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559: Apartment Values Crashed 30% and It's Going to Get Worse with Ken McElroy
About this Episode
Keith discusses the new power shift in the housing market, where buyers now have more power in the Northeast and Midwest.
Ken McElroy joins us to discuss the current state of the real estate market, highlighting a significant decline in apartment building values and a predicted further drop in home ownership rates, potentially below 60%.
They note that while some states, like Arizona, have surpassed pre-pandemic housing supply levels, others, like the Northeast and Midwest, still face shortages. Ken emphasizes the importance of affordability and the shift towards renting, predicting a significant increase in renters.
He also shares insights on strategic property investments and the benefits of buying at current market lows.
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Complete episode transcript:
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Keith Weinhold 0:01
Welcome to GRE. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, apartment building values have crashed about 30% in the past few years. Well, it's the opinion of today's qualified guest that it's going to get even worse from here. We'll also discuss why rents in the Phoenix area are declining, and a bold prediction on a collapse in the home ownership rate and the hordes of renters that that will create all today on get rich education.
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Speaker 1 1:59
You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is get rich education.
Keith Weinhold 2:15
Welcome to GRE from the Tigris to the Euphrates to the Mississippi and across 188 nations worldwide. I'm Keith Weinhold GRE founder Forbes real estate council member, Best Selling Author, look for my work in the USA today as well, and you are back inside for another wealth building week of get rich education. What's all that really mean? Ah, I'm just another slack jawed mouth breather with a mic here. Before we get to today's guest, Ken McElroy, let me tell you about housing's new power shift and where we're at today. Three to five years ago, sellers held all the power in virtually every market because the housing supply was so miserably low everywhere. So you had more one tours of real estate and few that were willing to sell. That is still mostly true on a national level, but the new power shift is about the fact that the Northeast and Midwest are replete with home buyers. Queues of buyers are lining up for the few available properties like I've touched on before, and look low available housing supply in these areas, the Midwest and Northeast, that's not a symptom of mass in migration. Hordes of people are not stampeding into Buffalo for the nightlife. It's all due to chronic under building, partly from strict regulation, especially in the Northeast. A big part of the power shift, though, is that we now have fully 10 states that are above pre pandemic supply levels, and you'll notice that none of these are in the Midwest and Northeast. The 10 states are Arizona, which we'll talk about more today, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Hawaii, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Washington. Here in these places, is where the tables have turned, because supply is catching up with demand in those 10 states. So that's where we're seeing softer home price growth and where buyers have the power, these are some of the states where you can find better deals. Motivated sellers and builders in these places will often buy down your mortgage rate, give you closing cost credits or reward you with incentives, like a free year of property management. In fact, our GRE investment coaches guide you for free to exact property addresses where builders will buy down your mortgage rate to 5% today, one of them will even give you a $9,800 post close credit instead, if you so choose. Often do. Those like that are in those 10 states. They're elsewhere too. You can get started at GRE investment coach.com, conversely, 40 states have less for sale housing inventory than they did as compared to pre pandemic times. This is where sellers still have the power some of the most competitive markets in the nation are buffalo, Hartford, Providence and Boston, where more than 10 active home buyers vie for every single listing. That's per Zillow. That's sort of the real estate equivalent of a Taylor Swift or Beyonce ticket queue. At the other end of the spectrum, shoppers have an easier time in Miami with only 2.6 shoppers per listing, followed by Houston at 3.4 New Orleans at 3.5 and San Antonio at 4.3 nationally active listings are up 31% over last year. That's quite a bit, but we're still 12% below pre pandemic, 2019 inventory levels. And is all this good news or bad news? It totally depends on who you are. If you're holding property in the Northeast and Midwest, you're pretty happy about this strong appreciation in the single family space, but in the southeast, appreciation is non existent. There's even mild depreciation, especially in parts of Florida. If you're looking to own more property in the nation's southeast quadrant, you're now enjoying less buyer competition. In fact, sellers are competing for you, and let's avoid being too assuming. Here I've been talking about things on the state level. States are not monoliths. Philadelphia is not Pittsburgh, Seattle is not Yakima. Cities have different supply situations. Even within one city, the scenario varies, of course, really the bottom line here is that today's recovery from 2022 national supply abyss has been an uneven recovery, where builders are frozen, appreciation soars, where builders hustle, buyers win. So if you're looking for deals, find that short queue.
Today's guest is a familiar one to GRE listeners. He's based in Scottsdale, Arizona, which is the Phoenix Metro. Arizona, though it's fast growing, is still just the 14th most populous state, but Arizona is an interesting market, because we're going to get to see what happens when you have an overbuilt condition, like we do there. We'll discuss that market and the national market as well. Get a key gage on the direction of rents, occupancy and prices, first in the single family space, and then we'll talk about apartments. Anyone that's paid attention to real estate that past few years. Knows that when mortgage rates spiked in 2022 single family values have held up, apartment values plummeted due to their interest rate resets. We'll get insight on if the beleaguered apartment space has bottomed out price wise, or if apartment values still have further to fall.
