Are We in A Market Correction or Collapse? The Current Rental Market
In this episode of the Building Equity podcast, real‑estate expert Jason Hartman discusses the state of the U.S. rental and housing markets. He begins by highlighting a dramatic shift in renter geography from 2018 to 2022, with urban renters falling from 44% to 32% and suburban renters rising from 44% to 52%. Survey data shows renters are far more concerned about housing affordability than homeowners, with 29% of renters strongly agreeing that rising costs are a critical issue versus only 14% of owners. Hartman argues that rent statistics are misleading because most surveys focus on multifamily apartments, ignoring the much larger single‑family rental sector. He critiques inflation measurement, labeling the Consumer Price Index a “CP lie” and explains the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) index as a more accurate gauge. He introduces the Hartman Comparison Index (HCI), which values median housing prices against a basket of commodities and assets—gold, oil, rice, the S&P 500, among others—to illustrate that housing is neither the cheapest nor the most expensive when measured in real terms. The discussion moves to market typology, distinguishing linear (steady, low‑volatility) markets from cyclical (high‑volatility) and hybrid markets, urging investors to focus on linear markets such as Memphis and Indianapolis. Hartman assesses current macro conditions: inventory remains historically low (≈561,000 homes, roughly six months of supply), a large share of owners hold ultra‑low‑rate mortgages (≈25% under 3%) and many homes are paid off outright, reducing crash risk. He warns against market‑timing, citing the 2008‑2015 and 2020‑2022 cycles as examples of missed opportunities. He stresses that cash holdings lose 9‑17% annually to inflation and that investors should deploy capital wisely. The conversation also covers the impact of natural disasters, arguing that hurricanes can increase demand for construction commodities and create buying opportunities rather than market collapses. Finally, Hartman promotes his Empowered Investor Pro coaching, free investment counseling, and an upcoming two‑and‑a‑half‑day conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, highlighting the community and networking benefits.
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But look at how startling this is, really. Okay, so the makeup in 2018 for urban renters, 44% of renters lived in urban areas, 44% lived in suburban areas, and only 13% in rural areas. Now jump to 2022. Only 32% live in urban areas and 52% live in suburban areas. Statistically, that is a shocking huge tectonic shift, just a huge difference. To go in four short years from 44% of renters living in urban areas to only 32% of them and in suburban areas, to go from 44% four years ago to 52% today, that is truly shocking.
And now here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.
Welcome to episode 1915. 1915. And thank you for joining me today. We have got an interview that I recently did. We're going to play that in a moment, but first I want to get to some stats. And as you know, I am moving. And hey, you look around, look at the background. Most of the stuff is gone. But as the drawers and the shelves and the decorations are gone in the background, the most important thing is here. Look at that gorgeous animal sitting behind me. I moved this little sofa down, down here into the office room. And the dog likes it. So you get to see the dog here. Joining me for the podcast. So that's really good. All right, so let's get to an interesting survey that I thought you would like. What do we have coming up? Well, you can't speak about this stuff anymore because the thought police are out and they might think that you're disagreeing with them. So instead of saying what is coming up? I will give it another word. I'll call it the erection. Yeah, with the erection coming up, they do all these surveys and polling of voters, right? And you know, what do they think is going to happen? Right? What, what, what are the most important issues for them? And one was particularly interesting. It's on the screen. For those of you watching on video and on audio, we'll just go over it. But this is an apartmentless survey. Rising housing cost, a more salient political issue for renters. Now, this really tells us a lot. So renters are much more concerned in making it a political issue. The, the cost of housing. Right. Why aren't homeowners as concerned about this? Well, I think there's a whole variety of reasons. But one reason, of course, is that when you buy a house, if you got a 30 year fantastic fixed rate mortgage at the lowest rates in 5,000 years and you have 28 or 29 years left on that mortgage, and you're very unlikely to ever give that mortgage up. No matter what, you're going to try and keep that mortgage because it's such an asset. Right. And I just want to make sure we distinguish this again. I have mentioned it before, but it is critically important. The market value