Real Estate Investing Trends to Watch in 2020

That’s why in this podcast, what I wanted to do is to bring on an expert in her field that is out there. She works around the country. She knows the markets that you should be considering for your investing because that’s what she does. She teaches thousands of people across the country every year about single family investing and much more. With that, I want to invite on Kathy Fettke of Real Wealth Network. Kathy, thanks for coming on.

Kathy: Thanks so much for having me here.

Clint: That’s great. Why don’t you start out? Give everyone a little bit about your background and how you got to where you are today.

Kathy: It was probably almost 18 years ago—time flies—when my husband, Rich, was flying around the country with his new book called Extreme Success. We really were at the top of our game, we just bought a big house, and had two little kids.

Everything was going great, until it all came to a screeching halt when he went to the doctor and checked out on a freckle. As you know, he is a red-head. I don’t know how he knew that freckle needed to be checked because he’s got a lot of them. Turned out it was melanoma. After further tests, the doctor thought he had maybe six months to live because they thought it metastasized.

Thankfully, the doctor was wrong, and 18 years later, Rich is doing great today. But at that time I didn’t know, so I had to figure out how to take over the finances so he could take care of himself, and if the doctor is right, live his last six months without having to work.

I had a radio show at the time in San Francisco. I didn’t know anything about real estate, but I thought I’ll just use this radio show as a way for me to understand how some people seem to be able to live off passive income. It was something I didn’t know anything about. I wasn’t taught it. My parents didn’t do it. My dad made good money but he spent it, too. He was a dentist and what came in, went out, so he didn’t really know how to invest it. I just didn’t understand how some people could actually have money that makes money. I just felt like it was a foreign concept.

The radio show is called The Edge of the Time, changed it to The Real Wealth Show. I just wanted to interview people who were living off passive income. I also (at the time) found a sponsor to help pay for it all. He was a mortgage broker. So at the same time, I was learning the power of leverage to be able to acquire assets that create passive income. That’s The Real Wealth Show where I learned the secrets of the wealthy, basically.

At that time, Rich found out that you could take that radio show and put it on this new thing called iTunes, and suddenly, I had kind of a world-wide following overnight. It’s kind of crazy how the Internet opens things up like that.

Clint: I think Rich found out, too, that it was great. You can do all the work and I can sit back and do all the crazy stuff I’d like to do, like walk on wires, skydive out of helicopters that are upside-down. I’m not sure how he’s able to accomplish that, but anyway.

Kathy: He’s been on the X-Games, bungee jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. That is why I knew that a freckle problem wasn’t going to take him down. I’m really glad it didn’t. That would have been just a terrible way to go. He’d much rather just jump off a cliff.

Clint: Yeah. I imagine people can tell that by the way we’re talking. I’ve known Rich and Kathy now probably going on 8–10 years. They are a client of mine, so we’ve been working together. But really what attracted me to them initially when I reached out to them was this concept of buying properties and holding on them for cash flow.

So many people like to talk about flipping. I grew up in real estate investing. My father, an avid real estate investor, bought a lot of real estate for cash flow purposes. He still owns it today and that’s mailbox money. That’s his retirement right there. He retired at 50, and they have no wants. They’re living the lifestyle that they had envisioned for themselves during retirement.

That’s what I like about what you do so much. You give people that education and that ability to achieve that if they’re just able to get past their fears. You live in California. I live in Washington. We live on the coast and it’s tough to invest that here and make money, unless you own or put in what I always say “sweat equity.” So, growing up, Kathy, how did you figure out yourself that you got to go to other places? How did you do that?

Kathy: Well, you’re so lucky that you have a family that understood this concept. So many people don’t understand and it’s wonderful that you’re teaching it. I’m still glad I’m teaching it after finally getting to learn how the wealthy think. I remember my mom looked at her husband—my dad—and said, “We should buy a few houses and rent them out.” They were in Menlo Park near Stanford. They could buy houses for $50,000 back then. My dad was like, “Oh, Barbara, that’s crazy. Who’s going to take care of them?” So we had the means, just not the knowledge. I’d be a trust fund kid today if they had just listened to my mom.

Once I started interviewing people, finding out how they were doing it, how they were acquiring properties and maybe fixing them up for flipping, or living in them for two years and then buy another one, renting the old one out for three years, then being able to sell and get all the gain, there are just so many tricks to saving on taxes, being an anonymous owner of the property. These are all things I learned in the interviews on The Real Wealth Show back then.

One of the people I had on was Robert Kiyosaki. A lot of people know him, author of Rich Dad Poor Dad. If you haven’t read the book, go get it today. Read it, make your kids read it. It is a mindset changer for people. It did help me change the mindset from being an hourly worker—even if it’s your own business, you’re still trading time for dollars—to actually run a business or owning assets that produce income for you.

