The 25 Most Financially Distressed Cities in America
4 Mar 2024 · 33 min
Scott Carson breaks down WalletHub and USA Today data on the 25 most financially distressed U.S. cities, looking at credit scores, bankruptcy filings, foreclosure rates, and debt searches. He shares what note investors should know about these markets and where distressed mortgage opportunities are emerging.
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This is the no Closer show where you get the latest developments in distressed note investing and learn the secrets of how you can control millions of dollars worth of property For Panties on the dollar. Get educated and entertained by someone who has closed thousands of deals and lives to support you in achieving the same. Now here's your host CEO of We Close Nodes, Scott Carson.
Hey Real estate investors, this is Scott Carson. I'm known across the country as the Note Guy and I've been an active note investor focused primarily on the niche of non performing notes, distressed mortgage notes on residential commercial properties for almost 20 years now. My company is we close notes.com and I know there's a lot of different things when it comes to the note world. Are you buying performing notes? Are you buying owner finance notes? Are you buying institutional debt? Like I would focus on Are you buying first seconds contract for each There's a lot of questions and it can be very confusing about what you can or cannot do. So one of the great things that we've hosted for the last couple of years that we do on just about a regular monthly basis is we host our one day class called Note Weekend. If you go to noteweekend.com you can register for our free three and a half hour class. We'll talk to you and share with you how you find fun and flip non performing notes. And yes, you can buy non performing notes from banks, hedge funds and a variety of different hard money lenders out there for your own portfolio. No, you don't have to have millions of dollars to dive into the non performing note game. We've got students that have bought plenty of deals with 2530 grand getting their ball rolling using their self directed IRA who are tired of dealing with toilets, tennis trash desks, tired of battling contractors and GCs to get properties rehabbed. We all know the market is changing and while it may not be like 2008, 9 and 10 again, it we do see a lot of distressed debt out there on both the residential and the commercial side. So if you're thinking about diving into the note game, becoming a note investor, a lean lord as you'd like to say, versus the landlord. Or you just want to figure out what it is about the sexy side of real estate in the note space. Well, check it out. Noteweekend.com doesn't cost you anything. We host it live usually the first or second Saturday of each month. You can go today. Register at the website noteweeking.com Register for the next live class we host. You'll get sent a replay to the previous class so you can start learning about the note business today. No questions asked, no credit card needed. This is a great way for you to dip your toes in the water and see if it's warm because I guarantee going through Art three one day class. You want to dive into the deep end and become a note investor. So check it out noteweekend.com you can also go to our website we close notes.com check out our podcast. Check out our YouTube number one YouTube channel. We are here to help support you. Whether you're experienced investor or you're brand new investing Note weekend is a great place for you to get the ball rolling. People often say we cover more in our three hour class than most people cover in their three day class. So check it out. Love to have you be part of our note family but get signed up today@noteweekend.com thanks and have a great day. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening everybody. Welcome to this special Monument Day episode of the Note Closure Show. As I Scott Carson Excited to be here today. Hope you had a great weekend. We had a a phenomenal weekend down in Corpus Christ. I grew up basically rans passing side. It was my mom's birthday so we went down spent some time with Madre and just great to hang out with her, some of her friends, my sister and her family, Tracy and then driving around Corpus and and fellowshiping and then we went to church Sunday morning. My mom at their church at her church there and enjoyed that and just you know got back late last night after spend some time just hanging out having a good time. It's great when you've got family to be able to do that. My heart always goes out those that don't get to spend time with their family. I've been there. You know family is one of those things that sometimes is great and other times it gets distressed over different things and you just try to make the best of it. It's family. Blood is thicker than water and you kind of go from there. You know what I mean? But we've all got Black Sheep or we've all been to Black Sheep at some point and then you just try to do your best and go from there. But