I'd like to welcome in frequent GRE guest, and he was also one of our earliest back in 2015 Ken McElroy. Ken authored a bunch of successful books, both within and outside of the rich dad series. He's also a well known, successful apartment syndicator with over 10,000 units across several states, and he's also in other parts of the commercial real estate sector, including billboards and self storage. So it's really great to have back on the show. Ken McElroy
Ken McElroy 8:57
good to be here, Keith, thank you. It's been 10 years, man, since we've been doing
Keith Weinhold 9:01
this? Yes, 10 years back in episode 25 since you were first here, more than a decade of this. So we know each other's work really well, and it's such an interesting time in the apartment space. I want to get to that later in our conversation today and really find out if you think that the apartment space has bottomed out. But before we do that, let's talk about the single family space. The audience should know that you can meet both Ken and I in person, as we're both faculty members on the spectacular real estate guys Investor Summit C, which is actually underway now. We're recording this just before the summit. So let's discuss the direction of rents and occupancy. We'll get to price later and Ken although most states still have a housing shortage statewide, Arizona's active housing inventory for sale is 24% above pre pandemic levels. That's what realtor.com tells us, and this. Deeply due to a lot of building, a lot of building usually does not bode well for price growth or rent growth. So tell us about rent, direction and occupancy in the single family space in the Phoenix Metro.
Ken McElroy 10:15
There's a bunch of things happening in the Arizona market. First of all, one is we've had a lot of people move here right in the last 4,5,6, years. Yeah, post pre pandemic, post pandemic, all of that. We are a pretty small state. You got Phoenix, got Tucson, you got Flagstaff, a bunch of other small cities that kind of surround some of those. But it's not like a Texas or a Washington or a lot of these California, like a lot of states, and have a lot of cities to draw from. If people move to Phoenix, that's pretty much where they're they start a lot of times, not every time, but and so it's really interesting. When we have net in migration into Arizona, it really moves the needle for most of these cities. Is kind of the point. And so we're always going to be affordable, we're always going to have great weather, it's safe. We got pretty normal politics, I should say, as compared to some of the others, we really do have a growing population. And so what happened? We had a nice run on the real estate. As you do, you know, we had a nice run on the apartments. We had a nice run on the single family that tapered off when the interest rates went up, essentially, right? You know, we actually built too much. We built too many apartments. We built too many houses. When interest rates went up, people kind of pulled back. That's what you're seeing now. So right now, it's a great time to be a home buyer. It's a great time to be a renter in most of those cities in Arizona specifically. And why would that be? It's because they have a lot of choices. So on the single family side, the listings have gone up, and therefore some of the prices have you know, people are starting to negotiate a little bit more. Now here's the interesting thing, Keith, if you measure it on last year or the year before, it has huge numbers, like you just quoted, you know, 24% but what's happening is things are on the market like 40 days, you know, you know what I mean, like from a week or two, it's doubled or tripled, as you know, that's still not a very realistic market. The market is still, in my opinion, pretty healthy. It's not unbalanced, and before it was a seller's market, and so it's just normalizing. And normalizing, to me, if you go over year, over year, over year, is I think MLS says four to six months of inventory, right? I think things are just normalizing. But if you've been through the run, this is like the end of the world, right? But it's not. It's just things are settling down, and it's the greatest time because they're supposed to be a little bit of friction between the seller and the buyer. I believe there should be just about right. It's never just right, as you know, it's usually pulls on one harder on one side or the other. But we just went through an incredible time where the sellers pretty much got whatever they wanted and the landlords pretty much got whatever they wanted, and so this is just pulling back, you know, the tide's going back out. There's no cause for concern, at least in my world at all. It's supposed to be this way, and we need affordability. We need people to be able to buy homes. We need people to be able to rent. Yeah, I'm in the landlord business, but I don't want rents to run. There needs to be a balance there, even though it's good for me, if it does, but it's not good, because what happens is, then the government gets involved, and what they need to get involved in is adding supply, right? And not capping the rents. You know, what they need to do is just work with developers. And you know, because we're growing here in Arizona right now, we're seeing a pullback, but I think it's needed. There's nothing wrong with this. It weeds out a lot of, you know, realtors that weren't doing much, that just got their license, were hanging around, say, with mortgage folks and title people and lazy contractors and all that stuff. So whenever there's a pullback, the professionals win.
