Should I Buy a House Now or Wait Until 2026?

“Should IShould you buy real estate now or wait for home prices to fall? I’m going to break down all the factors you need to know to make more accurate price predictions, but I’m also going to explain why if you’re asking this question in the first place, you might actually be thinking about your investing all wrong. Hey everyone, it’s Dave Meyer. I’ve been a real estate investor pursuing financial freedom for 15 years and I’m the head of real estate investing at BiggerPockets. Thanks for being with us today. In this show, we’re going to tackle a big debate in the real estate investing industry market timing. That is should you try to time your acquisitions and sales perfectly to only buy when there’s great value and only to sell when prices are peaking. The idea of timing the market is pretty appealing, right? Who doesn’t want to buy low and sell high?
The problem is it’s much harder than it seems professionals get it wrong. Frequently the best stock investors get it wrong all the time. The best real estate investors don’t know exactly what’s going to happen to property values. I’m not going to lie. I do try and time the market a bit myself, but please remember that I am a professional housing market analyst and although my track record for both predictions and actual investment timing has been good, I am far from perfect and if you don’t want to do what I do and digest a ton of data and try and make your own forecast, you should make sure to subscribe to this channel because I put out housing market updates, which contain my best approximations of what’s going to happen each and every month. So make sure to stay tuned to those, but the reality is even for people like me who spend all this time examining this data, it’s super, super hard.
So back to the original question, should you buy real estate now or will market conditions be better in the future? We’re going to dive into this. On this episode we’re going to talk about how Zillow and Redfin’s recent predictions are that housing prices are going to fall and whether that means deals are going to be better in the near future than they are right now. Then I’m going to talk about this concept called dollar cost averaging because if you haven’t heard about this, it’s a super powerful tool you can use in your investing. It’s one I use myself and it helps because it makes you less reliant on trying to predict a very unpredictable housing market. And then at the end I’ll put it all together with my advice and how to use my home price predictions along with this idea of dollar cost averaging to make the best investing decisions possible for your portfolio.
Let’s jump into it. So first things first, I just want to explain forecasting is super difficult. I’m not going to get into all the nerdy data things, but just there’s so much to it. People like to simplify these things by saying, oh, it’s gone up for five years now it’s going to go down or it’s gone down, got to buy the dip and it’s going to go up. But we do have to understand this stuff because we can’t also just go into our investments blind. We have to be driven by some data and understanding of market conditions and I do think there is a lot of value in trying to think through what the most likely scenarios are going to be. So we’re going to do a little bit of that today too, but let’s talk for a minute about where we are today because it is a super interesting time in the housing market.
I’m recording this at the end of May. So prices on a national level as of today are still up, but the growth rate is slowing and it keeps coming down and I have said since back in November, I’m expecting prices by the end of 2025. I’m thinking will probably be in the flat two negative 3% by the end of this year, and I’m not the only one that thinks that there are a lot of pretty prominent forecasters right now who are saying the same thing. Zillow and Redfin have both downgraded their forecast. Zillow is saying that they’re expecting prices to be down about 2% by the end of the year. Redfin is saying 1% by the end of the year. They all have different methodology, but I think the important thing is most of the reputable forecasters are saying that prices are soft and on a national level are going to be going down.
So ideally you can sort of wait around for the bottom of prices, then you pounce when prices are at their lowest point. So you get to enjoy all of the equity growth and appreciation once prices start to rebound. It’s so simple. Fortunately it is not that easy. First and foremost are these forecasts can even be right. I told you I agree with them, but they forecasters are wrong plenty of times and even if they’re right, the question of when the bottom is going to be is super hard to answer. Just think about the great recession. So that really started, prices really started to drop in about 2007, 2008 I think was the biggest drop. If I asked you right now when the market bottom, I think a lot of people would say 2009 because I think that’s when the recession officially ended, but it was actually not until 2013 until the market officially bottomed in terms of housing prices, it took six years and during that time people were still buying and selling real estate.
