Investor Who Timed Market (3 Times!) Says Now May Be Bottom

The housing market isHome prices are dropping in many parts of the country. Here’s how real estate investors should react. If you’ve been waiting for home prices to come down before making your next investment, well that time is coming soon if it’s not already here. So get prepared with Zillow, Redfin, and a lot of other reputable forecasters. Now predicting price drops in the second half of 2025. There are going to be big opportunities to buy investment properties, which you’ve all been anticipating and waiting for a long time, but you need to buy the right way in this kind of market. You don’t want to be catching a falling knife. And today we’ll tell you how.What’s up everyone? I am Dave Meyer, head of real Estate Investing at BiggerPockets. This podcast is devoted to helping you reach financial freedom through real estate. Today we are talking about a shift in the housing market that’s happening right now. Home prices are expected to fall on a national basis about 1% year over year. But this isn’t a crash and it’s not even necessarily a large correction, but it is still significant because home prices have been rising pretty consistently since 2012. If you’re one of those people who’s been sitting around and waiting for prices to drop before buying a rental property, now’s the time because it’s happening. This is a new dynamic in the market and because of that, I want to break down how investors should invest when there are fewer biding wars when sellers are dropping prices and homes are sitting on the market for longer durations. And to help me break it all down, I’m joined today by an investor who has seen every possible type of market probably more than once. Welcome back to the show, Brian Burke.Dave, thanks for having me again.I’m excited to have you here, Brian, because the fact that we’re going into a correction, it seems a little less obvious what to do and I certainly have my own opinions, but let’s just start with yours. How would you approach a correction and how would you start thinking about it in the residential real estate space?Well, I’m the kind that I always like to buy as you’re coming out of a bottoming process as opposed to when you’re going into a bottoming process. Having said that, if you’re investing your own money and you have a long-term horizon and you can get cashflow, buying at a lower basis is always a good thing. And today is a lower basis than you may have seen a year ago in a lot of markets. So it might be wise to get into the business. Now if you have a long-term horizon, if you’re thinking like, oh, I’m going to buy something, rent it out and sell it in one to two years and make all kinds of appreciation, I think you’re mistiming that opportunity. I’ll tell you a goal that I set when the market was kind of similar to now, it was around 1999 and 2000 and I set a goal.I thought, okay, prices are coming down a little bit. If I could buy one house a year for the rest of my life, I would be way ahead of anybody else I’ve ever met in my entire life. Even though prices may come down, we may have a future crash, which actually did happen like seven years later. There was a crash. But I thought if I could do that, I would set myself up for life. And in order to do that, you had to buy stuff at kind of a discount to market value, which means really fishing for fixers and things where you can add value. And the other piece was it had to have cashflow because you’ve got to be able to hold onto it no matter what. If you’re buying a rental house and you have to take $200 a month out of your pocket from your other earnings to keep it afloat, it’s difficult to survive those conditions long term and it’s impossible to scale under that model. You’ll just flat out run out of money.I’m glad you said that. I was actually writing an outline for another episode about just tactically things that you could do in this kind of market. And those were literally the two things. Three things I wrote down were cashflow and it has to be real cashflow. We talk about the lot on the show, not the fake social media cashflow, actual take into account maintenance, repairs, CapEx, turnover costs, all that stuff, actual cashflow where you’re really not coming out of pocket. That has to be true. And value add has to be the way that you add appreciation right now because if you’re not getting the quote market appreciation where macro macroeconomics are basically doing the work for you, you have to do the work yourself during this time. And I guess the third thing I would say, just for me personally, is focusing on tax optimization too, which is still a good thing and still works really well in this type of climate, at least in my opinion. Is there anything else on that list you would add to?No, those actually really are, especially in the single family space, duplex, triplex, small multi space, those really are the key factors is having that cashflow. Cause you think about the real estate investing environment is like a body of water and if the body of water is carrying you downstream and you’re trying to get downstream, all you have to do is throw your boat in the water, hop in and enjoy the ride. And so that’s an appreciating market. And then you have markets that are stagnant markets, that’s like throwing your boat in a lake, you toss the boat in, you sit in it and you really don’t go anywhere. You don’t go forwards backwards or nothing unless you could row a few times and maybe gain a little bit and then you’ll have some momentum that’ll carry you for a few more yards, no problem. And then there’s