Keith Weinhold 14:01
Well, this is some really good perspective here. We're all victims of the recency bias, and, yeah, you're talking largely about market normalization. What sure wasn't normal or healthy, in a lot of ways, was back in 2021 when you might have had 50 offers for one available property, and people had to bid 50k over the asking price, and they might have waived their inspection, which is typically not a good idea when we talk about rents in the direction of rents, especially there in the Phoenix metro with single family homes, which I know your wife, Daniil, is pretty intimately involved with. Typically, this new supply increases competition. It increases the competition for landlords competing for more of those tenants, which is something that typically is not good for rents. Have we seen declining rents in the local market there in Phoenix?
Ken McElroy 14:54
Of course, yeah. And I'll tell you, there's a bunch of factors. So there's always cross currents. People want one. Answer, but there's not right, like, so let's just pick on a whole bunch of things that went wrong at the tail end of all of this. It was Airbnb. Like, Phoenix and Scottsdale are a huge Airbnb market. I've rented Airbnbs there. Sure. It's incredible, right? And so what happened was a lot of people said, oh, I can buy this house, throw some furniture in it. And, you know, I can get 10,15, 20 grand a month in rent out of these things. And they were right. And then what happened was, there just was too many, so became oversaturated. So you're definitely seeing those back on the market. And so interesting fact, Heath, all you got to do is look at the pictures. And if you see bunk beds. You know, it used to be an Airbnb like, you know what I mean? So that was the one, but two, let's don't forget this run that we just had put a lot of people into the rental market for the first time on the single family side too. So we never really had this many landlords on the single family side as well. And so there's all these mistakes that people made. They bought incorrectly. They had capex work. They bought with floating rate debt. And when rates went up, they weren't cash flowing. They wouldn't know how to manage them. So So there's all this stuff that was kind of going on behind the scenes, on the apartment side of the equation, which is where I hang out. Mostly, I watch all this. And because my class A buildings are competing for single family. They have single family typically wins because it has a yard, has a garage. Nonetheless, I gotta pay attention to it. So it's been interesting to watch. At one point you could not find a home in the Scottsdale area under 500 grand period like nothing. And now, of course, those are starting to come down a little bit more, and there's some softness in the rent, so the renters are have more choices. Now, why is that? There's a couple reasons. If you're a renter and you're looking for a place, you know, I'm sure you're considering a house, but not everybody wants a house, especially if you're single or maybe it's just you and somebody else, and maybe you don't have a pet. There's a lot of reasons that people just don't want to have to a home. So you've got condos and you've got apartments and you've got homes, and then you have school districts. So people definitely want to be in certain school districts based on their children. So you have all these cross currents going on, on where people want to be. And so what does all that mean? What that means is there are certain markets, from a rental standpoint, that are doing extremely well, still, both on apartments, on condos and houses. And then there are other markets that absolutely are not just depends on the concentration of all those things and all those factors that are going on. The one thing that's actually disrupting a market more than anything is apartments and condos. Because, for example, Danielle just had a condo that she owned, and the condo was worth, let's say, 300 grand, but it's probably 25 years old now, yeah, and there's apartments going up, you know, a block from there, right? So her renter is said, you know, I'd rather go over here. Brand new amenities, nine foot ceilings, brand new fitness center, all this stuff. So apartments really do reach into that rental market a little bit. And so there is some spillover between that. But primarily what's going on in Phoenix is there's a lot of new construction. And not just Phoenix. This is Tucson and Greater Phoenix. There's a lot of new construction that was started when rates were low. They were started in 2122 and you know, like, because I'm a builder, it could be a year to 18 months when we're opening a project from the time we put our the shovel in the dirt, we're not even open for a good 18 months. So there's a lag period. And those started opening in 23,24 and certainly 25 and these big projects, two, 300 unit projects, which I have several going right now, they're one to two year lease ups, so you could be looking at two or three year lag on some of the housing that's being provided. So that's all here now that is been good for renters. There's a couple horror stories going on, and I'll just explain. So downtown Phoenix, there was a whole bunch of apartment projects and condo projects that were built trying to attract people to live in downtown Phoenix? Well, there's challenges for downtown Phoenix too, and we won't have to get into that. I don't particularly think that there was ever the real demand for the amount of housing. So what you've done is people build a lot of housing in concentrated areas around the stadium in West Phoenix, near the Cardinal Stadium downtown Phoenix, you know, right in the heart of the business district. So if you were to rent something today, it would be four months free on a 12 month lease.
Keith Weinhold 19:48
Wow, that's about the steepest concession I've ever heard of in my life.
