are a lot of companies out there that just survey apartment complexes and ask them what's going on. You know, they gumshoe surveying. You know, what are you getting?

This is one of the nice things about the US Government. It actually does do surveys every year and then obviously every 10 years the census does this too on a more detailed basis. But every year, all the time, let's put it this way, all the time the census is doing surveys all across the country, calling people up and talking to them in detail, but you know, not an intrusive detail about are you a renter or are you a homeowner? If you're a renter, how much do you pay per month, more or less? They don't ask you precisely. They give you ranges in which you can sort of give your answer. But basically the government does gigantic surveys. It's free to us. We don't have to pay for it.

We're paying for it. Trust me.

We're paying for it. We are paying, but let's say they don't charge us extra for that. These surveys are done all over the country and they're done down to the zip code level, which is really, really interesting, you know, because you're not going to get detailed data like that from anybody else. So data is good data. And one of the other things I do want to mention because we're spending more time looking at this is that within smaller market areas, like zip codes, but they tell you within different groups, how many people are paying this much rent? How many people are paying this much rent? How many people are paying this much rent? Now one of the things you don't know is are these apartments or is somebody renting a single family home? That we don't know.

But they give you market segmentation, so that's great.

Market segmentation, yeah. And the data, the smaller the market that you're getting the survey data for, in large markets they can tell you what's going on a year ago.

Okay.

In smaller markets, they sort of have to aggregate data from several years and they try to adjust for the effects of inflation, et cetera. But you know, you have to understand what the data tell you, how the data are acquired to know what the data actually mean. But it's pretty good data. As I said, the difficulty is that it's always a year old or so. So we don't know exactly what's going on. Right. But it's extremely comprehensive data. They do really good surveys, and it's. It's statistically very, very reliable data.

Okay, so it's old, though. It's a couple years old. So it's not ideal. Like the sales. The sales data is a lot better. Okay, so let's go back into the sales, and let's look at what your forecast are based on. Are they based on. They're based mostly around the concept of employment. Right. Jobs, Job growth. Tell us about that.

Yeah, we do forecast prices in all the markets that we cover, the 320 markets, and then also for counties and a little bit for zip codes. But I wouldn't place my money on those forecasts. I've done this by looking at lots of data over the years. That's one of the advantages of having been involved in this for 30 years. You see what things happen and what things don't happen. The forecasts are largely based on where are prices now, how much have they changed over the last six months? That gives you some idea of where prices are going, because prices tend to move in a smooth. A lot of stock prices are up one day, they're down the next day. Prices tend to move much more slowly and therefore sort of predictably. So even without anything else going on, you know, if prices start going down in the market, you're pretty darn sure they're going to keep going down and on the upside, too. And then we modulate.

But at some point that flips, you know, whether they're going up or down, it at some point. Flips, obviously. Yeah, right.

And one of the things we want to know is what is going to affect that? How is that going to change? And jobs, I, we found over the years is a very good predictor. It's a very important input into any home price forecast. And then also, you know, we have to look at what kind of a market is it, A market that. That tends to be volatile, or is it a market where everything's always, you know, going pretty smoothly? So, you know, the type of market. What's happening with jobs, what's happening with income? To some extent, you know, the income data is also old by the time we get it. So, you know, you want to be as recent as possible. And that's why jobs are such a good indicator, because new job data come out every month.

Okay, so unpack the jobs thing a little more, though. You can't just say jobs. Like, what does that mean? Is it job growth? You know, I mean, you can dice the job thing as zillion ways to Sunday. Right. So tell us more.

What we found out is the best indicator for what's going on in the local economy is how much jobs have changed in the past year. So right now we have job data for July and we compare it to what the job data were a year ago and you look at the percentage change. So it might be a 1% increase, 2% increase. In some markets it's a 1% decrease. And if you start charting those data, then you see patterns, you see, oh, you know, the economy is doing well or poorly depending on what's going on with the job data. So yeah, the change in jobs, I mean that's, you know, it makes sense that jobs would affect what's going on or what is going to happen with home prices and with rents. Because in a market where jobs are growing, you know, there's always going to be jobs create demand for real estate. And in any market, because it takes a long time to build real estate, you know, the demand is always ahead of the supply. So you know, unless you happen to be in a market where it's been overbuilt, the demand is always ahead of the supply. So if you know that the demand is going to be greater because jobs are growing in the market and for.