markets where you’re just rowing upstream. You throw your boat in the water and you got to go upstream and you got to paddle like hell to get anywhere. And that’s kind of what these markets are. I mean, it doesn’t mean that it’s not a navigable waterway, it just means that you have to work harder to get to your destination.And which of those do you think we’re in right now and where do you think we’re heading residential market wise over the next couple of years?I think we’re in a mild upstream situation. I mean, you’re not in Whitewater Rapids trying to paddle up like a 2008, 7, 8 9, but you’ve got a little bit of current against you right now and that’s fine. Work hard, find a really good deal, fix it up, make it worth more, have some real cashflow as you said. Don’t forget about things like water heater replacements and furnaces that break down and just all that kind of stuff. And you can not only succeed in this business, you can scale and part of this is setting yourself up for what will come. I mean, I read something really interesting the other day that I think really rings true to this situation. When you talk about you don’t make your money in buy and wait, you make your money by being positioned, and that’s really what today would be is getting positioned so that when the market does make a move, you have assets that move along with it. Otherwise you’re out of the game and you’re just waiting on the sidelines and you’re watching everybody else pass you by.Right? Because right now, using your analogy, we could put our boat in the water and even if it’s a little bit more difficult than it would be if the current was going in our favor, then at least you have your boat in the water so when the current comes back, you’re not going to miss it. If you sit around and wait, there’s the chance that you would miss it.Yeah. Eventually a rainstorm comes and fills that river with water. The water starts running and it’s going somewhere and it’s going to take you someplace, and that’s what happens in the real estate market. Things change and the market starts appreciating and if you had a goal where you said, all right, even if it’s a modest goal, I’m going to buy one rental house a year and three years from now, the market just takes off. You’d have three rental houses that would go up substantially in value and could make you extraordinarily wealthy. I mean, it only took two rental properties for me that appreciated in value to do a 10 31 exchange into a 16 unit apartment building and then that went up in value and so on and so on, and sparked my multifamily career into over 4,000 units and hundreds of millions of dollars in real estate. It only takes a spark to light the fuse, but if you don’t have a fuse, then the spark is lighting nothing.Right? I think a lot about COVID in these types of scenarios because no one knew COVID was going to happen, but if you had boats in the water in 20 18, 20 19, which people don’t remember this, people were starting to say that the housing market was overpriced. The Fed started raising rates in 2018, people were saying it was the end of the cycle. No one knew that we were going to have three years of some of the fastest appreciation ever in the history of asset prices in this country. And that’s just having sort of the humility to admit that you don’t know when the market is going to do these things, but saying you sort of have to just have this trust in the long-term outcome that there are going to be these periods of growth and over time the averages will prevail, which is three or 4% appreciation a year. You just don’t know exactly which years those are going to come and how intense those years they might be.And that’s just why I talk about being positioned, right? Because if you have an asset base, when that market makes that move, you’re participating in the move, not watching it from the sidelines. The old saying that there’s people that make what happens, there’s people that watch what happens and there’s people that wonder what the hell happened. So you want to be the one that makes it happen.I do want to talk a little bit more about the strategy here and why people shouldn’t necessarily wait. Because I could imagine people are listening to this and thinking, yeah, this all makes sense, but I could just wait another year or two more years and be a little bit more sure about my decision. I admit I have those own thoughts myself, so I’d love to get your take on this, Brian, but we do have to take a quick break. We’ll be right back. Welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. I’m here with Brian Burke. Before the break, I was hoping to turn our conversation to market timing. We are sort of just talking about this right now and why people should considering dipping your toes and putting your boat in the water to continue Brian’s analogy, but I imagine there are a lot of people, myself included, who sometimes think, I’ll just sit this year out 2025. It’s too uncertain. Is it the time to do that? Because one of my favorite Brian Burke quotes is there’s a time to buy, there’s a time to sell, and there’s a time to sit on the beach. Is now a time to buy or is it time to sit on the beach?Well, I’ve been sitting on the beach for three and a half years.It sounds lovely.It is quite lovely. I’ve spent my share of time out there and we haven’t bought any real estate at all in three and a half years until I had a closing last week on some skilled nursing facilities, a strategy we’ve pivoted into, but in the multifamily space, single family space, I’ve been out. I think sitting on the sidelines has been the right