I got him on the show, it was a huge win, and it was at the time that I was still learning. We had our house, and we started renting out rooms and making income that way, but we don’t know anything about really building a portfolio because like you said, it was impossible. It’s too expensive in California. Not to mention the landlord laws are terrible.

Kiyosaki came on the show and he said, no, you don’t want to be buying in California. You would want to be selling in California. Well, why? He said because first of all, it doesn’t cash flow. Second of all, it’s already peaked. By 2007, they already knew that when the loans adjust, people won’t be able to make the payment. This was a known thing. The banks knew when these loans were going to adjust. People who really understood what was going on, understood the fundamentals of affordability and market cycles, knew to sell before 2007 in California.

Kiyosaki said he sold all his California holdings where he made a bunch of money, took that equity, and 1031 exchanged it to Texas properties where the values had not gone up. It wasn’t a bubble. If anything, it was undervalued there. It was just at the beginning of Texas being a magnet for business. They were attracting jobs, attracting population, but home prices hadn’t gone up.

It was from Kiyosaki that I learned you can really time this well. The whole country doesn’t operate as one real estate market; it is all these different real estate markets. You can time your investments within the different cycles. If you sold at the peak in California, you could exchange those properties—1031 deferred, not having to pay taxes until a much later date—for a bunch of properties in Texas.

Rich and I jumped on a plane and we’re like, if it’s good enough for Kiyosaki, it was good enough for us. We ended up buying five homes in one weekend, right outside of Dallas because that’s where most of the job growth is happening. Houston was good too, but the taxes were a little bit higher. In Austin, we couldn’t really use much cash flow, so Dallas just made sense.

We came home with five properties, I talked about it in The Real Wealth Show, and pretty soon our phones are ringing off the hook with people who wanted to know how we did it, who we worked with, and how we used property managers. It was really just kind of a trial and error process that got us investing out of state. But once we did it, and we showed people that we survived it, we could show the roadmap (basically) of how to do it, and that’s what we’ve been doing ever since.

Clint: That’s always the fear; investing out of state. Your parents, as you stated, didn’t, but if somebody’s parents had property like my father, it’s always local.

Kathy: Always. He probably liked tinkering around on it, fixing things.

Clint: He still does. I just talked to him today and he’s talking about a tenant that tried to file a restraining order against him so he can’t come in town to clean up the property because they’re basically treating it like a pig sty. He had to go to court. He enjoys that.

But what you said (I think) was interesting—you hear this a lot—is you need to buy in those markets that have good job growth that are on the uptrend. You bought up Dallas. (A) Would you invest in Dallas today? (B) How do you find those markets? It seems really simple but I wouldn’t know where to go and look for that.

Kathy: As I said, I learned from Kiyosaki, and then subsequently just doing it and learning. There are three things we look for. One is job growth. There was massive job growth in Texas. There was job growth in California, too, so they kind of balance each other. Then, population growth. There was a massive population growth in Texas, but there was in California, too. The third thing we look at besides job growth and population growth—both very important—is affordability. That was the one thing California didn’t have. So, following those three things led us to Texas, also led us to Florida, and other areas of the country where if you could get the job growth, the population growth and the affordability, you could cash flow.

But I’m a California girl, so cash flow alone is just not that exciting to me. I feel like once you have to repair something on the house, there goes all your cash flow. I also wanted to be in areas that have one more thing and that is some kind of infrastructure growth, whatever that would be that would potentially bring up the value of that area. If you got the city, or the state or business really investing in a certain area, there’s a good chance values are going to go up.

When we decided to buy in Texas, in Dallas, specifically, why did we choose this little area called Rockwell when there were a whole lot of cities surrounding Dallas. We chose Rockwell because it was on a lake, so very beautiful, but you have to drive around the lake to get to Dallas. It was like an hour of commute to get to work. People like living in nice places but they really hate sitting in traffic. Prices weren’t very high there because people don’t really want to make that commute. What we knew is that a new freeway is coming on below the lake that would make it a 20 minute commute to Dallas. That was the reason. So we had job growth, population growth, affordability and then we have this infrastructure investment in this freeway.

Anytime you can get ahead of something like that, you can make money. Those brand new little houses we bought for $140,000 in Rockwell, once that freeway went in and people saw, wow, I can live by a lake and have really good schools but only be 20 minutes from work, those houses today are worth $400,000 or so. At that time people would say, nothing ever happens in Texas. You’re never going to see appreciation. That’s just not true. You can find appreciation in any market if you get ahead of the growth. If you get in front of the path of the progress.

