What Happened to Real Estate Investing?

Dave Meyer:
For a decade, real estate investing was easy. It was predictable. It was profitable. So what happened? Well, the market changed and those easy deals are much rarer today. You don’t find 1% rural deals on the MLS in most markets. In some places, they’ve been gone for years. But frankly, I’m not even sure that’s a bad thing. Investing in real estate might take more work today. It might be riskier, but it is still the best way to grow your net worth and one of the only ways to achieve real financial freedom. And now there’s actually fewer people doing it, which means there’s less competition for good deals because most people just aren’t willing to put in the work. But I am. I’ve adjusted my strategies and real estate is still growing my net worth. Hey everyone. I’m Dave Meyer, chief investment officer at BiggerPockets. Henry is here, of course, too.
Henry, what’s up, man?

Henry Washington:
Hey, what’s up, buddy? How are you?

Dave Meyer:
Good. I’m doing well, despite all this negativity out there about real estate. But I mean, I think it’s fair to say that real estate has changed a lot over the last couple of years. How would you describe that shift?

Henry Washington:
You know what? It feels like a shift to people who probably started investing during the last 10 years, but I think to people who were investing prior to that, it’s just part of a cycle. Real estate isn’t supposed to be easy. And I think we’re just now, if you started in the Goldilocks years, you’re just now seeing the hard part for the first time.

Dave Meyer:
I think that’s exactly right. So much of this is about expectations. And I mean, to be fair, I started investing in 2010, so I haven’t really seen a situation like this personally, but I do think I have the advantage of spending so much of my time looking at the history of the housing market and just can understand from the data and information and research that this is kind of normal. The fact that it goes into these cycles that it ebbs and flows and things get better, they get harder and then they get better again is just a normal part of not just real estate, but any economic cycle. Same thing that happens in the stock market, same thing that happens in cryptocurrency or anything that you invest in.

Henry Washington:
Is it wrong to say that I think it’s good?

Dave Meyer:
No, dude, I think it’s good too. Why were you saying that though?

Henry Washington:
Because everybody’s doom and gloom about it, but I think it’s a good thing for several reasons. A, I think it’s a good thing if you want to buy assets because in any investing scenario, it’s always easier to buy at a discount when there’s some sort of uneasiness or pain involved in the market. So there’s opportunity to buy a little bit lower right now. And it’s not super easy. It takes work, but there’s still the opportunity to do that. I think that it weeds out people who aren’t great at investing or maybe were in your way of buying deals before and not doing a lot of research when they didn’t have to because everything was a deal. It was tougher. And I think if you get started now and you get your reps in in a difficult market, when the market does come around and it becomes easier, you’re so much better positioned to clean house because you learned and you got prepared during a challenging time.
If you do it the other way around, you can sometimes get smacked in the face when the hard times come because you’re so used to it being easy. So I think this is a great time.

Dave Meyer:
I actually think that makes a lot of sense, just trying to learn during a more challenging time. I mean, I think that’s what sort of like the last generation of great real estate investors. A lot of them were investing through the financial crisis.

Henry Washington:
It’s

Dave Meyer:
Not like they had perfect market timing and started in 2009 or 2010 and then just rode the wave. Most of them, whether it’s our mutual friend, James Daynard or Brian Burke, who we were talking to the other day or Jay Scott, all these people learned how to really be good and stick to the fundamentals. Because if you can learn in a market like that,
Then you can succeed in a market that has some tailwinds. And I think really, ultimately, what is going on in the market? If we’re trying to answer the question, what happened to real estate investing? I think people’s expectations just have gone crazy. They’re completely out of whack. And that is due to, I guess, some combination of the Goldilocks era. If you listen to the show, we call the Goldilocks era the time between about 2012 and 2022, when literally everything was perfect for real estate investors. Prices were low, rents were high, you had structural supply shortages, you had super low interest rates. There was an abundance of information from bigger pockets and other sources that made it easier to learn the business. It was just so much easier to do it. On top of that, we got to call it out. We had a lot of people on social media raising people’s expectations even on top of that and showing off and perhaps even exaggerating, I dare say, their results of what they do and how well they do on real estate.
And that just created this idea that real estate is something that is not, that is a get rich quick thing or that retiring within two to three years and quitting your job and not having to work and that it’s totally passive, that that’s a thing and it’s not, and it never was. And I think that is the fundamental challenge that this industry is having is resetting expectations back to what it’s like to be a real estate investor in normal market conditions.