I bought my first property during that time. It worked out really great even though the market still hadn’t officially bottomed and I think a lot of people probably waited nine years to jump back in and then they missed some appreciation in a six year period of decline. It is super hard to time now that six years is very unusual. Normally when prices drop, it is not six years. Just as an example, the last sort of blip we saw in housing prices in the early nineties before the great recession that only lasted about six quarters, so one and a half years and that’s more normal. Usually when you see housing prices drop, it’s a couple of quarters a year, maybe two, but still hard to time the bottom. Are we at the bottom? Are we going to see a bottom this year? I don’t know. Let’s just game this out for a minute.
I can see a scenario where affordability remains low either because the economy keeps growing and there’s no reason to drop rates or because we have a recession, but that combines with some inflation that gives us stagflation rates would probably stay high in that scenario and either of these scenarios where rates stay high, affordability is low, we’ll probably see prices decline modestly I think, but consistently for the next year or two. I can also see a scenario where a recession comes in the next six months, but inflation stays low and rates come down. Then perhaps Trump replaces Powell in May of 2026 and rates go even lower and then we start to see maybe the bottom is this winter and things really start growing in 26 and 27. We just don’t know sometimes timing the market and predicting the future is easy right now. It definitely is not.
So the question is then what do you do buy when prices are going down and they might fall further? For many, that seems scary or maybe they say, I’m going to just keep waiting, but you may miss the boat and just wind up waiting indefinitely. So what is the right sweet spot of trying to time the market? This segment is brought to you by simply the all-in-one CRM built for real estate investors. Automate your marketing, skip trace for free, send direct mail and connect with your leads all in one place. Head over tore simply.com/biggerpockets now to start your free trial and get 50% off your first month. We’re going to get into that right after this break. Stick with us. Welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. We are talking today about trying to time the market or really as we were talking about before the break, trying to time the market or really as we were talking about before the break, the sweet spot for trying to time the market.
As I said, we really don’t know what’s going to happen, but you also want to be informed and make decisions based on real live market conditions. So I want to introduce to you a framework right now called dollar cost averaging, and then I’ll bring this back around and talk about how you can combine our understanding of the housing market with this concept of dollar cost averaging to achieve that sweet spot or at least what I think is the sweet spot for trying to time the market. So dollar cost averaging, if you haven’t heard of this, it’s this concept that comes from the stock market, but the basic idea is that you continue to buy at regular intervals no matter what’s going on in the market. So just as a quick example, you might say that I’m going to invest $100 per month in the stock market no matter what, I’m just going to buy a index fund, I’m going to buy an ETF, the same one a hundred dollars first of the month all the time no matter what’s going on.
I like it because it does a couple things. First and foremost, it takes some of the thinking out of it, which I think is really stressful for a lot of people, and I do this too, but you kind of overthink these things. I definitely do that sometimes. So it takes some of the thinking out of it, but basically what it’s saying is over time, the stock market, and this is true of the housing market too, they just go up over time. Just look at the charts, the s and p 500, the Dow, the median home price on a property in the United States, they go up over time. And so if you buy at regular intervals, you’re basically saying, I just want to get at least the average growth over the long term because if you do that in the stock market or the housing market, you’re probably going to be pretty happy if you do that for a long period of time.
And so dollar cost averaging basically says, I’m going to just keep buying because I know over time all of my returns are going to average out to what the stock market achieves over a long period of time. And that is really good, and I think that doing this in real estate makes a lot of sense as well because property values, they just go up over time, even if there’s a blip and prices go down, like I think they probably are going to in the next six months year, maybe even up to two years. If you keep buying at regular intervals, sometimes you might pay a little too much. Sometimes you’re going to get a screaming hot deal, but on average you’re going to get a pretty good deal and you’re going to get a good return on your real estate. So for real estate investors, an example of this is maybe you buy a rental property every three years.