of a property is not the same as the value of the property with the included mortgage to the current owner. In other words, the market value of a Property might be $500,000, for example, but to that current owner that has a mortgage of 3% or 3.5%, that property is worth a lot more than $500,000 to them because that mortgage is a big part of the asset and it's immovable. The new buyer does not get that mortgage. Only the current owner gets that mortgage. So this is kind of similar to what's going on with the rental housing market. And why is it that 29% of renters strongly agree that housing affordability is a critical issue in the upcoming midterm erection, while only 14% of homeowners, less than half, think this is such a big issue? And then when you go down one notch to the just agree rather than strongly agree. Now, you know, again, these are surveys. They're not totally empirical. They're humans. Like, do you agree or do you strongly agree or do you slightly agree or, you know, whatever, right? But look, when you do it out over enough numbers, you have that law of large numbers working for you. And you can get a lot of glean a lot of data from these surveys, right? So for agreeing, 25% of renters agree that this is a big issue, and only 19% of homeowners agree. Okay, what about the second question on this survey? In the past year, rising housing costs have had a negative impact on me and my family. Only 12% of homeowners said this, but 27% of renters said this. Wow, that was strongly agree. Now just agree. 14% of homeowners and 22% of renters. So clearly, no matter what way you slice it, and you know, you don't even need a survey to know this, right? Renters are far more concerned about affordability of a house. And this doesn't mean to buy a house. It just means to rent a house to have a place to live, right. They are far more concerned than homeowners because they have not locked in their rate. The rent is always rising and it's always adjusting upward. And as you know, and I've said it many times, it's going up a lot higher, folks. Yes, I know the surveys for rents are really misleading. Why are they so misleading? Well, because they're mostly multifamily housing surveys. I mean, think about it. The vast majority of you listening to this podcast, you are investors, you own rental properties. And I'll bet. And listen, I can say in my decades of investing, the only time someone ever asked me about these properties if they're vacant or occupied, and that is every 10 years when the Census Bureau reaches out to ask those questions. If they couldn't find someone at the house when they did the census survey, right. If they couldn't find them, they would try and track down the landlord and call me and say, hey, is this house vacant? Is it occupied? What's going on here? I have had like two of those calls in decades, right? Nothing even then, right? But nobody calls you. I mean, folks, if you're watching this on YouTube, comment below. And I know on the podcast you can't comment below, but you can reach out to us and let us know. Go to jasonartman.com ask and just let us know if you ever got surveyed on what your rents are for your investment properties, for your houses that you own, right? That you rent out. I bet you never got a survey. I never got a survey. Okay, but apartment owners, institutional apartment owners, where they've got 2, 3, 400 units in an apartment complex, they get surveyed all the times by these research firms that survey rents, right? You know, these research firms, they have gumshoe people that go out and they visit apartment leasing offices and they ask the leasing agents, hey, what's available? How much are these units? How much, how many square feet are they? You know, what amenities do they offer? They do these big elaborate surveys, but they don't do the surveys on single family homes. Why is this meaningful? Why am I telling you this? Well, here's why. Because you're seeing in the news that rents are starting to decelerate. Now, they're not really softening yet, but I think they will. But just remember, what rents are they talking about? They're talking about rents on the largely overbuilt multifamily housing sector. The single family home sector is not the same animal. And you know, like an animal farm, some animals are more equal than others. George Orwell, by the way, did you know that's not his real name? George Orwell? Yeah. That's just a nom de plume, pen name. Right. Okay, so the single family home rental market is not the market that is getting surveyed that is the apartment market and these two are quite different. But whatever. Anyway, that's that. Now we do have many more institutional players in the game. Now we have invitation homes, American homes for rent, all these other big giant landlords that own thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of single family homes. So you can bet that these surveys will get better over time and they will start to include more single family homes. But even with all of the institutional investors that really