Henry Washington:
Yeah. Especially when you look at things that are a little bit more risky because we were talking a little bit about this with Brian Burke. If you got into large scale multifamily syndications and you were raising money in the Goldilocks era, it probably felt like you couldn’t miss. You raised some money, you go buy an asset, you start producing returns for your investors and it feels great. And then the market shifts and things aren’t as easy. And a lot of those people are getting themselves into trouble because like I said, they got it in a good time and when the market shifted, it smacked them in the face. And so if you were dabbling in single family, you probably took a lot less of a hit or were a lot less in shock when the market turned versus if you were doing something that required a lot more capital and a lot more experience.
And now the market is forcing people to be much more fundamentally sound if they want to produce results. And if you didn’t develop those fundamentals in the beginning, you’re going to have to develop them now and it’s going to cost you something to develop them now.

Dave Meyer:
A lot of people rightfully started. They bought single families that bought multi-multifamilies during this Goldilocks era and they’re like, “Hey, I could do this. I could do a multifamily.” I could do it all day. And then all of a sudden, all of these tailwinds that we had that was just lifting all ships, the rising tide was lifting all ships. I benefited from it too, probably thought I was smarter than I was on some of deals. And I think that’s kind of just what happened with a lot of real estate. And now it’s just become work, which it’s supposed to be. Real estate investing is entrepreneurship. You’re going to have to work on it, but that part hasn’t, in my opinion, fundamentally changed. The things that allow you to do value add investing or to generate cashflow or loan pay down or all that still there.
It’s really just this era where you could get appreciation from doing nothing and count on massive gains with easy, cheap money, that’s gone away. But even without that, I still think there’s good opportunity and I still think it’s better than other opportunities. I see other things that I would choose to do with my money.

Henry Washington:
Yeah, I’m not shifting. I’m staying here.

Dave Meyer:
Yeah, right. Well, that’s a good question. Do you see your margins changing a lot or are your returns on individual deals worse now than they were? I mean, they have to be a little worse,

Henry Washington:
Right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we’re trying to mitigate that by just ensuring that we underwrite more conservatively and we buy at deeper discounts to maintain our margins. But that usually means you have to increase your volume of offers in order to keep the same amount of deal flow, or you have to be willing to do less deals because you’re willing to pay less, but the deals end up being more profitable. So yes, you can still get the margins if you adjust the underwriting, but I would be lying to you if I told you that I bought deals that are giving me the same margins now that I was getting in 2016. Now that’s just not true. The margins are not as good.

Dave Meyer:
Yeah. And that makes sense to me because just to do a little bit of a history lesson here, what happened during the great … As long as back as we have data since the Great Depression, since the 1930s, it was the biggest drop in home prices. So would deals coming out of that be the best that people have ever seen? Yeah, definitely. They definitely would be. 100%. I truly don’t think we’ll ever see that again in our lifetime. I think it’s unlikely that we see those kinds of deals again. And I think that’s where people get hung up is they’re like, “I compare the deals and the returns that I get here in 2026 to what I can get in 2016.” And it’s frustrating. Yeah, everyone wishes they could get easy money. I do too.That would be great. But the job of the investor is not to say, “I’m not going to invest today because I got better returns yesterday.” The job of the investor is to say, “What is the best use of my time and my money here in 2026?” And real estate still seems better to me than every other thing out there.
And so yeah, margins are probably lower, harder to find deals, but can I still find today a real estate deal on market that is better than what I think the stock market will do over the next three years? Yes. To me, yes. And that’s the important thing, right? It is worth it to me to do the extra work of real estate investing because if I can get a 15% return instead of an 8% return, you compound that over 10 years, that is millions of dollars, millions and millions of dollars for the average person. And so is that worth the time? Hell yeah, it is.