anyway, today's episode is something that kind of popped up while I was out driving around Corpus Christi and Steph and I were driving around looking at some stuff and was, you know, I always enjoyed Corpus Christi. Corpus Christi was a great place to grow up, but it is a distressed city. Most people just think of Corpus Christi for The beaches like Port Aransas or South Padre island. In that neck of the woods, a corpus does have a lot of distress. And I was like, well what am I going to talk about? I want to talk about different distress stuff this morning. And I just get online, reading my normal news, I'm out walking, make my my walk in the morning. And USA Today had an article from Wallet Hub that popped up. I was like, oh, this came out just like last week, the 22nd of February. I was like, oh this is great. It was written by Cassandra Happy. And I was like this is ideal for my audience out there. And it was, it talked, the article talks about the most financially distressed cities or markets in America. And I thought it's so valuable us being in the non performing note space. People often ask me, especially if I'm on other people's podcasts about, you know, where do I see the markets going, what's going on? And look, I think I see stuff six to 12 months ahead of most real estate investors. I definitely see it a lot of times ahead of, of Realtors or loan officers when I start seeing things change. You know, we keep trap track of interest rates obviously, although interest rates that originate today don't really are stuff that I'm really buying, you know what I mean? But what we do keep track of is default rates, bankruptcy filings, foreclosure filings across the country. And we all know foreclosure filings across the country vary from a state by state basis depending on the foreclosure time. From like here in Texas, it's fast, right? You can file a foreclosure really quick, whereas compared to like New York state, it could take you up to three years. So it's kind of a domino effect. Texas, Georgia hit faster then you have other non judicial states. Then you start getting into these faster judicial states. And of course it's wrapped up with New Jersey. You can even throw, you know, Illinois in there. It's not quite as long in New Jersey, but Illinois, that's rough. And then you get into New Jersey, New York, you can throw Puerto Rico in there because Puerto Rico's foreclosure laws are very similar to New York taking three, three years or so. But this article by Wallet Hub that I'll be sharing on it and if you guys are watching the live stream, you can click on the link in the roll, we'll put it on there. But you can go search 25 most financially distressed cities by, by Wallet Hub or the articles on USA Today to take a look at and it was very interesting. Let me if I can share the screen here on Zoom with those that are tuning in live here on Zoom and it'll be the link will be in the actual podcast episode below or the YouTube video below. And so here it is. Adam McCann also wrote this Wallet Hub financial writer February 22, 2024 and then Cassandra Hopp actually commented on this. So here's the thing. I'm just going to read a little bit to you because I think it's important to understand where they come from. Americans have been through a lot of financial difficulties in recent years. We all know that between periods of high unemployment and high inflation, although conditions have significantly improved, many people still are in financial distress, which WalletHub defines as having a credit account that is in forbearance or has its payments deferred. Very similar to what we consider in the mortgage industry. Right. Meaning the account holder is temporarily allowed to not make payments due to financial difficulties. We we call those as forbearance agreements in a lot of cases. Right. And good morning to a lot of folks. Good morning to Mathis. Good morning to Praxa. Good morning to Lisa Linford, Texas Real estate Goodness you say Unreal girl. Hey, good to see you. Some of you guys are tuning in live on the Instagram live stream, but you can see where people are experiencing financial more by in more broadly terms in their state level reports that they put out and we'll probably have some of those coming out over the next few weeks of episodes. But Cassandra Hopp mentioned out here says getting out of the downward spiral financial distress is no easy feat. And I would totally agree to that. Being there years ago. Once you're in this down a spiral, it's really hard to get out of it unless you have something major happen, a new job with new money or you make a lot of changes to your, you know, to what you've got going on. It can cut expenses sometimes. You know, sometimes people just stop paying on an account because they've got to get caught up on other things and they go back in and and work to make things happen. Okay. But all the while while you're kind of just sitting there, interest will keep building up on the debt and becomes even harder to pay off. Now people who find themselves in financial distress should budget