never played in our market before in any significant way until the last several years, they're a drop in the bucket. There are about 18 million mom and pop owned single family homes in the country. And the institutional landlords, it's hardly anything. Yeah, it's a big figure compared to what it was, which was almost non existent. But in the overall scheme of the single family home rental property market, there's still just a drop in the bucket, nothing significant. So this is important to understand and much bigger issue for renters because they don't have the benefits you have. And this also is very indicative of what will continue to happen to the concentration of wealth issue as wealth becomes more and more concentrated and most people move down the socioeconomic ladder. Very bad for society. Bad news, I don't like it. But it's the world we live in and we just want to help you be on the other side of that trade. So you're moving up the socioeconomic ladder or at least, at the very least, you're keeping your spot and you're not moving down like so many other people are. Look, in economics is a relative game, as I've said many, many times, if you can just stay where you are even if you don't advance in a world where so many other people, the vast majority of people are drifting backwards, which they are, sadly, you are doing better. As a relative perspective, that is absolutely the case. Okay, what else? Inflation. Gosh, who knows? We certainly talk about inflation more than enough on this channel. But I wanted to talk to you about a new thing. Another aspect. Well, it's not a new thing, but we haven't talked about this before. Maybe we've talked about it, but it hasn't been any real thing. And that is this. You've heard about the cpi, right? The Consumer Price Index, the most widely used measure of inflation. I call it the CP lie. It's like Bill Clinton, a good lie, guaranteed. Right. I remember a buddy of mine gave me some Bill Clinton golf balls years ago when he was president. And I was much more into golf back then because I guess my tolerance for Frustration was higher when I was younger. Right. And the golf balls had a picture of Slick Willy Bill Clinton on them. And it said, a good lie guaranteed. So the CP lie, obviously totally understated measure of inflation. But we also have the core rate, or headline inflation. Right. The core rate especially is interesting because that one strips out food and energy. We've talked about that many, many times over the years. So they mislead us into making us feel inflation is lower because they're stripping out food and energy in that equation. Right. But I wanted to talk to you about this one today. And this is the PCE Personal Consumption Expenditures. And I got this from our friends at Investopedia, which, by the way, is a great website. Just be careful. The ads on there will talk you into putting your money in the stock market, the modern version of organized crime. But this is interesting. So let me just share with you a little video from our friends here at Investopedia. I thought this was a good explanation. And here we go.
Personal Consumption expenditures, or pce, is a measure of price changes in consumer goods and services. The Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Department of Commerce published the PCE report. It's one of two broad measures of price fluctuations and consumer behavior in the United States. The other is the Consumer Price Index, which measures the weighted average price of a basket of consumer goods and services. That's the CPI shows how much households are spending and what they're spending their income on. While the CPI follows a fixed basket of goods and services, the PCE accounts for changes in consumption based on the idea that if a good becomes too expensive, consumers will use a cheaper alternative.
So there you go. Remember, I've taught you over the years about the three major ways they manipulate the Consumer Price Index to make us believe inflation is lower than it really is. Weighting, substitution. That's what they're talking about right here. Substitution and hedonic indexing. So substitution, a total scam. We don't want to substitute. People are only doing that out of necessity because inflation is so bad they'd rather not substitute. Listen to their example on substitution here.
When steak gets too pricey, consumers may substitute hamburger, for example.
So steak is too expensive, so you're going to have hamburger. I always use the example. If the price of beef goes up, everybody will, you know, switch to chicken, right? But maybe you think chicken's a dirty bird. You don't want chicken. And so that's substitution. Weighting, substitution and hedonic indexing.
The PCE measures data pertaining to services such as education or Entertainment. It also measures durable goods such as cars, appliances, and other items that last for a long time. And non durables, like fuel. Usually the PCE reveals a lower inflation rate than the cpi, but it is a predictable report that bears little impact on the markets.