Ken McElroy 19:54
Yes, that's today. So all you gotta do is Google it and you'll see. And the only reason that happened, Keith, is. Is because there was too many units delivered at at a short period of time, and there was the demand, wasn't there? Gosh, now go 10 miles up to Tempe, go to Chandler, go to Scottsdale. No concessions, right? So again, you know, when you look at a market, you're going to see that it typically a lot of these concentrate in certain areas. And so there's a lot of areas in Phoenix where the consumer or the renter has an upper hand a lot. And so they're driving their choices based on their monthly rent. All of that plays into this thing, but the there's areas that are rock solid. And you know that would be Scottsdale, Tempe, Chandler, Gilbert, and there's areas that are over built that would be the west side, downtown Phoenix, the south side, there's areas that there's pockets that you know are in disruption you can kind of pick your poison, right? Like, if you're a landlord, there are areas that you want to buy in areas that you don't want to buy in. And as a renter, you have the same kind of choices. So when you blend it all together, you guys get the national news. But really it's pretty pocketed, just like it can be in any market.
Keith Weinhold 21:12
Well, you bring up so many good points there. Some of these markets that have done more building than usual are in this situation where there is landlord competition for tenants. Now, nationally, we're still under built, so it's interesting to talk about one of these overbuilt conditions in that competition for tenants, like we've been talking about, in general, a tenant prefers a single family home, and it's privacy for sure. They can't always afford that, but the apartment market and the single family rental market are somewhat interrelated, because if there's so much new apartment supply, it's got the appeal of being brand new, and there might even be concessions given, like you've mentioned there Ken and that can make it very attractive for a potentially wannabe single family home renter to go ahead and rent an apartment instead. So this glut of new apartment supply actually can affect the single family rental market somewhat, and competition is really interesting. I mean, certainly in my real estate investment career, I've experienced that. The first time I ever experienced that was that I owned several doors, and they were about 25 years old, and they had garages, each one of them a new apartment complex was built close to those so brand new, and you had to drive by this new apartment complex. Everything nice, shiny new, painted new parking lot, everything a prospective tenant had to drive by that in order to get over to look to my units. That softened my rent somewhat. The one thing that saved me a bit is that my running units were in Anchorage, Alaska, I had the garages with my units. The new apartment building didn't. They only had carports, so I did have a differentiator to help soften the blow in a rental market that became more competitive. Tell us more about the competition for tenants there in Phoenix, whether that's on the single family side or the apartment side can with concessions. And does that mean that you're altering the length of leases there in the local market? Or tell us more about how you're doing that competition?
Ken McElroy 23:10
It's a great question, yeah. So I would say generally, a home is going to be about 1000 bucks more on the average, like if you were just to put a number on it, three bedroom, Rambler type home with a garage in a yard. It's going to be maybe three grand. That apartment, the equivalent was is going to be maybe two grand. So roughly, those are kind of the numbers. But what happens if you're going to rent a house, you're definitely going to pay more money, that's for sure. And of course, depending on the area, depends on the on the rent. Now what's happening in a lot of these markets, like West Phoenix, for example, where you have 1000s of units being added at once, and you get this one month, two month, three month, and the extreme, of course, being four months free, if you're a renter and your rent is two grand, but you get three months free, let's say or four, you're going to take that deal, right? Because your your your average rent is, what 12,13, $1,400 a month, not 2000 so all of a sudden, it's going to impact those single families. So what's happening right now is the apartments that got delivered in in a lot of these geographic areas, these sub markets are definitely impacting the single family rental market. Now, if you're a family and you've got kids and you got pets and you want to be in a school district, you're not even looking you're basically just trying to find the best deal on a home. I get that. But if you have a choice, the rents are about the same, you're going to take the house, sure period I would, you would. So now what's happening is there's, there's such a difference between the rental price of a home versus the rental price of a brand new apartment that people are going to gravitate to the apartments, because those landlords trying to fill those things up are scrambling and marketing to anybody. And everybody and cutting whatever deals they can, because they're just trying to get out of those construction loans. It's a weird market right now. And of course, there are areas Keith that this does not exist at all, right, like you go into like Tempe, and you're not going to have because it doesn't have the available land, you know, which is around Arizona state for example, the Arizona State University. You go into North Scottsdale, you're not going to find this because North Scottsdale doesn't like apartments. And, you know, the homes are a million bucks and up, but there are definitely pockets where this is happening. So if you're a renter and you have choices, this is a great time for you and and to be honest, it's about time, because it was a seller's market and a landlord's market for a long time, and so it's just reverting back to the mean.
Keith Weinhold 25:46
Let's wrap up the discussion about rents and occupancy with what's happening nationally. Ken, since in apartment buildings, you invest in multiple states there, we know, for example, that the home ownership rate recently fell from 65.7% down to 65.1% fewer homeowners means more renters. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they're all going to be absorbed immediately, either. So talk to us about that.