Maybe that’s how long it takes you to save up money. If you have more money, you might just say, I’m going to buy one rental property per year. I do this in a couple of different ways for syndications. I do one syndication passive investing deal every single year. I try and buy a rental property every year at this point, if not more, but I’ll get into different ways. You can work on your timing, but just as an example, just say you’re going to buy a rental property every three years. Sometimes you may pay a little more, sometimes you may pay a little less relative to the market, but over the long run you’re getting good deals and your property values are going to keep going up. I like this because first and foremost, as I said, it sort of reduces your timing risk. You don’t have to predict market highs and lows.
You don’t have to think as much about real estate cycles. The second thing is it captures that long-term growth, right? This is the key US residential real estate has historically appreciated three to 5% per year annually. That is awesome because three to 5% annually might not sound great, but when you’re leveraged, that could be a 12 to 15% return annually, and that is awesome. As an investor, I am super happy to hitch myself to the wagon of long-term US appreciation. To me, that’s one of the main reasons I am in this game and that’s why I don’t think as much about short-term fluctuations in the market and just buying assets that will at least capture that normal long-term growth in the market. And ideally some of them do better, some of them might do a little bit worth, but if I could just get that average, I am pretty happy.
The other thing about this is of course that rent also increases over time, which will further compound your returns. So another reason why just getting the average is good. Third, it also just build in some diversification because if you buy across different years, it spreads out your exposure to interest rate changes, economic cycles, market volatility, and I like all of that. This idea of dollar cost averaging I think really just goes back to a lot of the principles of the upside era and that I like to talk about on this show, which is first and foremost, if you buy a deal that’s good today, it’s going to get better over time. And when I’m talking about dollar cost averaging, I’m still going to buy with those upside error principles that I talk about a lot on the show, which are making sure that it is at least cash flowing by the end of year one, trying to get that 10% average annual return on investment by the end of year one and buying in a market with good fundamentals.
But if you can do that consistently, I think that’s actually more important than perfection. You don’t need to get every deal absolutely perfect. If you can follow those principles and do it consistently, you’re going to be better off. I think that need for perfection is going to hold a lot of people back from doing more deals and you’ll probably miss out on a lot more upswings in the market than you would if you’re just following these really solid, strong low risk principles and doing it consistently. The second thing is buying right now and buying consistently also helps you hedge inflation because you do this at different times in the market cycle. It also helps your experience to compound a little bit because if you wait 10 years between doing deals it, you might not learn as much as if you’re doing this consistently. And your cashflow also starts to compound over this time because even if your cashflow isn’t that good in year one, by the time you go to buy that second property, let’s say in year three or year four, your first property is probably generating some solid cashflow that point.
And if you just keep doing that over the course of 10 or 15 years, your cashflow is going to be very solid by the time you maybe want to retire or live more off of your investments. And what I’m talking about here doesn’t just work in theory. There’s actually been a lot of studies of dollar cost averaging, and the math just confirms what I’m saying here. Long-term holding strategies consistently show that they have better risk adjusted performance when compared to timing based approaches. This is true in the stock market. You’ve probably heard of this. There’s actually this funny anecdote that some of the best market performance for stock investors are people who are dead. And I know that sounds crazy, but they found out that people die and they don’t close their brokerage accounts and maybe it takes time for their family or next of kin or whatever to close their brokerage accounts and they do better because they don’t look at their portfolio and try and time it.
They just buy things and hold on. And that same thing is true when you do the math in real estate. If you actually just hold and enjoy and employ these buy and hold strategies on a consistent basis, they actually perform better than timing based approaches. Okay, so there’s my introduction to dollar cost averaging, but I want to bring this all back together because I am a data analyst. I do think looking at the housing market really does matter and what’s going on really does matter. So how do you sort of blend these two ideas of buying consistently and using this dollar cost averaging theory, but also taking into account what we know about the housing market? I’m going to get into that after this quick break, so stick with us. Welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. I’m here talking about market timing. The big question on everyone’s mind right now.