Investors, there's just this beautiful scarcity built into housing. The demand is always ahead of the supply. And that's wonderful when you own the properties. So yeah, you know, when you're a buyer of them, you're going to feel like, well, you know, I just can't get the deal I want to get right. But those deals always tend to look pretty great in the rearview mirror when you, after you just wait a little while. So yeah, good point. What else should we know? So jobs, anything more you want to say about the jobs component?

Well, yeah, I mean, we've talked a little bit about local jobs and local jobs can be of various sorts. They are there, you know, in a lot of markets. Well, you have to look at the kind of jobs that are growing. They are in some markets, let's say in Seattle, everybody's working for a high tech company, they're making lots of money and they're probably going to be homeowners. In a lot of other markets, let's say in Las Vegas, most of the jobs in the services sector and those tend to be lowing paying jobs. So those people are more likely to be looking for rental properties. So in different markets, depending on where the concentration of jobs is or let's say, which jobs are growing the fastest. For example, these days a lot of the new jobs in the economy are in health care and in business services and they tend to be lower paying jobs than the old jobs in manufacturing, which used to be driving real estate demand 30, 40 years ago. So it's new types of jobs. And in those markets with a lot of health care jobs, for example, example, it's a much better place to be looking for rental property because those people want to rent.

So are you saying they want rent because they move? I mean, there's the old thing about the nurses. There's even a name for it. I can't remember where they stay on for a certain amount of time, then they move somewhere else.

Yeah, yeah.

Is that what you mean? So, so you're saying that health care is a transient industry and that's good?

Well, it's a growing industry now. It also depends what kind of jobs in health care. You know, if you're a well paid technician, you make, you know, you make enough money to buy a home. If you're a nurse's aide, you don't. So you do have to look at what kinds of jobs are being created in a local market to get a more refined sense of what's going on in the market. Still, the overall growth in jobs is going to drive the overall demand for real estate. So it's just a question of, you know, are you looking for, do you want to buy single family homes and rent them out to people or do you want to buy apartments or you know, what kind of stuff, what kind of rentals do you want to invest in? Look, you find the right kind of properties in almost any market. But it's. If you find properties that are sort of in sync with what the local economy is suggesting you do, you have a much better chance of a really successful investment.

Okay, so are there some anomalies? For example, when you look at certain markets that are retirement oriented? Say you look at Scottsdale, Arizona, say you look at some areas in Florida now I live in Florida now. I used to live in Scottsdale. And you know, retirees don't take up a job, but they still have a house, hopefully. And they still go out to dinner and spend money on entertainment and all that kind of stuff, but they don't take a job slot. Yeah, and also what do you do about the gig economy and the freelancers and are they even counted or counted properly? You know, nowadays you've got so much mobility that, you know, there's these digital nomads that don't really live anywhere, but they, you know, they sleep somewhere every night. You know, they. Yeah, they go rent an Airbnb for a month in each place and, you know, move 12 times a year. I don't know. There's all kinds of things going on now. It's complicated world.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's start with the retirement markets, because as you say, you know, retirees by definition, or I shouldn't say by definition, probably don't have jobs. But what creates the demand for real estate in those areas is in retirement markets, there's a lot. A lot of service jobs, all the people who are providing the services to the retirees, a lot of health care jobs, a lot of jobs in restaurants, all kinds of services. So in those markets, it's not really retirees that you want to be renting to. You can be renting to the people who are providing the services to the retirees. And that obviously, the number of jobs created there largely depends on how many retirees are moving into an area.

To add to that, to make it even more confusing, Snowbirds. You know, you've got these snowbirds. Many times retired people, too, coming to Florida, Arizona, right.

Yeah.

And retirement markets are also tricky. It's one of the most difficult things during the last recession because there are markets where people say, well, I'm going to retire in a few years, so maybe I should buy that condo. Right now, prices are going, maybe I'll buy two of them. And so retirement markets actually end up being sort of during boom times, end up being speculative markets where prices can change very, very rapidly. So in a way, you think, well, retirement markets are sort of steady markets, but because people are sort of buying beforehand before they're actually retiring, and then, oh, then they may have to sell because all of a sudden things aren't working out so well. Prices can go up and down much more than in other markets. And we saw that especially in Florida after 2008. In some markets, prices just fell 40% or so.