carefully, cut non essential expenses and pursue strategies like debt consolidation or debt management to get their situation under control. Totally agree with that from Cassandra. But what I wanted to go through this is their main findings kind of started ranking cities and they took a Combination of different things in the article here today. Okay. And before I get to the top cities, now they're listed the top 100. I'm not going to go through all the 100. And then they also wrote back some stuff on the top three, which the methodology is order to determine the cities where people are in the most financial distress. Wallet hub compared the 100 largest cities without data limitations across nine key metrics in six overall categories. One being the overall average credit score in the area. Two, people with accounts in distress, net city. Three, average number of accounts in distress. Okay. For the change in number of bankruptcy filings from December of 2023 to December of 2022. So it's a full basically the last year full quarter. And number five is debt search interest index. That means how many times people are typing for search or loans was number six in search interest index. And of course Google and all that stuff will track that search engine will tell you what's the interest rate. Interest, not interest rate, but the interest rate of searches when it comes to specific terms. Right. That's SEO optimized. Right. So debt and loans are two of the biggest search criteria. And now what they did is they basically gave all six of these categories across the board an average of 16.6 points to get average of 100 points. And so that's what we think. You ranked really high in that you got 16. If you ranked really low in the city, you got closer to one or zero. Okay. And that's where they kind of brought it up. Credit score people, accounts in distress, average number of accounts in distress, change in bankruptcy filings to go from there. And then they've also got some questions and stuff like here. But let's go through these 25. Now, of course you can rank these cities individually by each six of the matrixes. Okay. But we're not going to do that. You can. I'll put the link to the article in the comment section on the YouTube video and then of course in the podcast episode, so you can actually click on this yourself particularly. But number one, coming at number one, the Windy City, Chicago was number one. Overall, they had a total score of 72.54. When it's spread out across the board, they ranked number one in debt searches. They ranked number one in accounts of distress and number two with people with accounts and distress ranking. Okay, so think about that. Number two. Surprise, surprise, surprise. H town. Not a town. H town. Houston, Texas, which Houston is the largest county in the country at Harris county basically resides for that. They had a combined score of 61%. And they also had a tide ranking for number one for debt searches. They ranked number 13 for an increase in bankruptcy filings. Okay. And ranked 12th in number of accounts of distress. All right, number three, no surprise, the Big Apple, New York, New York, that's been not surprising. Ranked number one debt searches number six in the changing bankruptcy filings. More people filing bankruptcy in New York's New York. Of course, you've had issues obviously with it being a sanctuary city and people coming in and a lot of even though it's not effective distress type, but it can affect things for jobs or other things like that. The little pain. It ranked 80th out of credit score. So it had high credit score rankings, but still a lot of people at ranked 73rd with people in distress, but then also 82nd number of accounts in distress. But it was the big bankruptcy filings aspect of that and debt searches. La, not Louisiana. Los Angeles, City of Angels came in number four. Tied again for searches there. Big county, LA county is in California. Number five was really a surprise to me. Another Texas city, Big D, Dallas, Texas, came in at number five, Las Vegas, Nevada, which has its, you know, peaks and valleys, hit and misses dependence going on the economy there because it is such a touristy city, came at number six. That was his prize. Number seven. Another Texas city, San Antonio, Texas, came in as distressed. It kind of was average across the board, but number seven are all number eight, Atlanta, Georgia. Number nine, Riverside, California. Ten was Jacksonville, Florida. Eleven was Baton Rouge. I actually expected Baton Rouge or New Orleans to be higher up on this list because they've, they've. Louisiana still ranks in the top four or five as far as foreclosure filings, distressed levels. So it came in at number 11. But the search that was surprised with the search ratio of this one of Baton Rouge was way down to 55. It ranked number two for the number of most amount of counts of stress and number three in oh, what was that? People with accounts of distress. Okay, that was 11 was Baton Rouge, like I said. 10 was Jacksonville, Florida. 12. Viva La Miami. Came in distress there. 