Ken McElroy 26:13
There's an affordability problem, right? We haven't seen a massive adjustment with house prices now you have in areas, of course, I saw your recent podcast on Florida. You know how right the price of a house is, is less than a car today? Yeah, you're right, like so, but what's happening is there are markets that are pulling back, right. There are markets that had a bigger bubble than others, and they're pulling back. And so there's great deals in those markets. A lot of areas in Florida being one of those markets, there are other markets where you don't have that. So we are definitely seeing the same thing. And so we're having, in my opinion, it's the greatest time, because you have people that are, I think, should be able to buy a home. But interest rates seem to be holding at Six 7% and the pricing, albeit, hasn't run like it has, but it's certainly not pulling back like crazy either. It's still over 400 on the average, you know. So if you look at the delta between what it costs to buy a home just mortgage only, and you look at what it costs to rent, it's never been bigger. So the difference between your rent, the rent and a mortgage, has never been bigger. And the other thing Keith, that doesn't get talked a lot about are everything non interest rate and everything non mortgage. So let's start talking about insurance. Let's talk about property tax. Let's talk about, you know, capex. So there's a really good survey that bankrate.com did that said that right now, the average cost to own a home, not mortgage, is 1500 a month. So now that's average. I'm sure there's some that's less. I'm sure it's some that higher. So when you take 1500 a month to own it, plus the mortgage you're talking about quite a bit. It's a heck of a financial commitment when you can just rent for 12, 1314, 1500 and call it a day, you're going to move the needle twice as fast, and you're going to be able to get out of whatever financial situation you're in twice as fast when you don't have all those other costs. So what's really going on now? And the reason why you're starting to see this home ownership rate go down, and I actually make a prediction, gonna do it right now on your show, I think it's gonna go down below 60. I think for the first time in our history, we're gonna see home ownership in the 5050 nines, which is a massive statement. But if you take a look at under Obama got up to 69 and then it was, first of all, it was Clinton, and before that, and then kind of ran, but then it kind of got pulled back under the Bush, and then Obama kind of took the brunt of it. You know, when all that stuff was falling out, but it's been falling, and it's falling. Why it's falling? Because people can't afford a home, and they need to be able to afford a home. So we can't build affordably. The single family market is not affordable, and inflation surpassing wage growth, so you have this massive shift of people, in my opinion, moving from home ownership to the rental side. And there was a time where 1% shift Keith was 1 million people,
Keith Weinhold 29:27
1 million new renters, with every 1% drop in the home ownership rate
Ken McElroy 29:32
was 1 million people. So imagine that it doesn't sound like much when you go 65.7 to 65.1 right? That's a lot of people. When you got about 142 million people in the US, or a billion, right? 340
Keith Weinhold 29:46
350 million in 300 Yeah, about 145 million houses,
Ken McElroy 29:51
45 million, yeah, something like that. So you start to take a look at these numbers. They're massive. So these little 1% movement. It is a lot of people. I think we're going to continue to see it. People need to put their stake in the ground here and get on the landlord side of this, because we're going to see a massive shift of people because they can't afford they're going to be permanent renters, renters for life. And it's not good. I'm not advocating, but it just is what it is, with wage destruction, with inflation, with the affordability, the way it is, people are going to be forced into the rental side of the equation, whereas before, we were always kind of working on the fluctuations of the interest rates and the policies of the President, let's say, or whatever it was, to try to get people to be homeowners, or whatever it might be. Now, we might be in some kind of a permanent state unless something really changes, because we're four or 5 million houses short in the US as a result of the last 20 years. As you know,
Keith Weinhold 30:54
I recently saw a media article that was titled The hidden cost of home ownership, and they were talking about hidden costs as things like maintenance, property taxes, property insurance, utilities. I don't know how in the heck those costs are hidden. Any prospective homeowner needs to be aware of those costs, and inflation impacts those costs, where inflation cannot impact your fixed rate, principal and interest payment. There we have it a brazen prediction from Ken that the home ownership rate will drop below 60% in this cycle and the hordes of renters that that's going to release, we're talking about the direction of rents and occupancy in both Phoenix and the nation at large. We're going to come back after the break and talk about the direction of real estate prices. You're listening to get rich education. Our guest is Ken McElroy. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold.
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Naresh Vissa 33:25
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Keith Weinhold 33:32
Welcome back to get worse education. We're talking with seasoned investor Ken McElroy, and he's also been one of the most recurrent guests here on the show. He's just consistently got some of the very best perspectives in the entire nation on the real estate market. And Ken the Fred data, which pulls their numbers from Kay Shiller, it shows that the value of a mid tier single family home in Phoenix, Metro wide, has basically been flat for the last year and a half. I know your wife, Daniil, deals with single family rentals there in Phoenix. Can you corroborate Is that what you're seeing as far as values go there on the ground, or is it different in the sub markets
Ken McElroy 34:20
it's definitely different in the sub markets, but I would definitely concur that it is flat, Keith, it's a very interesting time. People are used to selling things fast. Oh, I'm going to sell this and it trades, and then they're moving it right to something else. They're not used to the markets that you and I grew up in, right which is, you remember the old days where we would list something and it might be on the market for three or four or five months. These people, these kids, these let's last 10 years, they have never seen anything like that. So for me, I think we're just moving back to what I would consider to be normal. I don't see a problem with flat at all. In fact, I think homes are unaffordable and. And flat isn't necessarily bad. That means that both sides are kind of doing deals. That means the seller doesn't hold the cards, and it means the buyer doesn't hold the cards, and so right now is a great time to buy because if a seller is sitting on something for even a couple months, they're not used to it. There's deals to be had right now. And it's, I think, if you have the dry powder and you have the ability to move, is a great time to buy.
