Tommy DobczykOpportunity Zone Advisor, OZ Wizard · Director of Development | Certified Opportunity Zone Advisor

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

3 Mar 2026 · 0 min

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In this short dialogue, the speakers discuss a disciplined real‑estate investment approach that combines conservative underwriting with practical stress‑testing of potential deals. They explain that beyond setting underwriting metrics that can withstand a severe economic downturn, they place test rental advertisements to validate proposed rent increases (e.g., from $450 to $490) and to gauge market demand for lot and home rents. The response to these test ads determines whether they proceed with a purchase—poor response leads to passing on the deal, while strong response signals a viable investment. The conversation also includes brief encouragement and a side question about a person named Catherine Bell, which remains unanswered.

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