choice for me, and I’ve managed to time a lot of market cycles and get in and get out at the right time. So I’m very thankful for maybe some luck, but really what I don’t see in the single family and small multifamily space is I don’t see a 2008 style crash ahead of us. Now, I will say that some markets have suffered dramatically. I was talking to a friend of mine who’s a home builder in Austin, Texas, and he’s told me that prices there are down over 30% from their peak, and he said they may have another 20% down leg to go, which would mean nearly a 50% price,20% down.Yeah, still. Wow. And soThat’s like, is it just because rents are falling or is the absorption really low?It’s both Rents are falling absorption low construction was high. The inward migration has slowed down to an extent. And so all of those factors colliding and happening right after a massive runup in prices post COVID has contributed to this slide of prices. And that’s a pretty massive slide, and it’s almost as deep as what we saw in the 2008, 2009 era, but most of that move is behind us. So you could wait it out in some markets if you still see that the market is falling, I’m not opposed at all to waiting it out or picking another market and buying somewhere where the bottoming is maybe a little bit more mature than it’s getting sung its legs underneath and starting to stand up a little bit. There’s no problem at all in waiting. The risk that you have in waiting of course, is if the market does move in a positive direction and you don’t have an asset base that you’ve built, you’re going to miss some of that move. And for some people that’s an intolerable risk. They’re like, I don’t want to miss any of it. Other people, they’re more risk averse, may say, I’ll give up a little bit of upside for a little more certainty of lack of downside. So waiting a year or so may be totally fine. A lot of people though are just waiting for lower interest rates and frankly, when lower interest rates come, that’s probably going to cause a rebounding in pricing and you could always buy now and refinance then.I know that’s kind of the thing, right? It’s like there is an element of market timing that is appealing, but also it’s just the affordability. It’s harder for people to buy right now with interest rates. And since prices haven’t really corrected and sounds like we’re have a similar opinion here that probably a correction is an order, but a crash unlikely. I’ve talked about a lot on the show, but just as a reminder, when you look at mortgage delinquency rates and the fact that people have so much equity in their houses, there are a lot of buffers against a crash that still exist today. And corrections like the one we might see over the next year or so are normal parts of the cycle. But previous times when we’ve had these types of corrections, we weren’t at 40 year lows of affordability. So that’s sort of the challenge here is I think people perhaps are waiting because they think things will get more affordable, but to your point, that might not materialize.If we have a decline in mortgage rates, then we might see prices go back up and that would offset any benefit to affordability that comes from lower mortgage rates. So this is kind of why I think you just dollar cost average, this is why Brian’s idea of just buying at a regular cadence, whether that’s once a year, once every two years, once every four years, whatever you can afford sort of makes the most sense because that’s just the humble approach to admitting you don’t know how to time the market, but you want to tie yourself to that long-term average of rising tides.Yeah, I mean I agree with that for the largest part of that, but I would add to that that it’s okay to introduce some elements of market timing to that cadence. There are times when it’s obvious that prices have gotten too high and that might be a good time to curb your buying back. And there are times when it’s obvious that the market is falling and you don’t want to catch a falling knife and it’s okay to sit on the beach. And then there are times when it’s much less clear exactly where the next move is going to be. And I think do you have to buy right now to get at the bottom? No, probably not. If you wanted to sit on the beach another six months and then dip your toes in, I think that’s perfectly reasonable. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. Would I say you want to wait five years? I think you’ll miss some of the upside.I totally agree, and you used my word here upside because I think that is what I’ve been talking to our audience here in the BiggerPockets podcast about recently and pretty much throughout the year, is that the way I think about deals right now is looking for base hits that are positioned, like you said, to capture the maximum amount of upside when the market turns around. And I think there are deals that I could do that fit those criteria today. There might be more of them in three months or six months, I don’t know. But I’m taking the approach that I’m going to keep my eyes open and know those criteria that I’m looking for. Like you said, it has to have cashflow, it has to have some value add opportunity. And if you listen to the show, you’ve heard some of the other upside or has Brian call that sort of positions that you can take to help you maximize or realize that. But at least the way I’m seeing deals right now is I’m starting to see those deals far more today than I have in a year or two at least. I don’t know how much you look at the residential market, but I just feel like we’re starting to see the tides turn and tip in the favor of better