13. This really surprised me. Austin, Texas, my hometown here where I Live, Austin, Texas ranked 13th. Surprising about this. It only came in at 43.37. It ranked 21 for new bankruptcy filings. 13 for search engines, Miami actually ranked number five for people searching for debt loans. That's surprising. Now 14, the other city of New Orleans or Louisiana, New Orleans came in at 14th. That's not really surprise. Fifteen, another Texas city, Dallas's neighbor, Fort Worth, Nashville, Tennessee came at 16th, which is crazy as much as that city's been booming. Let's see here, who's next? Phoenix, Arizona, not a surprise there so much is a top 20 because there has been a lot of stress there ever really since the Super Bowl. I would say that would people trying to Airbnb everything up and it didn't, didn't fill up, you know what I mean? But that was last. That was last year. It was the most recent one. But still a lot of people struggling in Phoenix. Charlotte, North Carolina came as 18. Baltimore wasn't really surprised at 19. Number 20 was St. Louis 21, Winston Salem, 22, Tampa, Florida. Okay, 23, Stockton, California, 24. Another Texas city, El Paso, Texas. And number 12, number 25, Viente Le Cinco, San Diego or San Diego, California. Now give me some of the other things. Cities like Orlando came in at 28th. I'm just scrolling down here, getting some other cities that might think Laredo, Texas, 36. I thought that would be actually be higher. Columbus, Ohio's 39th. D.C. was 40th and North Las Vegas was 41. Not just Las Vegas itself in the top 20, but North Las Vegas, which is rougher. And another Texas City, Plano, Texas made the list at 44. I kind of throw Plano in with Dallas, but that surprised me. It's Lubbock, Texas, 46. Arlington, Texas, 47, Corpus Christi, Texas, 48, Reno, Nevada, 49. And Birmingham, Alabama was 50. Now that's what kind of really surprised me. Texas has been such a great booming state, but all of our major cities are in the top 50 when it comes to distress out there. So if you're a real estate investor, what are some of the things that you can do with this list, if you think about it? Well, obviously a, if you're a credit repair specialist or you do anything that you might be targeting these cities that rank for searches on where to advertise online. Hey, if you're in Baltimore or hey, you're in Los Angeles, need help with your credit repair, stuff like that, this may be something to help out. That'd be exactly what I would tell like our buddy Merrill Chandler over get, get fundable. Like, hey, maybe you should start marketing to these cities or in that area on the search engines to help people out. Now, as a real estate investor, what do I do? Well, I'm gonna tell you the truth on these. When it comes to seeing more distressed stuff, distressed mortgage notes and what we're buying, this list really doesn't surprise me. Because we are starting to see some stuff in areas that I haven't usually seen. Stuff. Like people always ask me when I get a list, and how do I know that I've seen a list before or how do I recognize a tape? Well, I look at a lot of stuff, right? And when I look at stuff, I look at stuff that's in Texas. To recognize cities in Texas. If I see anything in Austin, it's a kind of a dead giveaway. But Corpus Christi has been one of those cities that I hadn't seen a lot of stuff prior to Covet. Now in Covid, I'm starting to see more distressed stuff hit the neck of the woods, some stuff in San Antonio, Fort Worth plaintiffs, I'm starting to see some more distressed stuff. I don't just have to target the foreclosure list in those counties, but that's a great way. Like in Houston, Texas, if I buy the. The. The foreclosure list, like FLS Foreclosure Listing Source Online or the Rotter report for Harris county, that county has always got a lot, much more than compared to Bexar county, where San Antonio is, or Travis County, Austin, Texas is, or even Williamson county, which is the north side of town here and into Georgetown, that neck of the woods, which is some of the boom stuff there. So I've seen an increase in foreclosures across that board, which obviously foreclosures is a distressed mortgage. Oftentimes, if people are behind in their mortgage, guess what? They're behind. The credit cards, behind student loans, are behind on their car payments, are behind on other things. All right? Most people will put off paying their mortgage because that's the biggest payment they're making per month. And if they can kind of kick the can down the road and try to work with banks to foreclose, they might give them the opportunity to get things back on track. And as somebody who's, you know, done loan mods, done. I mean, I've really done a lot of forbearance plans for borrowers in the past. We even negotiated short sales and loan modifications or stuff for people that were in distress. We had short sale company doing stuff, you know, across the country years ago. This list, there are things that surprise me, other things that don't, but this. How do I look at this list and understand it? Well, if you live in