Keith Weinhold 35:26
You had mentioned, when we were talking outside this show, that your wife, Danielle has made some interesting moves in her single Yeah, yeah, tell us about that.
Ken McElroy 35:36
It's a fantastic move. I mean, one of the greatest, obviously, I'm doing these big apartment deals, she can't relate, and she's doing these small houses, which she loves. She doesn't like debt. She likes to pay them off, and she manages them all herself. And so she bought this condo years ago, and it's worth about 300 grand, and she paid like 164 years ago, and the rents have dropped. You know, per our last conversation, they were used to be around 1900 now they're around 1700 but the same time, rents have dropped. And why would rents drop? Because there's more competition. There's new apartment buildings being built around the area. The tenants have more choices. Again. There's, you know, rents came down a little bit. So she lost couple 100 bucks a month there, and the HOA hit her with costs. Our insurance went up, our landscaping went up, so all of a sudden their HOA fees started going up. So the rents came down, and the HOA costs went up, squeezes on, yeah, so all sudden she's got this squeeze and so she's looking at it. And I said, you really ought to take a look at your what we call imputed equity. In other words, she has no debt on this thing, so she literally has another way to say it is she has 300,000 sitting in a condo, an asset. What does it matter? What it is and she gets maybe, what does she make it 500 a month, maybe $6,000 okay? Net Cash Flow a year, right? Nothing. So you take your 6000 you divide it by your 300 and it's not a very good return. Yeah, eight. Okay, so she's looking at what we call imputed equity. What's your return on the equity you have? Okay, so she said, I'm going to start looking at these homes that have, like you said, the garages and the yards, because again, we know that should be able to get closer to $3,000 a month on those so she started scouring, and she found one, and it was about 450 grand. So she had to come up with another 150 grand. And so what she did was she sold the unit, the condo she had that had rising HOA and lowering rents for 300 she did a 1031 exchange into the $450,000 house, and then she had to come up with another 150 but her rent now is three grand, and she was able to increase her cash flow By almost $1,000 for a month. So that extra 150 generated about $12,000 of net cash flow gain. And so again, she just purely looked at the math on one and did a 1031 moved it into another one. And now she's super happy it's in a home. And as you know, in a lot of these homes, not always, but you tend to have people that don't move as much. So this the guy that moved in has his son. He has him in a local school. He's young. He's probably going to be there for years, so she's probably not going to have the turnover that she would in a condo project. That's really more like an apartment building. That's what she just did. And so don't forget, when prices are high, you're exiting high and buying high. When prices are in flux, a little bit like they are flat, you're going to be able to find deals. So it's a really good time to take a look at imputed equity and what's your real, true return, and is there a better asset class for you to be able to move that money into? Because this is truly about managing money and maximizing your return on your own dollars. And that's a move that she just made, and she's going to be on the cruise. She'll see you, and I'm encouraging her to actually do a talk on it, because there's a lot more detail to how she pulled it off. But it only took her, like, four or five months to do it, and it worked perfectly.
Keith Weinhold 39:22
Yeah. Well, congratulations there. I'm a fan of debt around here, as you know, on the summit, Daniel and I'll have to have a chat, and I'll talk about why financially free beats debt free and all of that. But I would love to hear her reply. She probably has some really good, sound reasoning for that can nationally apartment values have followed perhaps an astounding 30% because the way I see it is that three or four years ago, there were tons of new apartment starts with those freakishly low mortgage rates like you touched on. Start to completion of an apartment building can be as long as two years. So those starts have now become completion. Dollars, and they need to be leased up. So that's the glut, and that's why apartment vacancies are common in a lot of American markets today, with higher mortgage rates now, we have fewer starts and with less new future apartment supply coming onto the market, which would have been completed in 2025 to 2027 I mean, that's something that could portend well for the future, but the current apartment glut still needs to get absorbed by tenants. So talk to us about that.