deal flow. And I don’t see why you wouldn’t at least keep your eyes open and start looking at those deals today.I think you nailed it with that statement right there is keeping your eyes open and looking for deals because right now in the single family market and in fact multifamily too right now, transaction velocity is way down. And I’m looking at some statistics that covers a variety of single family markets, probably about 30 or 40 markets. And on average since versus 2019, transaction velocity is down 25 point a 5% since last year it’s down 4.3%. So that hole, there’s fewer sellers, but there’s also fewer buyers. So there’s just less transaction velocity taking place. And this is single family statistics that I’m looking at. And so that means when you have these lower transaction volumes, you have more sellers that find themselves in positions where they have to sell for one reason or another. Life happens in, there are situations where people have to sell and that means their price has to meet the market and stimulate the demand because the demand isn’t there on its own.And what that spells is lower pricing and more better terms, the ability to negotiate more things in your favor than you would’ve had when somebody could list their house for sale at 8:00 AM and be an escrow by noon. There’s no deals to be had in those kinds of markets and we’ve been in one of those kinds of markets for quite some time and that tide has shifted. So if you think prices are going to come down a little bit more, my question would be is it possible to buy at that lower price today by finding the right deal in the right spot from the right seller in the right situation where you can then go in and make improvements to that property and bring its value up right away and then you don’t have to wait for the price to come down. You can kind of create that. Now.Completely agree. This idea of buying at a discount to recent comps is always a great idea. You always want to do it, but reality is in a strong seller’s market, we’ve been that is super hard to do. Yeah, good luck. We’ll just wait and get 17 more offersTomorrow. Absolutely.And that’s why so many people have turned to off market deals or direct to seller marketing over the last couple of years. That was the only way you could buy at a discount. I think that’s changing. I noticed I just bought a house primary residence, I’m going to renovate two weeks ago. I definitely bought it probably 10% below what it would’ve sold for six months ago. And I think that this is happening all over the place. You’re seeing things sit on the market longer and not everyone’s going to be able to do that. So I think that’s the key thing. You can’t go in and assume that every seller is going to budge on their price one ever or two at the point that you contact them. It’s sort of like, hey, you have to have the right seller at the right time to be able to negotiate those things.But the number of sellers that are going to be willing to at least have these conversations is going up and is probably going to continue going up. And that to me is a big opportunity as you go into these softer markets. If you’re paying attention and know your market really well, there are likely certain subsections of the market, certain price bands, certain asset classes, certain neighborhoods that are going to see the biggest declines like here in Washington state in the Seattle area, anything that’s around the median home price and lower is doing great. That’s still really good.Anything that’s actually super luxury, according to some agents I’ve talked to still doing well, it’s that band between the median home price and I have so much money, it doesn’t matter. That’s really getting hurt right now. I think this is probably happening in a lot of markets, but that will recover. So I think it’s just a matter of looking for these areas of weakness. There’s still great houses that are going to be in demand again, but if you can find those areas of weakness and secure assets that are just really good long-term assets, assets that you’re going to be proud of and excited to own for 10 to 20 years, this to me, and that’s just my strategy. It’s a good time to do that.Yeah, it’s absolutely true, and it goes right back to what we talked about at the opening of the show, about being positioned and positioning yourself in the market and doing it with smart acquisitions and buying at a good basis and making sure that you have that cashflow because as long as you do, if the market comes down another 5%, it kind of doesn’t matter. I mean, if you buy a dividend stock, do you really care if that’s going in your IRA account, you’re going to hold it for 50 years, do you really care that the value of the stock went down 5%? If you’re still getting your dividend, you really kind of don’t over time that value is going to go up. And so if you’re a smaller, newer investor just trying to break into this industry or trying to grow a very small portfolio into a little bit larger one, smart acquisitions with positive cash flow at a really good basis is never a bad idea except in the face of imminent market crash. And I don’t think that we’re there.We’ve talked about buying and holding onto your properties, but I want to ask you about the third part of the Brian Burke saying about there’s a time to buy, there’s a time to sell, there’s a time to sit on the beach. I want to talk to you a little bit about selling, but we do have to take a quick break. We’ll be right back. Welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. I’m here with Brian Burke. Brian, you’ve talked to us about acquisition