Well, I don't know if you can blame the retirees on that. I mean, Florida was just a building madhouse. Oh. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, it was just there were speculators for some reason. Florida attracts that mentality. There's the old saying, I got some swamp land in Florida to sell you. You know, I mean, that. I guess that started right around the Great Depression maybe. You know, it's just. I mean, Florida was absolutely a psychotic place in the last boom before the Great Recession. So it didn't surprise me at all that, it had a bust.

I agree.

I agree. Yeah. Okay. What else can you share with our listeners? What else? Maybe a question I haven't asked you. Ingo, anything you want to share?

Let me get back to the stuff I was talking about, like getting really local and looking at the data that are available to help you with making an investment. I recently am emphasizing a whole lot this range of where the renters are, because in many markets, people, if you don't know where the largest concentration of renters are, you can fall in love with a property which right now may have a tenant. And this tends to happen on the high side of the property ranges where people see a beautiful property and has a tenant that's paying a lot. And so you invest and the tenant's there. And then if the economy goes sour for some reason, as we're looking at that possibility right now, then the tenant moves out, then you need another tenant, and then you find it's really difficult to get another tenant who's willing to pay the same amount for that property because that property is like, I shouldn't say an outlier, but it's outside sort of the range where most renters are concentrated. And knowing where most of those renters are, I think I'm not an investor. You're an investor. I'm not an investor. Knowing where that concentration of renters is is extremely important in my mind. Because, you know, then you can decide, you can say, well, okay, I'm going to go for sort of lower renters or higher renters, but they're within that range. And also, if you're looking at, if you're looking at buying a property and upgrading it to a higher rental value, you want to make sure that you can be upgrading it in maybe the top half of that, what I call the favored price range. So there's a lot more data available now that people didn't have before, or let's say data was available. We didn't quite know what to do with it. So real estate investors are still an underserved group of. Because. Because it's a gigantic industry and the data about almost everything else in the world, but not good data for real estate still.

Yeah.

And by the way, I always like to say, ask myself the question. Tell my listeners to ask the question compared to what? And I'll tell you, in the United States, it is far better than it is around the world. And that's one of the reasons I love the US Real estate market comparatively, because just the transparency of data and the availability of Data in the US is dramatically better than it is elsewhere around the world. I mean it is just really good here. I mean, yeah, I know it's not as good as manufacturing widgets or I don't know, what would you compare it to where there's really good data. Right, yeah, it's, you know, it's a lumpy, imperfect market. Put it this way, it's not as good as the stock market. That would be a great comparison.

Right.

Great data in the stock market. Admittedly a lot of it's cook the books and it's fake obviously. But you know, the data is very quantified. You know, you can search all the companies by their price to earnings ratio, the amount of buybacks they did, what the insiders are doing, you know, as long as, I mean there's fraud galore. It's the modern version of organized crime. But, but at least the data is there. Right? You can take it for what it's worth.

It is, yeah. One of the reasons that that individual can make successful investments that, that the real estate market is not dominated by a few corporations who are. It's fragmented, cranking stuff through computers and saying, well, okay, we're going to own all this stuff because we know exactly what's going to happen. You still don't know exactly what's going to happen.

Right.

You know, for any particular property, you don't know what's going to happen. So, you know, that's why it's still, I shouldn't say risky business, but that's why it's sort of an unknown business.

Right, right.

And that's why individuals, you don't have to be an analyst to do well at real estate investment. It's good to hear from analysts, but you don't need to be one.

Right, right.

I agree. Just to add to what you said, because that's a good point. We always say to our investors, embrace the fragmentation. I mean it's frustrating, you know, that it's not simple. You can't click amount house and trade your real estate. But all of these things that make it imperfect and lumpy, that's what keeps Goldman Sachs out of our business. Okay, Right. You know, it's what preserves the opportunity for the individual investor and why the individual investor can become very wealthy through income property. Whereas, you know, it's hard for the institutions to play in it. And they are this time around. It's been very different post great recession that we've seen giant investors that own 50,000 homes, single family homes, you know, companies like Invitation Homes in this business that's really never been done before to this scale. So they are playing in it and the data is getting better. There's a lot more technology out there that'll help you do it. But still, compared to can I deploy 30 billion of my fund in the stock market, you can do that much more easily in the public markets than you can in real estate. So yeah, yeah, absolutely. Good stuff. Give out your website and just wrap it up with any closing thoughts.

Sure. Local Market Monitor.com Local Market Monitor.

And.

We'Re trying to help investors to be successful with their real estate investors investments. That's basically what it comes down to.

Excellent.

Ingo, thanks for joining us and happy investing.

Thank you very much.

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