All right, so I hope that was helpful. So that's just a different concept that I thought you should be aware of. I just wanted to share that with you real quickly. No big deal there. Now, another thing, and this is just as I predicted. Just as I predicted back in about March of 2020. And Lisa shared this in our Empowered Investor Pro Group and I thought it was interesting. It shows you over the years the percentage change of renters in urban areas, suburban areas and rural areas. And this is pretty startling. I predicted this would happen both for home buyers and renters, just movers, just people in general. But look at how startling this is, really. Okay, so the makeup in 2018 for urban renters, 44% of renters lived in urban areas, 44% lived in suburban areas, and only 13% in rural areas. Now jump to 2022. Only 32% live in urban areas and 52% live in suburban areas. That is statistically, that is a shocking huge tectonic shift. And 16% in rural areas, that's up 3%, but just a huge difference. To go in four short years from 44% of renters living in urban areas to only 32% of them, and in suburban areas to go from 44% four years ago to 52% today. That is truly shocking. And guess what, most of you, if you're following our plan and the plan that I've outlined over the last many, many years on this show and in our live events, we got another one of those coming up. Don't miss it. You are investing in suburban areas. You're not investing in urban areas. So you are winning big time with this trend. Now, guess what? I have not packed this yet. I left it out just for you. We still have sound effects. See, those will get packed up soon. Okay, thought I'd just share that one with you. Remember, tomorrow night is our first Tuesday of the month Empowered Investor Pro Zoom meeting. So join us for that and we look forward to seeing all of you pro members there. If you're not a pro member, check it out. Ask your investment counselor about it. But join our pro group because we have huge discounts on our upcoming live event, which will almost pay for your pro membership with just one discount event. And of course, we will have several events throughout the year and that is coming up. Don't mind the, the countdown timer here because that's only when I took the screenshot. But it, it is, it is at the end of January in Scottsdale, Arizona. Beautiful Scottsdale, Arizona. We've got some fantastic speakers. We're going to continue to announce more fantastic speakers and this is just going to be a great event. Go to jason hartman.com get your tickets today for Empowered Investor Live. We can't wait to see you there in person. I know all of you have been bugging me, bugging me, bugging me like crazy. When is your next live conference? Here it is. It's official. It'll be at the end of January. So we look forward to seeing you there. And without further ado, let's get to that interview I just mentioned. And here we go.
We're back, back here on the Building Equity podcast. John, I couldn't be more excited to have a legend, probably one of the best real estate coaches in all the business here on our show, Jason Hartman. Jason, thank you so much for joining us.
Hey, it's my pleasure. Good to be here.
I got to dive right in. The first question, are we in a correction or collapse? What's happening here?
That is the trillion dollar question that everybody keeps asking. And just to give a little spoiler alert here, I do not think we are in for a market crash. However, we are definitely going into a recession if we're in one already. The Fed is doing everything they can to stop inflation. I think they've just played this very poorly. They let the economy run way too hot for way too long. They should have raised interest rates much sooner and more gradually. They didn't. We're in a centrally planned economy. So look, we have what we have and now they've acted too suddenly and it's shocking the market. And the idea of a soft landing is probably not going to happen.
When you hear the question, Jason, I don't mean to cut you off here, but here, hey, inventory over the last three, four months, it's skyrocketing.
What's your, yeah, that's just not true. Inventory is still historically low. And I'd be happy to show you some charts on that. It is higher than it was before, but it is, historically speaking, very, very low. There's no question about that. We have about 561,000 homes for sale in the United States right now. Any expert you ask would say that normal, a quote unquote normal market would be two times that, maybe about two and a half times that amount depending on who you ask. And that would leave us with approximately six months of inventory at current absorption rates. We have a very unusual situation going on right now because we have people that own properties already that have incredibly cheap mortgages. This really may have never happened before. I don't know. I can't think of a time, at least in the last five decades, when it's happened. And they've got these incredibly low, artificially cheap mortgages. 25% of the country has mortgages under 3%, if you can believe that. 40% of all homes in the United States are paid off free and clear. Those people are not going to be under any distress, right? And to have a crash, you need a distressed owner, a distressed seller, and the vast majority of the country has got a very good deal. Now, I said before that 25% of the country had mortgages sub 3%. But let's take it up a little bit from that. And unfortunately I don't have numbers on this, but you can just kind of take educated guesses yourself how much more of the country has a mortgage below 3.5% or below 4% or below 4.5% or below 5%. Those are still very low rates and very affordable mortgages. So the idea that there's going to be some big crash, there's no evidence for it yet. That evidence may come in the future, but right now, not even close.
I love when I listen to you because typically what you'd say is compared to what is the magic question, right? And I agree with you 100%. While we got you here, is it possible you can give us the top three mistakes? You see, entry level, intermediate level real estate investors make, you know, I think.