strategy, buying good long-term cash flowing assets. I totally agree that this is the time to start looking for these things. You got to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. I don’t really understand what that analogy means to be honest. Signal through the noise, whatever you want to call it, find the good stuff among a lot of junk that might be in the market. But what about selling? Because if we’re entering a correction, I can imagine that it’s tempting for people to sell. I’ll tell you a little bit about what I’m doing, but how do you think about selling some or all of your portfolio in a time like this?Well, I think a lot of it really depends on what your portfolio composition is and what your goals are. If you have properties that you bought 20 years ago and they’ve gone up in value three or four X and you’ve got low leverage on them, your return on equity is probably extraordinarily low.And in that case, you need to increase your return on equity by either refinancing and taking cash out that you can reinvest, which isn’t really a great idea when you have seven or 8% interest rates or you need to sell and roll that capital into something that’s earning you a higher return. In that instance, I could get behind the concept of selling. If you’ve got property that isn’t really worth much more than you paid for it or maybe a little bit more and you think that you want to harvest some of that, this probably isn’t really the best time to do that unless you absolutely had to.Our mutual friend and my co-author on real estate by the numbers, Jay Scott came on the show and he said something that convinced me to sell a property. He said, in this kind of market, look at your portfolio and if there’s a property that you don’t want to own for the next three to five years, just sell it now. And I thought that was pretty good advice. I’m curious what you think about that, but I had this one property that it is been a good deal, but I think it’s kind of like maxed out. We’ve done the renovation, we’ve stabilized it, there’s a lot of equity in it, like you said, and it’s not getting me the best return on equity and in the market that I own this property and it’s still hot, it’s in the Midwest, it’s one of these markets where things are still up. And I’m kind of like, I’m going to sell this thing, not because it’s a bad deal, but because I think better deals are starting to materialize and I want to reposition my capital. I’m not taking money out of real estate. I’m selling something to put it back into real estate. What do you make of that kind of approach?Well, what I make of it is in part then you’re making an arbitrage play, right? Where you had a lower price property, you’ve improved, you’ve kind of gotten all the extra value out of it that you can and you’re selling to harvest that value and play that capture the arbitrage to reinvest the proceeds elsewhere, which fits into the same category or a similar category, the one I mentioned where you’ve got a property that’s appreciated, you’ve got a lot of equity and you’ve got a low return on equity. I think that that fits no matter what. If you have something that you’ve really kind of sucked the life out of and you can roll that into something else that you can buy it at a discount, let’s say, and repeat the process. I’m a big believer in buy, improve, sell, and then buy back down again, improve and sell. You can leverage your gains that way tremendously. I think that’s really good advice. The other kind of piece of that advice is the pain in the ass factor where you have this property that’s just a total thorn in your side. Maybe one property requires three times more of your time than 10 others combined. That’s a really good candidate for offloading as well. But those are, I think the main reasons why you would take that advice and sell is to improve your return on equity, play more arbitrage or just simplify your life a little.Yeah, the pain in the ass thing is really kind of important. I think it’s nice and freeing to curate your portfolio from time to time and just focus on the ones that you really want to own as a long-term buy and hold investor. I think as my career has gone on, I’ve really just come to love the properties that are low maintenance, even if they earn a little bit lower returns. I just think I’m at this point in my career, and I think most people get to this point in their career where they’re willing to trade a little bit of cashflow, a little bit of upside for that peace of mind. And this could be a good time to start to make a couple of those moves right now.Wait a minute. I thought investing in real estate was all about having less work and less things to do so that you could live the lifestyle of freedom. Are you saying that some of the properties actually require your time and effort and work?No, I have never worked on any of my properties, Brian. It’s just like it’s opening Robinhood and putting my money in a index fund. There are always properties, there’s always a property that’s a pain in the butt and there always seems to be one in your portfolio. I don’t have a huge portfolio. I have a modest one, but there always seems to be one or two that are squawking a little bit.Well never forget the life’s too short factor. You just don’t have time For the ones that are a real pain, slough those off, redeploy the capital into another asset that’s going to be less of a pain for you and ultimately you’ll be happier and live a more well-balanced life. And I think that has to play a role in this all too.Alright, well that’s super helpful. I want to go back to just a couple of