Henry Washington:
Yeah, 100%. It’s absolutely worth the time.

Dave Meyer:
All right. So that’s, I think, a fair assessment of what has happened to real estate investing is that it was abnormally easy to be a real estate investor, and that’s great. I’m happy that that happened. Now, I think we’re back to just more normal fundamental style real estate investing, but I want to talk to you specifically, Henry, about what has gotten harder, the specific things that people should be looking out and why that has caused such a shift in, I think, mentality and psychology in the market, even if the return profile of the best deals hasn’t changed that much.

Henry Washington:
Let’s

Dave Meyer:
Get into that, but we do have to take one quick break. We’ll be right back. Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. Henry and I are here answering the question, what happened to real estate investing? And before the break, we talked about just expectations have changed. They were high. People were expecting returns that are probably not sustainable well into the future, but Henry, tell me a little bit, what has relatively become harder for you in your day-to-day that has changed so much in the last 10 years?

Henry Washington:
Yeah, I think everything got more expensive all at the same time. When interest rates started going up, that was just kind of a shock for people because we were at such historically low interest rates to then jump up to around … I mean, for investors, we were getting deals with nine, nine and a half percent interest rates at the height of the interest rate hikes. And when you have one of the real estate levers that goes up, you can make an adjustment. And I think people were still finding ways to find deals or make deals work even at an eight or 9% interest rate. But at the same time, insurance started to go up dramatically. There were storms across the country. There was problems in California. So insurance premiums started to go up like crazy right around the same time. And then taxes started to go up and we were getting hit with higher than ever tax bills.
Then we weren’t seeing the rent growth that we were used to seeing. So rents weren’t growing as fast as we would’ve expected or wanted rents to grow. It’s

Dave Meyer:
Just been one thing after the other. That is

Henry Washington:
True.
And then yeah, prices were still going up. Even with all these other factors, some people were expecting prices to come down a little bit and they just didn’t, not drastically. And then on top of all of that, seller expectations did not adjust with the new pricing. And so if you were being a fundamentally sound real estate investor and you were adjusting your underwriting for all these new higher expenses, which essentially means you need to offer at lower price points, sellers were not here for it because they just felt like their houses were worth substantially more than what a good fundamentally sound investor could pay. And that just made finding and buying good deals extremely challenging.

Dave Meyer:
Yeah. I think you’re right. It’s just this one thing after the other. And I do think this is a real thing. If you look at behavioral economics, people just have an anchor in their brain of what things are supposed to cost. And once that changes, it just fries your brain. I experience this every day, right? You go to the gas station, you’re like, “This is wrong. I think you are incorrect about what you are charging me. ” And I think this is happening in real estate, right? You start underwriting a deal and you just get insurance and it’s like, all right, it’s going to be three grand for insurance on this $200,000 house. You’re like, “No.” Even if you underwrite the deal and it makes sense, you’re just like, “No, I refuse to pay that. ” But this is what I mean by being expectations and less about actually what the bottom line winds up being.
It’s just we’re all still trying to adjust to this new reality that has changed really quickly. And so that’s why that I think people are feeling like these things don’t work, but you wouldn’t be doing deals if they don’t work, right?

Henry Washington:
So

Dave Meyer:
Somehow you are making them work.

Henry Washington:
Yeah. Now I will say 2024, going into 2025 was probably the lowest volume of deals I’ve done in a single year because of the things that I mentioned. I was making adjustments in my underwriting. So I was offering price points that would still allow me to make money, but I just couldn’t get people to say yes enough. And so we did our lowest amount of volume that year. But yeah, I mean, we’re still buying deals. And I think part of what’s changing is sellers’ expectations are adjusting a little bit. They’re starting to realize- Finally. Yes. They’re starting to realize that, okay, in some markets, homes are valued at what they were before, but in some markets, things are coming down and buyers aren’t expecting anymore that if they say, “Someone buy my house,” that 37 people are going to raise their hand and say, “Here’s an offer.” They start to realize that now.