one of these cities in your list, it may first of all make sense for you to a find who handles the foreclosure list in your area. Okay. And that would be something to take a look at if you have an increased amount of foreclosure people stuff talk to the list service provider in that county or that city and say hey, have you seen an increase amount of foreclosures taking place or filings in this place? That may be something for you to take a look at as an opportunity to target new foreclosures. But it's also if you're a real estate investor, it's also optimal for probably people with distressed mortgage debt. That's all in our nick neck of the woods, right? People facing difficulties and distress can't pay their mortgage. More distressed debt on the books, whether it's residential or commercial notes means more opportunities for us. It also if you don't want to necessarily go raise capital but you still want to be an investor, it may make opportunities for subject to deals where you can take over payments of the two or get a distress borrower maybe not be maybe it may not be too far behind on payments to take over payments or get them to owner finance the property to you and then you put a renter in it or you, you know a sandwich wrap or something like that. Okay, so that's the thing to take a look at. Some of these cities really surprised me. If you look at the top I'll give you let's look at the bottom here in the 100 who ranked number 100. Boise, Idaho doesn't really surprise me. Scottsdale, Arizona, not Phoenix. Scottsdale came at 99 compared to its near cousin Gilbert, Arizona, Chandler, Arizona. So you had some Arizona cities that were all right there around Phoenix area that came in much better than Phoenix itself. Des Moines was at 96. Lincoln, Nebraska doesn't really surprise me. They're 95. And this the Pittsburgh, the steel city came out in 95 compared to other now New Jersey City, 90, 93 and then others in that necklace. But you can take a look at that once you take a look just if you if you're Wallet Hub, you know most financially distressed cities in the country. But like I said, if you watch the YouTube video or listen or listen to podcasts, just look in the description, you'll see the link to the article. So that's the thing to look at. How do you approach these things? Well find out who's handling the foreclosure list for the county. If you're a tax lien investor and these cities have tax liens or tax certificates, which many of them do, you may want to go to the taxing office and say hey can I get a list of the tax sales, you know, to bid on. You know, Texas is a great tax lien state to invest in. We're going to get an 18 return on your money annualized, guaranteed for that when you buy that stuff. You may also look at the tax lien sales that didn't take, that didn't get bid on an auction that may be table deals that you could purchase from the county after the fact to either take over that asset or start getting a percentage of your money with the idea to take the property back. There's a lot of things to take a look at there. But honestly, ladies and gentlemen, you know, if I'm a note investor and I'm especially a brand new investor, I'm going to start Targeting those top 50 cities is probably the places that I want to invest in, excluding some of the crazy ones. Like I would kick New York, New Jersey, Louisiana, California, Stockton. I would kick some of those difficult cities out of the, you know, Chicago, if you live in Chicago, that's one thing. And we had a great article with Crystal Hammond from the Stacking Deeds podcast talking about how she's buying empty lots there and building fourplexes on them on the south side. And she, she's from the Neck woods knows even though she lives in D.C. she's still doing that. That's potentially an opportunity for you if you see the opportunity like that in your city that you live in. So the thing to keep in mind, ladies and gentlemen, is you're not limited to one city. It's not like it used to be. With the help of the Internet and resources and realtors and investors everywhere, investment clubs, take a look at what's going on in your markets or if it's not satisfactory and not investor friendly, keep that in mind. Then look at where other investors in your market are investing. Go to your local real estate club, your networking event, who's investing out of out of town and why. And you know, we've had that happen here in Austin, Texas. Austin being very competitive and often sometimes overpriced. A lot of people will start investing in Houston or Dallas or they would go south to San Antonio, start going to the Valley as opportunities because there's less investors and more opportunity in a lot of cases. I mean if you look at too we had Mike Cost from Credit IQ on a year ago and he talked about how it was really surprising on a lot of multifamily deals they were taking place south of San Antonio is a hot spot for finding great deals, not some of the bigger 100200 plus units. But sub hundred unit apartment complexes were being sold and so that may be something to