The first mistake is that they don't invest. They find all sorts of justifications and reasons. You know, they try to time the market. And in any asset class, whether it be stocks, bonds, precious metals, cryptocurrency, market timing has just historically been proven to be a bad idea. Okay? The people that win the game are the people that make smart, value oriented decisions and they buy and they hold the asset. Now, I'm not just talking about real estate, I'm talking about any asset. And you know, you can look in any kind of market and you can see that that has been true over and over again. So the fact that they don't invest because they're trying to time the market, Let me give you an example of that. Let's look back to 2008 and the great Recession. That was an anomaly. It's something that Happened once in seven decades. We never saw that kind of economy before in any of our lifetimes. So we had the Great Recession, right? And coming out of the Great Recession, people saw prices rise and they all started to get worried as prices kept going up, saying, hey, you know, this has got to be a bubble. This has got to be the peak of the market. I'm going to wait until the market cools off and I'm going to preserve my cash and I'm going to go in and buy, buy, buy. Guess what year they were saying that? 2014, 2015. And guess how they did. And then they said that all along, right up until 2020. And then the pandemic came along, and everybody thought that was the end of the world. And what a lot of people just forget is that we are in a centrally planned economy, and as such, the central planners react to the market, right? It's not just a matter of supply and demand and basic economic fundamentals. You know, when, when things get bad, the Fed makes changes, they make adjustments, and the government does the same thing. You know, people who in 2020 were thinking Covid is the end of the world, they didn't do anything. And look what happened. They lost 40% appreciation in some places. So they just completely missed the boat on that. The thing you've got to do is make smart decisions and buy. Here's what investors do. They invest.
Makes perfect sense.
Investors invest, okay? And think about this, too. If you keep your money sitting on the sidelines, it is guaranteed that you will lose officially 9% a year just to inflation. And unofficially, because the consumer price index is massively understated and it's a farce, you'll probably lose 17%. So if you have $100,000 or a million dollars that you've just got in cold, hard cash, you're going to lose $17,000 a year on the 100,000 or 170,000 on the million by inflation, right? So you've got to get that money deployed. That's the important thing to do, is to be in the market. But you got to do it smart. And I'll just share my screen and share a couple of things here that might be helpful to the listeners. First of all, to understand the value of anything, you've got to have the right measuring stick. And so let's talk about that measuring stick. Most people have these huge blind spots because they're using the wrong measuring stick. In fact, they only use one measuring stick, and that is the US Dollar. They compare the value of real Estate to one thing, the US Dollar. And the US Dollar is a moving target. Obviously, it's constantly being debased by inflation. Right? So that would be a huge mistake. So we've got to compare it to more things to understand the real value. There are three basic types of markets. Linear markets, cyclical markets, and hybrid markets. And they all act very differently. The linear markets, those are the markets we like and smart investors like. These are slow and steady and profitable markets. A lot of them are in the Southeast, the Midwest, those kinds of places. The cyclical markets, these are the roller coaster markets. You know, the markets that get all the attention. The west coast of the United States, the expensive Northeastern markets, and South Florida, where I live. And then hybrid markets are in between the two. When you hear about real estate prices and you listen to one of the most commonly cited indexes of real estate prices, the Case Shiller Index, you have to understand that that contains only 20 metro areas. And 15 of the 20 are cyclical markets. Three quarters of that index is cyclical. Only 25% or a quarter is linear. There's just too much attention paid to cyclical markets, not enough attention paid to linear markets. And the cyclical markets in this phase that we're in are suffering the most. And I believe they will continue to suffer the most. Let me give you an example of these, okay? It's really easy when you look at a chart. So this is Memphis, Tennessee, since the early 80s. This is a chart of appreciation and depreciation. And you can see that Memphis is pretty slow and steady. It's pretty linear. Right? That's why it's called a linear market. And we've helped hundreds of investors buy properties in Memphis. Great rental properties. I've owned many there myself. Good market. Indianapolis, another place that we've helped hundreds of investors buy properties. Another boring linear market, Minor ups and downs, but again, nothing too exciting. Nothing the news media would be very interested in. Contrast that to where I grew up, Los Angeles, California, and look at this. It's a roller coaster of glorious highs and really ugly lows. And then it goes up, then it goes down, then it goes up and down and up and down. And it's just absolutely crazy, right? This is a roller coaster cyclical market. So we recommend the linear markets. Okay? And that compared to what question that you mentioned is so important for everything we do in life is to compare to a lot of things so that we can understand the value of anything. Awesome.