Dave Meyer:
Yeah. I think that’s the big thing that is starting to shift. And I think that’s honestly where a lot of the negative sentiment is. I truly believe you can invest in any kind of market. History has proven that. That is just absolutely true. But normally, I feel like the peak, the transition between a seller’s market like we’re in for a while to buyer’s market, which we’re going into is faster. You usually go and you start to see, okay, inventory’s going up, maybe things are a little bit less affordable. So prices start coming down. You get better deal flow. But it was like 18 months. It’s like two years of time where it was like the pendulum was about to swing back and you’re like, “Has it swung back? Has it started? Has it started?” And it hasn’t come fully back. And it has started now.
I feel pretty confident that we are moving in that direction, but it kind of hung out there for a while. And I think deals were just really hard to come by. And that didn’t mean you couldn’t find them, but you have to be patient. And I think that’s the other thing that has happened is you could just buy anything for so long. No one has patience and understands that maybe 2% of leads are deals, maybe 1% of leads are deals. And that’s okay. If you were in any other kind of market, if you were a stockpicker, you don’t get half of your stocks that you look into you buy. If you’re a private equity firm, you don’t buy 10% of deals, you look at one or 2%. It’s just normal. You have to be willing to look for the cream of the crop.

Henry Washington:
The market that we’re in, which I don’t think is a terrible market, what it is forcing us to do is to operate like a normal real estate investor, to do the proper amount of due diligence, to actually evaluate a good number of deals before making a buying decision. And the market’s allowing for you to do that. There’s not 37 offers on every house. You can take your time, you can evaluate deals, you can make lower offers, you can ask for concessions like this is what you should want. You used to be a fundamentally sound investor and then buy something confidently. And if you can buy deals that work in a market that’s a little tougher, I am telling you, when things shift and you start to see better opportunities that are more profitable, you’re going to be so much better positioned to jump on those and beat out the competition when there is more competition because the market’s more favorable.

Dave Meyer:
100%.

Henry Washington:
You’re going to be in a better cash position to do it. You’re going to be in a better education position to do it. You’re going to have more confidence because if you can build confidence now, this is, I think, a really good thing for a lot of investors.

Dave Meyer:
It’s hard to buy at the top. That’s the thing is we’ve just been at the top for a while. You could still do it. You’ve done it very successfully, but it’s just harder. It is harder. And I do think things are going to get easier. I’m not saying they’re going to get more obvious though. I don’t think we’re going back to this age where it’s like, oh my God, I’m going to do a perfect deal and be really bad at investing. And that’s good. Honestly, that’s really good. Because now we’re not going to have as many people who are bad at investing who are competing with us. If you’re willing to get good at this, this is an advantage for you over the long run. I think that’s really good. So I want to talk to you a little bit about some of the upsides and ways that you’re looking for deals in this, but before I need to ask you something.

Henry Washington:
Uh-oh.

Dave Meyer:
What do you make of all these people on social media? People who are or were real estate investors saying real estate is dead. How do you interpret that?

Henry Washington:
I just don’t understand how you can say real estate is dead. Unless laws change that stop normal people from buying real estate, I don’t think it’s ever going to be dead. And also, if they’re making money and not making money doing the thing they’re trying to teach you how to do, and that’s probably a red flag for me.

Dave Meyer:
Totally.

Henry Washington:
The people that I see saying that are usually the people that I just can’t verify that they actually do any real deals themselves.

Dave Meyer:
Yeah, I think that’s absolutely true. Or they were making so much money selling courses or doing BERS or coaching or whatever. And now the market has shifted. There’s lower interest in real estate. I think that’s just true. This is what we’re

Henry Washington:
Saying.