take a look at in the distress side of things. We just had an episode, our previous episode. You can check it out. How to find distress apartment notes. If you like these cities, that may be something to take a look at what's going on in these markets. What's going on. How do I find these types of deals in those cities and states and go from there. So but I hope the whole goal of this episode is, you know, so many people say oh, the economy is doing well and things are rock and rolling and I'm not going to get into a political who's better, Trump or Biden? I don't think either of those guys are really fit to serve. You get to pick the lesser of the two evils and who's going to whose policies are going to match up more with your personal aspect of I just think both of it are horrible and it's unfortunate cases, but that's, that's what we're left with, right? The lesser two evils you have to pick. But the thing to look at is if people are struggling and that's been no surprise for a while, especially since COVID things are more expensive, inflation is up. They talk about jobs, but a lot of these jobs that are being created out there are menial jobs. And even folks in menial jobs are losing, losing the way they can't afford to live in a city in a lot of cases. And I not surprised. Basic looking, if you compare this count, you know, this schedule with the average cost or the average per dollar amount they make people need to make in that city to live above the poverty line in cities. There's going to be a lot of direct relationships between the two. So anyway, I hope this was valuable for you. What questions, comments, concerns do you guys have? Hey, good to see Dana Williamson. Hey, Gene Chandler. What's up buddy Chin Cornerstone. Good to see you guys out there this morning and join us live here. But like I said, really the biggest surprise that Texas had so many cities in the top 50 for the most part. All of our major cities for the most part, including like Lubbock and Plano. That really kind of surprised me. Arlington as well too. But you know, real estate's getting expensive so people have a hard time staying in those neck of the woods. Let me go down here too. I wanted to go through. There's some other stuff that surprised me. The changes in credit score in Q4 of 2023 versus Q4 22. The lowest change was. Number one was Winston Salem, North Carolina. Plano, Texas had the lowest, second lowest change. Irvine, California. St. Louis, Missouri came at number four. And number five with Long Beach, California had the lowest change. The highest change was, let's see here was 99. Tied for 99 was Washington D.C. and Des Moines, Iowa. Scottsdale, Arizona, 98. Fort Wayne, Indiana came in at 97. And then it surprised me. And Toledo, Ohio had the highest change changes here. People with accounts of distress, stuff where you know things are getting worse, I guess you say the highest change. No surprise, surprise. Chicago, Illinois was number one in that city. Winston Salem came at number two. Stockton, California. Irvine, California and La Cal, Long Beach, California. So three out of five California cities had the most amount of change in distress where it's really expensive. The lowest change. Orlando didn't surprise. The most change of credit scores. Des Moines, D.C. at 98, Boise at 97 and Pittsburgh, Pa 96. Orlando really kind of surprised me on that because there's so many people that are like students and jobs there that are in the, you know, like working for Universal and other things like that. And they're not really great paying jobs. And I know that a lot of people are struggling to survive that are working at those places. And then a couple of a little bit longer ones like we talk about an in depth look at the most financially distressed cities. They talked about Chicago here. Chicago had the biggest change in the share of people who had accounts in distress between Q4 of 2022 and Q4 2023, with a nearly 30% increase. Wow. Okay. That means that nearly 30% more residents were allowed to skip payments due to financial difficulty last year. In addition, Chicago residents had the third most accounts in distress per person. Wow. People in Chicago also had some of the highest Google search interest in the country for terms like debt and loans. It shows that people need to borrow even more. Wow. That was kind of an in depth into Houston is kind of surprising. Houston, we have a problem. Yes, you do. And it's that Houston is the city with the second highest level of financial distress. Houston has a high share of the population of the council distress compared to most other cities at over 8%. Wow. Basically was that 1 in 12 people had a high had a high number of accounts of stress per person. In addition, Houston residents are declaring bankruptcy to escape their money troubles at a higher rate than people in most other cities. Houston had around 31% more bankruptcy balance per capita in 2023 compared to 2022. For comparison, only 26 out of the 100 cities had increases above 30%. Well, that doesn't surprise me. Texas is a fast foreclosure