Should you wait, should you buy right now? So far, we’ve talked a little bit about what’s going on in the housing market, and I think prices are going to be declining a bit and softening, and that raises the question, should you try and negotiate a good deal now? Should you buy? Should you wait and try and time the bottom? Should you use dollar cost averaging? I will share with you now how I personally at least combine these two concepts of not overly obsessing about the market, but also using what we know to make informed decisions. So I obviously like the idea of dollar cost averaging because talking about it, I think it’s sort of the honest approach that we don’t know for certain what’s going to go on, and if you’re like me and buy into it, let’s talk a little bit about tactically how you can do this.
The concept of dollar cost averaging was really invented in the stock market in equities trading where buying can be more systematic, it is easier to just say, I’m going to put a hundred dollars aside and put it into the stock market every single week, every single month, whatever. That doesn’t really work as well in real estate because you need to save up a lot more capital. If you want to just go buy an index fund, you can do that instantly. I can do that in the next 15 seconds on Robinhood, but if I want to go buy a property, it might take me a couple of weeks, it could take me several months to identify the right deal. And so you sort of have to adapt the idea of dollar cost averaging to the real estate market. And I think there’s a couple of ways that you can do it.
The first is most similar to the stock market, which is timing based. So you buy a property every year or every two years or something like that. Like I said, that’s kind of how I go about syndications and passive investing. I target one of these per year because they’re fairly expensive and they’re long hold periods and they’re relatively risky. So I just want to do one of them per year. Another good way to do it, which is totally reasonable. And I think probably the more common way to do it is do it when I can afford it. Timeline. So you save up your money and as soon as you’re able to find a deal that meets your criteria, not just any deal, but you find a deal that meets your court criteria, that’s when you buy it at first. That might take one year, it might take you four years.
I waited four years between my first and second deal because I needed to save up money and find a deal that met my criteria. That’s okay. Over time, it will accelerate because you will enjoy the benefits of your early purchases. Again, one of the benefits of dollar cost averaging. And so you might speed that up. That’s another good way to do it. And the third way to do it is if you have a bunch of capital, you can just do it whenever you find a deal that meets a certain criteria. So any of these three ways is a form of dollar cost averaging. And again, the three ways are doing it on a time-based approach. So every two years doing it on a, when I can afford it approach, or anytime you find a deal that meets your criteria, you buy a deal. I think any of these work for dollar cost averaging in real estate.
So that’s step one, just figuring out what your approach is going to be to how to time your deals. The second thing is you really need to set that criteria because a key component of the real estate side of dollar cost averaging is that they have to meet your criteria. That problem doesn’t exist in the stock market because the stock is going to be the same if you buy some sort of index fund, it’s going to be relatively similar one year to the next. You don’t really have to evaluate that stock over and over and over again, especially if you’re doing an ETF or an index fund. But in real estate, there’s a lot of junk out there. You can’t just say, I’m going to buy any property this year. You have to buy a property that meets your criteria. And so I think that you should do this and ideally keep those criteria relatively similar from year to year, and you might need to adjust it a little bit.
We’ll talk about that in just a minute. But the idea is that you have a minimum standard that you need to hit to buy something so you don’t buy something that’s excessively risky or just going to be a bad deal. So just as an example, I talk about this upside era a lot on the show. I believe we are in a new era of real estate investing where we need to think really hard about what our criteria are going to be. And the ones that I have come up with that I use for my own personal investing are number one, they have to cashflow. And that is by the end of the first year. So I’m okay buying something that might have undervalued rents right now, but I know that after raising rents a little bit or renovating a property that it’s going to provide positive cashflow me for me by the end of year one.
That is a core requirement and criteria for me. The second is I need a 10% average annual return of investment by the end of year one, but I’m somewhat agnostic to where those returns come from. It’s some combination of cashflow, amortization appreciation, and tax benefits. If I’m getting a 10% annualized return, I’m happy about that. And I picked 10%. If you haven’t listened to the other shows, I picked 10% because on average, the stock market returns about 8% and stock market’s pretty passive. And in exchange for the work I do to manage my own real estate portfolio, I want at least a 2% premium on it in that first year. And knowing real estate, that premium’s only going to go up, but I like to start with a 10% average return. Third criteria, I also need to buy in a strong market with long-term fundamentals.