Dave Meyer:
There’s going to be less competition and maybe it’s not worth it to them because they have this very high expectation of what they’re supposed to be able to earn, not just off real estate, but off of teaching other people real estate. I think that’s another part that’s going on in our industry as well. And they’re just negative about it because this is the same thing with expectations. They anchor their expectations to the best time they’ve ever had. And that’s just not the case. I personally, maybe I’m really negative, people are going to disagree with me. I just think investing returns across every asset class for the next five to 10 years are going to be lower. I just don’t think they’re going to be as good. And if you look at history, this just happens. It just happens. It’s just part … We’ve had some of the best probably last 15 years.
It was incredible to be an investor. That can’t last forever. It just does not happen. I hate when people say about investment, what goes up must come down. That is not true. That is just historically completely just dumb. That is not right. But can you have an ever accelerating rate of growth? No, it’s going to slow down. And so I think everyone needs to just understand that returns are going to probably be lower across the board, but can you still make 15, 20% return on real estate on a rental property? Yeah. Can you still make 50% on a flip? Yeah, that is unbelievable. Sorry, I’m cursing because it’s just so much better than everything else. The stock market average is 8% to 9%. If you look at any projection in the stock market over the next few years by any professional person, they say we’re going to have a bad decade.
So why would you call real estate debt when it’s still … Almost everyone agrees it’s going to outperform every other asset class. All right, we got to take a quick break, but Henry and I will be back to answer the question, what happened to real estate investing right after this?
Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. Henry and I are here level setting, raising people’s expectations to modern normal levels and discussing what has actually happened in real estate over the last couple of years and what you should expect going forward.

Henry Washington:
We’ve been talking about essentially you have to adjust your underwriting so that you can buy deals that perform, but everybody underwrites deals a little differently. And so can you explain to us a little bit about how you adjust your underwriting or how you underwrite a deal a little differently now than maybe you would a few years ago?

Dave Meyer:
Great. Yeah. For me for just buying regular rental properties, I am assuming no appreciation. I think that’s the way to go. And it’s funny, I’m looking back on it as a lesson learned, but I wrote a book with Jay Scott, great investor, done it all. And he said he never underwrites for appreciation, never has. Even during the Gold Lakes era, never did it. And I thought I was being conservative because I do like 2% appreciation way under what we were getting, but I just thought that made sense.That’s the historical average. And now I’m just seeing the wisdom of just doing zero, just 0% appreciation unless you’re doing value add, unless you’re forcing appreciation, unless it is under your control, don’t count it. And I just have come around to that philosophy a lot. I am not saying I think it’s going to be zero. I have just reset my own standards to say, if it is zero, does this still make sense?
I have always underwritten deals with a total return. I have a calculator on BiggerPockets. You can get that for free. I’m going to biggerpockets.com/resources, but it’s cashflow plus tax benefits, plus amortization, plus value add. If that equals 12 to 15%, that’s usually pretty good for me if it’s a low risk deal. If it’s like, I’m going to have to put a lot of money into it, maybe 15 to 20%, something like that. That just hasn’t changed, but I’m putting zero in to the equation there, which just means my cashflow has to be better or my value add opportunity has to be better. And so that’s just the way I’m looking at it. And although it hasn’t shifted, the pendulum’s still holding, we’re still at the top, I think cashflow is going to get better,

Henry Washington:
I think

Dave Meyer:
Prices are going to come down and rents are going to stay exactly where they are or grow. And so I think that’s going to be the opportunity and that’s how I’m going to underwrite deals.

Henry Washington:
The other question I have is it’s easy to adjust your underwriting. What’s hard is when you find those deals that are just outside of your new underwriting that maybe would have performed if you underwrote it the old way, are you finding it easy or hard to say yes or no to those?

Dave Meyer:
Easy. To me, that’s easy because I don’t buy the same volume of deals as you. So I’m patient. If I buy five deals this year, I buy two, I don’t care. I just want these deals that make sense to me. And I just think the window, I think some people say, “Oh, the window of it’s buying is the next six months. The Fed’s going to lower rates.” I don’t buy it. I think we have two or three years where we’re going to have flat and declining rates. We’re going to be in a buyer’s market for a while now. So I just don’t see any incentive to rushing

Henry Washington:
Into

Dave Meyer:
Something or fudging your numbers.