Ken McElroy 40:29
That's a great, great tee up for me. Okay, so I'm going to do seven transactions this year. Now, that's all 200 plus units. So I bought 360 unit building and brand new in Las Vegas. We just closed on a 282 unit in north Scottsdale. We bought 152 unit in Phoenix. And on and on and on and on and on. We're really, really, really busy right now, because, to your point, why would we be doing that now? Here's why apartments are valued based on how they're operating period. So high vacancy, high concession, flat rents, high expenses. That's all bad if you own it, it's really good if you buy it. So you want to buy at today's numbers, and that's what we're doing. We're buying at today's numbers, and we think that there's a little window that we've got through 26 to be able to acquire a bunch of apartments at these low values. To your point, they've definitely dropped. There's another case as to why, because the next piece is when the mortgage rate's high, cash flow is less. So when your mortgage payment is higher, all things being equal, your cash flow is less. So when rates went up, then people could pay less, and that drove values down. So if we could lock in today with all this disruption, so that's what we've been focused on. And it's been a very exciting year for our company. And in addition to that, to your point, but you and I have never spoken about, we just broke ground on another deal, and we're just leasing up on a deal down in Tucson that we're we're a 300 unit building that we're just finishing, and we just broke ground on a 312 unit, and we got a couple more slated because we're trying to break ground today. And why would we would break ground today because there's not a lot of subcontractors bidding on the stuff. So we're getting better pricing. The interest rates are high. This is true. That's not necessarily a positive, but we're breaking ground in anticipation of opening in two years, when all this stuff gets absorbed, we're going to be opening and so, you know, if we could time it today with 25 we break ground, we're going to open in 27 this stuff will be absorbed by then the blood will be in the streets in 25 and 26 and maybe early 27 and then it's going to shift again, Keith, and you know, people are slow to react. And so we think we're going to hit this little window at optimal time to be able to open up brand new product in two years.
Keith Weinhold 43:05
That's great. Ken we've been having these conversations for over a decade now, I know, and the way that I see it is that MC companies, your company, was built exactly for times like this. Is that to say that you think apartment values have reached their bottom,
Speaker 2 43:22
so I actually don't think they have yet. That's a funny comment, and here's why, because we also went through this extend and pretend time with lenders, right? So the lenders, whoever bought something, was trying to hold on to it forever. But now, with this new administration and the battle with the, you know, Powell still in office for another year. Who knows really, what's going to happen with rates? Maybe a quarter here, quarter there, whatever. But the reality is, there's no relief in sight. It doesn't appear. Because now we have this high vacancy, we have high expenses, and I don't think there's going to be a lot of interest rate relief. And so I think the lenders are going, you know what? We're gonna start listing these. So we're starting to see just in the last few months, brokers call. I got a call the other day from a broker out of San Antonio. He said a lender called me. They gave me nine deals. He said the keys, they gave me the keys on nine deals now and then I got another one in Dallas. It was 35% occupied, and the loan was 25 million, and the guy said they would take 14, so that's an $11 million haircut to the lender. So you're starting to see these. These are coming into my emails, right? Because they flooded. We are kind of deal. Yeah, it's so good. Now I've passed on everything so far because I think the knife is still falling a little bit, and so I think we're in the first few innings of seeing these kinds of deals, and there needs to be a lot of them, right? Like they need to be everywhere. And then when they're everywhere, everything's listed, and people are looking at them, and there's all this interest, then I think we're going to be at the bottom, but we're darn close. I mean, we're darn close, I would say. Right? We're probably by end of the year close. That's why, if a prudent investor, is getting their dry powder together, now they're meeting with their broker relationships, now they're meeting with their lender relationships, now they're putting together their LPs, and they're starting to go out and look at deals. Now, even if it's no no, no, no, no, no, no. This is the time for you to build relationships and be ready to strike when you start to see stuff this year, toward the end of the year, will will be the bottom and then I also think next year is going to be rocky for a lot of things. Then you're going to see a lot of lender write offs.
Keith Weinhold 45:37
This is really good guidance for what you the listener, can accidentally do if you are a prospective apartment building buyer. Great insight there. Ken. Ken, yes, you and I are about to be together on the real estate guys Investor Summit to see but there's another great event that begins at the end of next month that you put together.