Jason, question for you. I'm glad. I really appreciate you pointing out you have to look at the specific market, you can't just look holistically, you know, from a macro perspective. And that's what this Building Equity podcast is all about, is showing investors how to look specifically in their individual market. So we know that the national association of Realtors is saying, okay, valuations are up. I think they are saying year over year, 1%. Yet we have very large institutions like Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and some others that are saying, well, no, our prediction or what we're seeing. And the data we're looking at is saying 5 to 10% moving into the future over the next year. They're saying you're going to see a 5 to 10% drop valuation over the next year. How do you look at that type of data and where should viewers be looking for data? Whether it's on a macro level or.
A micro level, that data is very skewed because it's all lumped together. Look, in a country as large and diverse as the United States, we have almost 400 what they call MSAs, or Metropolitan Statistical Areas. We have over 3,100 counties. We have over 9,000 cities, and according to Obama, we have 56 states. Okay, had to throw that in. But you just can't lump those all together. The old saying in real estate is all real estate is local. So to answer your question, the place to really look, to understand what's going on is the index that I created because it takes a much more accurate view of things. I call it the Hartman Comparison Index, or the hci. And what this does is compares the price of real estate over the last 52 years to a whole bunch of things, a whole basket of things. Things that have intrinsic value that are not attached to any one currency, and things that every person on earth needs to live. But let's look at the first item in the Hartman Comparison Index, and that is gold. Now, I'm not a gold bug, but there's no question that billions of people on Earth consider gold to be money, and they have for thousands of years. So let's compare the price of houses to gold. Okay? Now, up until 1971, we were on a gold standard until Nixon took us off of it in 1971. And the gold price was pretty much controlled until then. But let's just look at a couple of examples here. Let's go back to 1970, and the median price house was $23,000. Gold was $35 an ounce. If you wanted to buy the median price house, you would need 654 ounces of gold. Just 10 years later, as we had all this Inflation from the 80s, the median price house tripled almost to $63,000. The gold price went way up to $653. And it would only take 97 ounces of gold to buy the median price house. Now let's fast forward a bit. Let's go to, say, 2010. Okay. Because then we're just kind of coming out of the great recession. The median house price is 171,000. Essentially, gold is a little over. It's almost eleven hundred dollars an ounce. It would take one hundred and fifty eight ounces of gold to buy the median price house. Today, the median price house is $390,000. Gold is about 1700 bucks an ounce. It would take 227 ounces of gold to buy the median price house. So look at this. Priced in gold, houses are cheaper than they were three months ago by one ounce. Not much. I get it. They're definitely way cheaper than they were in the year 2000. Because in the year 2000, you'd have to have 520 ounces of gold to buy the median price house. You know, back in 1990, 32 years ago, you'd need about the same amount of gold as you need today. Right. The dollar is a moving target. It's a bad comparison. It's, you know, it's one comparison, but it's only one of many. Okay, so priced in gold, is housing cheap or expensive? Well, what's the answer? It's certainly not the cheapest it's ever been, but it's also not the most expensive it's ever been. Now, let's look at. Oil is a hugely important commodity, arguably one of the most important commodities in the world. No matter what the greenies say, the world runs on oil. Okay. Back in 1970, that $23,000 median price house priced in oil at $4 a barrel, which is the price back then. It would cost 6,400 barrels of oil to buy the median price house. Ten years later, in 1980, the house price almost triples. Oil is way up to $37 a barrel, and it would take 1700 barrels of oil to buy a house. Now people might be thinking, well, Jason, you know, I don't denominate my life in gold or oil or any of the other commodities in the Hartman comparison index. But you have a choice. And a lot of people make these choices, even if you don't. When they get paid every two weeks or every month, they do something with their extra money. They either put it in the bank and in a savings account or they buy stocks or they buy commodities like these things and they decide on a way to store their wealth until they save enough for a down payment on a house. So if you save it in dollars, you can see that over time you're definitely going to lose by inflation. Right. You're not going to keep up with inflation. So it's better to have it in things that than currency units. Let's go to today. So the house is about $390,000 oil, approximately $94,4100 barrels of oil to buy the median price house today. So is it cheaper, expensive in oil? Well, let's just look at the right hand column here. I mean it's pretty cheap actually, you know, it's not the cheapest it's ever been. Certainly not the most expensive either. So priced in oil, not that bad either. We can look at rice, which is the food stock of, you know, more than half the world and priced in rice. Housing is actually quite cheap today and we can keep going. We can price it in shares of the S&P 500 index. Priced in the S and P. Housing is actually very cheap. It's only 98 shares of the S and P to buy the median price house. Okay. You know, back in 1970 it was 249 shares of the S and P to buy the median price house. In 2010 it was 136 shares. So price in shares of the S and P is housing cheap or expensive? It's actually pretty cheap. Not the cheapest it's ever been, but pretty cheap. Thoughts?