state. So one thing that doesn't people don't have the opportunity is to drag things out. So you've got to file bankruptcy to delay the foreclosure. And you're going to see that happen. I guarantee those are primarily related in Houston. New York City, on the other hand, long foreclosure time frame has the third most financially distressed residence in the country, which is demonstrated by the fact that they had a big increase in non business bankruptcy filings in 23 compared to 2022. That's a surprise at over 36%. This shows that even temporary forbearance hasn't been enough to get some people out of their financial difficulties. A big increase in bankruptcy filings is concerning because of how devastating bankruptcy is for the person's credit. Yeah, a bankruptcy is better than foreclosure though. A bankruptcy can affect you for 24 months. A foreclosure will file will affect you for seven years. Okay. In addition, more people in New York search Google for debt and loan related terms more than people in most other cities. All right, so that was kind of a big thing there. They shared the rest of the methodology and that kind of stuff there for you. So like I said, guys, if you're a real estate investor in any of the cities or invest in those cities, or you're looking to maybe invest in the cities, keep that in mind. What you may take a look at, obviously I think if you look at, you know, like you look at the city, look at me like, I'll give you example. If I were going to be investing in Plano, I would look at what the median income is in Plano and then figure out, okay, what's the median income for folks at Plano? Take 35% of that and that's what they can afford in a house and figure out what kind of value house that is at roughly a 6% interest rate. And that's the price of the houses you probably want to buy or below that. Okay, so let me give you an example. If somebody's making, oh, I'm gonna probably have to pull my phone up here and figure this out. But let's say 100 grand a year. Let's just make it simple. 100 grand a year, if that's the average income in an area, take it. I take 30, you know, 35 percentage. 35 grand, 35, 36. That's basically when we look at a front End ratio what they can afford. Basically for house, you don't really want the housing cost to go above 40%, so we always try to stay below that. But you can go 40%, we'll just say 36%, 36,000 divided by 12 months, that means they could pay up to three grand per month in rent or a mortgage payment. Right. So what is three grand a month get you in a year? If you reverse that number out and figure out, okay, what kind of house am I making payments on? PITI, principals, interest, taxes and insurance to get that $3,000amount and what's that average house look like in that neck of the woods? And that's the number I would probably stay at. I might go a little bit above that for the most part. That would be my buy box. So if it found out that the average house in Plano that people are buying with that $36,000 a year housing budget, what does it come to? Well, that's a, you know, 400, $500,000 house. That's where I would look at my buy box. I would look at anything 100 up to that or 200 to that 500 is where you're probably going to see the most amount of movement, most amount of need for buyers to buy or properties where rent falls in that category of that 2500-3000 mark in areas like that too for you. So that's, that's my philosophy, taking a look at that, that's what I would leverage this income, this data for. To help you be a better and smarter and more efficient real estate investor in 2024. Of course, as always, prayers and thoughts go out to folks that are facing financial stress. I've been there, got the T shirt, the scars back in the early 2000s after being laid off and dealing with that stuff. But the best thing I can tell you, ladies and gentlemen, is be educated, be smart and use the information that you find out there to help educate yourself, educate your friends and family and go find opportunities. Because whether it's an up or down market, there's always plenty of deal flow. If you know the data and are informed, you can make more informed decisions and be proactive versus reactive. It's always good to have a good offense versus defense and unfortunately a lot of people are very defensive in nature. They have to react versus being proactive. So that's one of the great things I like about the note business is that we're seeing information six or 12 months ahead of time and can kind of start spotting trends before the fix and flippers, the wholesalers and stuff like that out there. So any questions, comments, concerns before you guys let you guys go for the day on this episode, hopefully you found this valuable and you know, if you like it, make sure you subscribe and give us a five star review. You'd love to see that. We're trying to get that 200 review mark here on the note closure show ASAP. So anyway, go out, take some action buddy. Have a great day and we'll see you all at the top. Bye SA.
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