Ken McElroy 45:59
Tell us about that. This is great. I have now we have about 4000 investors. So these are all high net worth people that invest with us. And you know, this is our 24th year in business. So when I meet with all of them, we used to do these investor summits, they would say, What about gold? What about silver? What about oil? What about water? What about timber? What about self storage? What about Office? What about retail? So I'm like, I'm going to create a conference where I can have everything in one spot, and we can invite high net worth, accredited people be able to come there and listen to the best of the best. So no professional speakers, just people that are really doing deals. You know, like we have guys that are building wellness spas and hospitality. Obviously, we have some single family. We got multi family. Got a retail guy, industrial guy, commercial guy, office guy. We got a gold panel. And then we got these economists, and you probably know some of the names. So we got George gammon coming. We got Jeff Snyder, who's unbelievable Euro dollar University. He's coming. We got Brent Johnson, who created what's called the milkshake theory. And just Google it, you'll see it's all about the central banks. We got Jim Rickards, who wrote currency wars and a new case for gold. And we got Lawrence Lepard, who just wrote this book called The Big print. All coming as speakers unpaid, and they're just going to try to deliver the best value they can to the people. Because I tell you what, Keith, I don't know about you, but it's confusing. I'm reading about tariffs, I'm reading about inflation. I'm reading about unemployment. I don't know where interest rates are going. I'm feeling it at the street level, at the main street level, with my apartment buildings, they're harder to manage. The expenses are going up. I try to create this environment to where people can show up and hear real real things, and they can make real decisions and course correct, right, and also take advantage of of some other things. We're also having a manufacturing panel, and I got a whole panel just on the Trump tax bill, because the opportunity zones, the bonus depreciation, all the stuff, these are things that you can do to be able to take action. So this is limitless expo.com. Since we're on your show, they can do KEN10. KEN10, which is a discount, the prices do go up. Obviously they're the highest. They are in July, because that's when the event is but in June, they're still lower. So I would suggest that people go this year, especially with this new administration, and everybody's like, what is going on? Hopefully we can it's starting to clear up some of the confusion that we all have right now and try to figure things out.
Keith Weinhold 48:36
It seems like all we do know is that we don't know limitless ought to help clear some of that up. It is July 31 to August 2. Tell us where it's taking place.
Ken McElroy 48:47
Yeah, it's at the gaylord in Texas, in Dallas, Texas. It's called the Gaylord Texan. It's limitless expo.com. Now we did it last year. There'll be 2000 people. We have 50 speakers. We have five stages, 50 speakers. It's a really high end event. What I mean by that is these are real people doing real deals with real businesses, real investors. It's been fantastic. I haven't had to pay speakers because of the quality of the attendee. That says a lot. It's really been interesting and great. And by the way, I don't really think having big speakers to sell tickets is the way to go. I'd rather have a real quality event, and it's really interesting once you set your mind on something. Because my investors and other investors show up because they do more than invest in just what we do. Like real estate. Everybody wants a little piece of real estate, but they also want to know about Bitcoin. They also want to know about gold, you know. And these are things that I'm not that proficient in, you know. I want to hear from experts in those fields. So it's really been a great, great event.
Keith Weinhold 49:48
You kind of crowdsource the need. You listen to what your audience was asking about, and then you delivered it for them. Limitless expo.com, use the discount code KEN10 to get. Get a discount. Ken McElroy, it's been great chatting about the direction of rents and prices in the both single family space and apartment space. It's been great having you back on the show.
Ken McElroy 50:09
Yeah, for sure. Keith, always great. Man. Good seeing you.
Keith Weinhold 50:18
Yeah. Ken, decidedly bullish on buying real estate, even calling it a great time to buy. He basically believes that because buyers have more power than they did three and four years ago, and they have more options, an emphatic prediction that the home ownership rate will fall below 60% there is profundity here. I mean, the census figures on this go back to the 1960s and the lowest it's fallen in all that time was 63% by the way, homeownership peaked in 2004 at 69% apartment values have crashed about 30% and It's probably going to get worse. So the worst isn't over, but likely will be by about the end of this year. So in Ken's opinion, most of the worst is over. I'm reading in between the lines there on that one. Hey, I hope you've been enjoying this show lately. Next week, we're going to change things up somewhat here. Recently, we've had rather prominent guests on the show, like the father of Reaganomics, David Stockman, then Russell gray last week, this week, the owner of 10,000 running units, Ken McElroy. And you know their perspectives and experience and influence, they are terrific. And I trust that you've learned from them. Next week, we'll have two GRE listeners here on the show, regular listeners, perhaps people more like you, because you can probably relate well to their stories. Until then, I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, don't quit your Daydream.
Speaker 3 51:59
Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of get rich Education LLC, exclusively.
Keith Weinhold 52:22
You know, whenever you want the best written real estate and finance info, oh, geez, today's experience limits your free articles access, and it's got paywalls and pop ups and push notifications and cookies disclaimers. It's not so great. So then it's vital to place nice, clean, free content into your hands that adds no hype value to your life. That's why this is the golden age of quality newsletters. And I write every word of ours myself. It's got a dash of humor, and it's to the point, because even the word abbreviation is too long. My letter usually takes less than three minutes to read, and when you start the letter, you also get my one hour fast real estate video. Course, it's all completely free. It's called the Don't quit your Daydream letter. It wires your mind for wealth, and it couldn't be easier for you to get it right now. Just text gre 266, 866, while it's on your mind, take a moment to do it right now. Text GRE TO 66866
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