How do you find those places? At this point, people tell us because we’re pretty well-known for doing that. So people are like, hey, you got to check out what’s happening in Atlanta. Well, let me tell you what’s happening in Atlanta. I bet you didn’t know that Atlanta does an entire film industry there because it is so much cheaper to film there. There was like a mini Hollywood there just South of Atlanta.

There’s also a big tech hub and one of the largest airports. Now, the city is taking the old train tracks and kind of doing what they did to New York with the high line. They’re taking the train tracks and making it into beautiful park land, so I can assure you, everything around that is going to pop in value. That’s just one explanation.

You’ve got Florida now. That area between Tampa and Orlando is the fastest growing in the country. That has a lot to do with the fact that there is no state income tax but also massive job growth and lots of demographic shifts. This was already happening before the pandemic where people were leaving high-priced markets and able to work a little bit more remotely, live in a place that is more affordable but also has a lot of things to do. We already saw a massive, massive migration to the Southeast. After Corona hit, it has accelerated.

New York is losing people. I think it was like 500,000 people who moved out just during this pandemic. Add to it the fact that there has been social unrest in the cities. People are leaving. The same with San Francisco. They’re getting out. They were doing it already. But now it’s really accelerated into areas where people can raise their kids with a yard. If this is the new normal, they want to know that their kids can go outside and play because the parks are shut down.

We don’t know if this is going to happen again. I think a lot of people are concerned it could happen again or that it’s not going to be over. Maybe the vaccine comes out but it doesn’t work. We don’t know. People are realizing, well, gosh, I’m going to be working at home. I’m going to be homeschooling. If my entertainment is at home, I’m not going out and cooking at home. I’m going to have a bigger home. You’re not going to have that in the city, so they’re moving out.

We’re actually seeing—for the first time—people moving to rural areas. They’re just going. It’s like, hey, I want a second home where I can fish. Now they’re like, I just want to move there because I can live there and work remotely.

Real estate is booming across the board. Definitely big migration patterns quite in the southeast, but it’s really all over the country. It’s phenomenal what’s happening right now.

Clint: As an investor, I’ve seen it. How do you determine where are you going to dip your toe because there is a lot of price competition now? It’s driving up prices everywhere. If I want to generate strong passive income from my real estate and get that appreciation, what are you looking at yourself right now?

Kathy: On top of the things I just said—population growth, job growth, infrastructure development, and affordability—the main thing that has to be present before any of that matters to me is the landlord laws. Being here in California where I’m located, it’s crazy. It’s crazy land. To own rental property here is just dumb because for one, if you’re in the commercial space there’s talk about Prop 13 changing where taxes would go up on the commercial properties.

I just did an interview an hour ago with a site selection guy for corporations. They are not choosing California. You think it would be because of taxes or landlord laws or something It is Prop 13 where the taxes are going to go up. We were really lucky. When my dad was younger, and they own property, values went up so quickly.

He bought a house for $99,000. It was worth $1 million by the time I went through high school. Prices went up so fast, but then property taxes did too and it was pricing seniors out of housing. They couldn’t afford to live there. Basically, Prop 13 was passed where your property taxes would only go up incrementally every year. Very, very tiny amount and not along with the inflation of the property because the inflation was just too high in California.

That’s looking to be reversed at least on commercial properties. We don’t know if it will, but there’s a lot of talk about it. That means a lot of these commercial properties just are less interesting. Just again, businesses are not wanting to do business in California.

Clint: It comes down to the red state versus blue state. I’ve always told people if you can avoid blue states to invest in because of the fact that their landlord-tenant laws and their property taxes. Or even cities. Take Austin for example, which you brought up. The taxes there kill any profits you make in your properties.

I’ve looked at Austin before on different occasions, and I just couldn’t ever justify it. When you’re looking at the areas you’re going to invest in, how much of this factors in if you’re looking at the influx. Let’s say I wanted to buy property longer-term in Tallahassee, Florida, but I see a lot of people are moving there from New York. Does that then concern me? Because if they bring the same politics that created the problem in New York, for example, and made property taxes so high and landlord-tenant laws so egregious, they wanted to escape it, but they moved down to Tallahassee making the exact same thing over again that they did there, then that makes it less of an attractive environment. Does that ever factor in?

Kathy: Yeah. Let’s face it. Oregon and Washington, what’s happening is really our fault. It’s the only Californians that moved to Oregon and Washington For so many years, the locals were angry at Californians because we’d come with all our money and we drive prices up. Now if you own a home, then you loved us. If you were trying to buy one, you hated us because we’re driving prices out. And then, we brought our politics with us. Look, you guys are worse than Californians at this point.

Clint: I know. That seems like it’s horrible.