I'm blown away right now. Just I've never thought in a million years to equate the valuations of homes and what your question, John, to Jason and he queued up, compared to what? Hey, is it expensive compared to gold, oil, rice? And you start to get a chance.
And we've got over 40 things in the index. Okay, so can you talk a little.
Bit, Jason, very quickly, I want to be courteous of your time, but when folks sign up for coaching under Jason Hartman, what should they expect? What does it look like? And obviously it's a unique way of looking at the markets that is brilliant to be honest with you. But can you, can you talk a little bit about that and then talk about your upcoming conference?
Yeah, so typically people just listen to my YouTube channel or my Creating wealth podcast. A lot of times they reach out to our investment counselors who offer free investment counseling on how to build a real estate portfolio and Then if they want something more formal, they can sign up for one of our more formal programs like our Empowered Investor Pro membership or our formal coaching program. And then we've got a conference coming up in Scottsdale. It's two and a half day conference at a beautiful resort location at the end of January. People can go to jasonhartman.com, my main website, for tickets on that and join us for that. We'll have lots of great speakers, lots of great exhibitors, and it'll be a really fun time. We always have a band, we have a lot of fun. We have cocktail parties. People say it's like the funnest thing they did all year when they come to our conferences. So join us for that. Thank youasonarten.com thank you so much for that.
And listen, I'm in South Florida, so I'm in Naples and I heard your opinion on this. But when a hurricane comes and devastates a state, you get a lot of folks that say, oh my goodness, the real estate market in the state of Florida is completely going to collapse. And what says you, Jason?
Oh, they're usually completely wrong. It's usually the reverse is true. And listen, I've watched it over the years, many, many times. First off, we've got to realize we're talking about commodities. Commodities, right. When you look behind, I'm in my house, right? And I live in Palm Beach, Florida. So behind me and above me and below me, what do you see? You see drywall, you see lumber, you see steel, you see brick, you see concrete. In front of me you see glass and steel. And in the walls you see copper wire wrapped in petroleum products. Right? The insulation for the wire. All of these commodities have intrinsic value. And whenever there's a natural disaster, commodities get destroyed and there's more demand to buy more commodities and then some housing stock gets destroyed. And so you've got actually more demand in that area because all kinds of construction workers, contractors, insurance estimators, they have to move into that area and live there for a year or two to handle all of their business and their construction there. Right. You know, I remember when Katrina hit in what, 2005, and I visited the affected areas in the Gulf Coast, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and the opposite was true of what everybody said. You know, people got paid their insurance claims. Many times they had to fight with or sue their insurance company. Sure, I get it. But then a lot of times they didn't even rebuild their house because by the time they settled their insurance claim or even before that some big developer came along and did what's called an assemblage and bought a bunch of houses and built a high rise condo or some new development there and made a huge offer they couldn't resist and refuse. So people just don't get it. You know, after that last hurricane, people were calling me, emailing me, saying, hey, there must be great opportunities. It must be a fire sale. No, the opposite is true. You don't get it. And just think about the market dynamics. Now granted, you know, if everybody did leave the state of Florida, yes, that would be bad news, but. But the opposite is true. I mean, people are moving into Florida like crazy.