Henry Washington:
Yeah. I mean, I agree with you, but I think that’s where a lot of people struggle, especially if they are doing some sort of volume. Or where I really feel like people struggle is people who are full-time investors, who’ve got to feed their family by doing real estate deals, find it the easiest to kind of fudge numbers or just be comfortable with things they shouldn’t be comfortable with. And this is not the market to do that in.

Dave Meyer:
So what do you do though? That is hard.

Henry Washington:
Well, you got to keep in mind that if you are doing some sort of volume, which means you should be generating leads on some sort of volume, whether that’s leads you’re getting for free by making offers on the MLS or whether you’re doing off market stuff like me, you have to just always remind yourself there’s going to be another deal to underwrite very soon and there’s going to be another opportunity. And you have to be comfortable leaving potential money on the table even though the deal doesn’t pencil. Because what we’re saying when we adjust our underwriting isn’t that a deal just outside of our underwriting won’t make us money. It totally could if everything goes perfect, but we are purposely not banking on everything going perfect. And so we are comfortable. What we’re saying is I’m comfortable leaving that amount of money on the table.
There’s too much risk for not enough reward. And so you’ve just got to be very comfortable with your risk to reward profile and your risk to reward ratio and your underwriting and be okay leaving 10, 20, 30 grand on the table because you want to get a deal that’s got 40, 50, 60 grand.

Dave Meyer:
That’s right. I actually think this is the hardest mental thing
For me too. I don’t do a ton of volume. For me, the shift I’ve made in the last two or three years just mindset wise, not even underwriting is priority number one in every deal is protect against downside risk. Priority two is make money. Right now, the idea is like, think about everything that’s going to go wrong. And that does mean you’re going to be able to do less deals, but that’s okay because you’re going to have rock solid deals.That’s the way I want to see is like, this is just bulletproof. That is what gets me away from the fear because there’s so much uncertainty right now and it’s inevitable. Everyone is afraid. You read the headlines. It’s scary stuff, right? But it’s like if you’re like, “I just am being such a grumpy dude. I hate everything. I think everything’s going to go wrong and this one still works.” I’m like, “Okay.

Henry Washington:
Yeah.

Dave Meyer:
I could cock myself into that.

Henry Washington:
” Yeah. I just want to highlight what you said for a second because that is probably the most valuable thing that was said on this show to date that we’ve talked about today. He said he’s changed his priority from protecting against downside risk as priority number one when underwriting, and then priority number two is making money. Because I guarantee you, most people who underwrite deals still prioritize profitability over risk. And in a market like this where it is very likely that you can do a deal and lose money, protecting against downside risk is making money because- Exactly. Yes,

Dave Meyer:
That’s exactly right. And if you protect against downside risk because then you’ll hold onto a deal, you’ll guarantee to make money. Yes, guaranteed. Absolutely going to make money. It might not be tomorrow. It might not be the highest, fastest return, but it will be the most reliable.

Henry Washington:
I mean, you and I have talked about this on several different shows. The way to really lose in real estate is to not be able to hold onto your asset. So even if you buy a deal that doesn’t work out on your numbers like you wanted it to and you’re losing a little bit of money, 10 years from now, somebody’s going to call you a genius for buying that deal. You just got to be able to stay in the game that long. So protecting against downside risk is making money.

Dave Meyer:
A hundred percent. And I’ll just call out people worry about the market as the risk as the number one thing like, oh, our price is going to go down. Yeah. Okay, that’s a risk. To me, I think the bigger risk that people ignore are like the risks of vacancy. If there’s too much supply in your area or you haven’t kept up with your units and they don’t look as nice as everyone else’s and you’re not going to be able to attract good tenants and expenses risk. Are your taxes going to go up? Are you going to … I invest in Colorado, hard to get insurance here. Same with places like California or in Florida. Those are the risks I’m trying to protect against because if the prices go down 2%, I’m not going to love it. I’d rather them go up. But the things that endanger my ability to hold onto them, those are the risks that I think you really need to be protecting against.