And lastly, it needs to have two or three upsides. And if you haven’t listened to other shows where I explain the concept of upsides, these are things like rapid rent growth or buying in the path of progress or zoning upside where you’re going to be able to add units or there’s great opportunity for value add. These are all upsides to take my deal from what is a 10% annualized return to hopefully making it a 15 or 20% annualized return over the lifetime of my whole. And this is where I think the market timing and the dollar cost averaging piece really start to converge. I plan to buy real estate in almost all market conditions. I bought when prices are going up, I’m going to keep buying this year. I’m actually closing on a property today, even though I said properties are going down, I literally just wired a check right before I recorded this podcast.
I’m still buying properties even during these market conditions because I believe in this dollar cost averaging approach. But what I do change is which upsides I’m looking for and targeting during a certain period of time. So for example, right now, I believe the idea of buying deep or walk-in equity or buying for great value, whatever you want to call it, is key. This idea, you’ve probably heard it called all these things, but it’s basically like we’re in a buyer’s market right now. That means there are more sellers than buyers, and that gives buyers the power to negotiate. And so when I am looking at what upsides I want in my deals, I want to buy a good two, three, 5% below what I think current market value is, because if prices come down another two or 3%, I’m protected in that scenario. Just as an example, the property I’m buying today, I’m buying it for 10, 15% lower than what it probably would’ve sold for, I don’t know, two or three months ago.
But the market here where I am is probably only one to 2% lower. So I feel pretty confident that even if the market goes down a couple percentage more, I’m still getting a good deal. So that is an example of why I’m willing to buy right now, but I’m looking for the specific walk-in equity or buying deep upsides in that deal. I also believe in rent growth right now, and I’m going to continue looking for that in my current deals. And value add investing in general is always an upside that I’m looking for. If I was just looking, if the market was going crazy and values were really going up, I would probably favor something like the path of progress upside over the walk-in equity upside. And so hopefully you can see this framework is very flexible, almost regardless of what type of market you’re in, you still, you have your criteria, but you change these little tactics that you’re looking at what kind of properties that you’re targeting based on current market conditions.
And I think that this way of thinking about market timing works for, I don’t know, like 80% of investors set a criteria, buy when you can or at a certain interval because we don’t know about what’s going to happen short term. But what we do know is that long-term gains in real estate investing are huge. And like I said, I do want to admit that I do try and time the market a little bit, but it’s maybe less of what you think. And it’s more about tactics, not if and when to buy. I’m not saying I’m not buying this year because X, Y, Z, or I’m not selling this year because X, Y, Z. I’m just saying I’m going to shift what kind of deals I’m going to buy. I’m going to shift what I might consider selling based on market conditions, but I still want to be transacting at a regular interval because that allows me to hitch my wagon to the long-term appreciation that has proven to be true over centuries in the United States.
So like I said, I’m still transacting this year, but I’m going to be a little bit more conservative. I’m mostly this year that my big move then I’m going to make this year is probably going to be into my primary house doing a major rehab on that. I’m going to try and drive up the A RVA lot. It’s kind of like a live and flip. I may not flip it. I might refinance it. We’ll see. But it’s a big investment that I’m making. I am also looking for multifamily deals. I see good inventory and numbers there. My overall criteria about those returns and numbers haven’t really changed, but the asset type that I am looking for is shifting a little bit. And that’s why I do think it’s silly to say you shouldn’t time the market because you do need to understand what’s going on in the market to make these tactical decisions.
And that’s the main reason that we talk about this stuff, why we do housing market updates on this show. That’s why we have our sister podcast on the market podcast because you should be making data-driven decisions. But my recommendation is to use that data to adjust your strategy, not to use it as a means for trying to time your acquisitions and dispositions absolutely perfectly. So those are my thoughts on timing the market. I would love to hear yours. If you’re listening on YouTube, definitely drop us a comment or let me know either on biggerpockets.com or you’re always free to message me or on Instagram where I’m at, the data deli. Thank you all so much for listening to this episode of the BiggerPockets Podcast. We’ll see you next time.