other topics about risk mitigation. So the cashflow thing, we talked a little bit about not wanting to catch the volume. Nice. So you mentioned buying below market value, right? That when you can do that, that’s great cashflow, great value add, another way to mitigate risk. What about leverage right now and using debt? Would you adjust your strategy at all in how you financed acquisitions?Well, not in the single family space. I’ve always been a big believer on single family of doing 30 year fixed rate debt. It’s the most incredible financing available for any investment known in this universe that I’m aware of. There’s nothing better than the 30 year fully amortizing fixed rate mortgage. And I don’t think I would change my strategy of using that for my rental properties unless you’re using a 15 year that I like even better,Just left overall interest even though perhaps it will lower your cashflow,It will lower your cashflow, but it sets you up for retirement. So what I did when I first bought my rental properties, I did ’em all on 30 year fixed, and then about four or five years later, I refinanced ’em all on 15 year fixed. And within a couple years from now, almost all of ’em will be paid off in September. I’ve got my first one that I’m going to own free and clear and just fully amortized off of regular dead amortization and it’s going to be incredible cashflow at a time in life when I need it more. I mean, when you’re younger, yeah, you need the cashflow of course, but when you’re older you just don’t want to work for it as much. You’re trying to ease into retirement. So I think that makes a big difference. But I think leverage is a double-edged sword leverage.On one hand, I treat it like a loaded weapon, right? A loaded weapon can save your life or end your life depending upon how you use it. And so this in the financial sense is very similar in that too much or the wrong type of leverage can destroy your investment program. You can lose properties and foreclosure or you could become upside down and find yourself sucking up all of your earned income and floating your rental properties. You just don’t want to put yourself in that situation. But it can also amplify your returns and give you some incredible results. So I think if you can use more leverage and still have positive cashflow, real positive cashflow, then that is a real winner if you can pull that off now, it’s always a bit of a balancing act and it’s hard to do that unless you get at a really, really good price.That makes a lot of sense. Would you put more money down even if we were going to use these things to make it cashflow, because that was sort of the core pillar of your risk mitigation strategy? If you’re in that position,Yeah, if you’re in that position, great. If you’ve got a lot of capital already, then this is an investment strategy for you. And in that case, I would consider thinking about diversifying into passive income strategies. Maybe depending on the strategy, maybe not right now, but I would at least set money aside for more passive income opportunities through syndications and stuff. If you have a lot of wide capital base, maybe do some personal investing in the hard assets themselves as well to augment that strategy. But most kind of newer investors or starting out real estate investors don’t have a lot of cash to put a lot of big down payments down on a lot of real estate. Maybe a little bit, but not a lot. So I was a big believer in using a lot more leverage. And what I would do is I would just buy really undervalue and then I would use a lot of leverage. And then if you look at loan to market value, it was pretty darn good, but loan to purchase price was pretty darn aggressive. And as a beginning investor, that strategy worked really, really well for me.Yeah, I think that’s an excellent strategy and one that could probably work really well, but you obviously have to be in a position to be able to do that. So Brian, I think it sounds like we’re sort of in the same, have a similar point here, but just to recap for our audience here. Number one, it still can be a good time to buy, but there are risks right now and it makes sense to be looking for deals because there are going to be opportunities, but you need to sort of focus on some of these risk mitigation strategies, which are cashflow, being able to buying great assets, really being disciplined on your acquisition. Third was to look for value add opportunities and then of course being reasonable with your debt and your financing also makes sense. Did I miss anything there?No, just also I think the only other thing is pay attention to the broader market. Read the news of what’s going on, pay attention to the events that affect real estate and use that to guide your decision making. And that might mean where you invest, what type of property you invest in or when you make those investments or how you structure them. Don’t just blindly go out and just buy anything you can get your hands on anywhere. You can find it at any price that you can get it for. Be disciplined and recognize that this is a business that carries risk. And I will tell you it is a lot easier to lose a million dollars than it is to make a million dollars. So if you’re really paying attention and you treat this business with respect, it will be very good to you over the long term.Well said. Alright, well thank you so much for joining us again, Brian. We really appreciate your insights and your time.Thanks for having me here again.And thank you all so much for listening to this episode of the BiggerPockets podcast. I am Dave Meyer. We’ll see you next time.