Henry Washington:
Yeah. And I think another risk that people don’t think about because it’s not part of underwriting is the risk of running out of capital or additional capital that can help you stay afloat, right? Yes, we underwrite these deals to pay for themselves. In most instances they do, in some instances they don’t, but the people who end up building true wealth over a long period of time are the people who were able to maintain a stable level of cash reserves to cover them when deals didn’t work out, when vacancy didn’t work out like they wanted to. And over leveraging by buying too many assets that aren’t penciling all at the same time is going to deplete your cash reserves so quickly and then you don’t have any other options if things aren’t working out, you’ve got to sell or you got to let it go.

Dave Meyer:
Well, before we get out of here, I want to end on a little bit of a positive note because

Henry Washington:
You’ve

Dave Meyer:
Been saying a lot of things that have gotten harder, but I think there are things that are also getting easier and better, and that is lower prices. People look at this correction in a market and say that it makes it impossible. No, that actually makes things more affordable. We’ve seen housing affordability get better for the better part of a year now, which is much better. And I actually think cashflow’s getting better and you’re going You have better negotiating leverage. So yeah, things have changed, but some of it is for the better. It’s just about establishing that discipline to be able to only look for good deals and then work with what the market’s given you.

Henry Washington:
Yeah. Over the past, I would say 90 to 120 days, we have been seeing some of the best spreads on deals that I’ve seen in a long time since the 2017, 2018 timeframe. Seriously,

Dave Meyer:
That’s

Henry Washington:
Encouraging. And I think a lot of that has to do with sellers, A, starting to finally loosen up with what they’re expecting. I think a lot of that has to do with people just getting comfortable with the level of uncomfortability that the market has been providing. People start to settle in eventually. Interest rates went crazy and then they’ve come down a little bit. Now they’re just kind of chilling around the same. They’re hovering a little bit, but it’s not drastic changes like it was before. Expenses, they went up. They’re higher than they were a couple of years ago, but they’re not continually rising so drastic. People are just comfortable with how much things cost, with how much real estate costs. And now people are willing to trade because a lot of people were locked into sub 4% interest rates, but now you can go get a new mortgage at 6%.
And a lot of people are willing to make that trade if they’re getting a better house and a better neighborhood or if it’s providing something else for their lifestyle. And so I think people are a little more comfortable. Sellers are a little more realistic. People still need to sell. That’s creating opportunity for us to come in and find deals that actually pencil with our new levels of underwriting.

Dave Meyer:
I don’t want to say that we’ve reached peak challenging. Who knows what’s going to happen? There’s so much uncertainty. But there are reasons to believe that this era of really high prices, really high interest rate, and rapidly expanding expenses and no rent growth. Those are what, five of the hardest things that you could probably deal with as an investor. They’re starting to ease. It’s not going to happen overnight. Those people who are waiting for that magical day where it’s all going to get better. It’s not true, but it is getting relatively easier. And I think it’s just going to continue. And it’s for the people who aren’t getting discouraged. Those are the people who are going to benefit from this, means there’s still a lot of garbage out there. You’re still going to have to be super, super patient. But that’s the discipline I encourage everyone to start thinking about and practicing over the next month, year, two years.That is going to benefit you for a decade or more, even if it means it’s a little frustrating right now.

Henry Washington:
I think the goal right now is get a comfortable level of cash reserves. Stick to your underwriting. Be willing to leave a little bit of money on the table. Only buy deals that fit into your buy box. Don’t fudge it at all. And in five years, you’ll look like a frick fracking genius.

Dave Meyer:
All right. Well, Henry, thank you so much. This was a lot of fun. I always love ranting with you about this. It’s

Henry Washington:
One of my favorite things to do, is just to stand on a soapbox and rant about things. So anytime you need me for that, I’m in.

Dave Meyer:
Absolutely. And thank you all so much for listening to this episode of the BiggerPockets Podcast. He is Mr. Henry Washington. I’m Dave Meyer. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.