Kathy: And it didn’t used to be that way. It is possible that Californians will infect other areas. Oh, boy. Listeners might hate me for saying this, but unfortunately, it very well could happen. I know Texans are very concerned about that because so many California businesses have moved to Texas and they brought their California employees and their politics.

We’ll see. On the flip side of that, many people are fleeing those high-priced states that have been poorly run with trying to raise taxes every which way they can without reducing expenses, giving away freebies to those who maybe aren’t working and really not incentivizing those who are working. They’re leaving. My guess is that a lot of people who are fleeing the high tax states are doing so because they don’t like the high taxes, so hopefully, they don’t bring that part of politics.

Clint: Try to part with them. All right. Where would you invest? If somebody’s listening right now they’re thinking that, where should I be looking? What states? I know there are pockets in every state, but you do this on a day-in and day-out basis.

Kathy: A lot of people still really love Texas, Dallas, and parts of Houston because of the massive job growth and job diversification. It’s not dependent on oil anymore. In fact, we’ve had cheap oil and an oil crisis for five or six years now, and Houston, home prices haven’t actually gone up in that time. That’s just a testament to how Texas is no longer just dependent on the oil industry. It’s so diverse. Even though taxes are high, the cash flow is pretty good. Some people just like it for the safety of so much job diversification.

I really do like areas that have lower property taxes, so that is one of the reasons I like Florida because you’ve got some of the same things. You’ve got no state income tax, but you’ve got really cheap housing, combined with low insurance and low property taxes, so the cash flow is higher.

Parts of Alabama, same thing. Really low property taxes, really low state income taxes, and job growth, although not nearly the job growth we’re seeing in some other areas but still, it’s growing. Parts of Atlanta, although that has gotten more expensive.

What we’ve done at least in our fund, we have a single-family rental fund for people who just really want to be totally passive. They just did not want to be landlords at all. We do the management for them and the way that we bounced out the portfolio, and the way that we teach other people to do it, is to just diversify a little bit and maybe choose growth markets where you’re not going to get as much cash flow, but you probably get more appreciation, and then buy some really high cash flow properties in the Midwest, where there is job growth but you’re just probably never going to see a lot of appreciation.

In other words, we might buy 10 properties in Tampa, the Orlando area, or Cape Coral; some of these areas that are just booming. We might get a 5% or 6% return, so nothing mind-blowing, but we’re seeing massive appreciation.

Then we offset that with properties in Ohio or Kansas City, even Detroit, where we’re getting closer to 8% or 9% after financing cash flow, but not generally as much appreciation. At least we didn’t think so, but we’ve been getting it there, too. It’s amazing.

We were buying properties in Detroit for $60,000. They’re selling for $90,000 now just a few years later. Even in these areas that typically don’t appreciate, they are just because they’re so cheap. And there’s a lack of supply. That is the theme across the board. That after 2007 and 2008 when the housing market completely collapsed, builders got wiped out. They just froze for a few years, and they’ve taken a while to get back up and running because it takes a long time to build houses, buy land, get entitled and stuff. It took a long time for them to get back up and running and they’ve never gotten back to demand levels. We just are seeing a lack of supply across the board.

Add to it that a lot of homes have been used for Airbnb and vacation rentals, so this got taken off the market. We’re seeing more people going in and buying second homes, take those off the market. It’s just a real lack of supply, tremendous demand. The demand is for affordable and builders simply can’t build anything affordable. It’s just too hot. That lumber cost is one of 17% over the last few months, expect it to go under 45% or something, so material costs are going up. Builders just cannot build affordable housing. If you can find it and renovate it, it’s gold right now because it’s just not out there.

Clint: I know. We invest in the Winston-Salem area, and that’s the thing we run into is there are no properties available right now. We’ve decided that we’re buying land and we’re working with the city to get some breaks to provide affordable housing because we see that as our only option to continue to grow our portfolio. Whereas a couple of years ago when the home prices were down, we still had a supply problem in some areas.

We were thinking about building because when you look at your CapEx over five years, there’s no CapEx on the new property, so your returns got really close when you were buying an existing home and doing the remodel versus just building new. I think the market has been really strange right now, squirrely in that neither one seems to work as you stated.

Have you considered that even though the costs have gone up if you guys have looked at it with your own portfolios, doing any land acquisitions maybe? I know it’s off-topic what you normally do but if you suddenly decline and hold.

Kathy: No, we do.

Clint: You decline and hold on to it?

Kathy: Yeah. We’re building subdivisions in Carson City and Bozeman, but we’re selling retail because they don’t make sense as rentals. Although they’re starting to make a little bit more sense as rentals because rents are going up as well, but in those cases, I think we’re just selling retail. We are vetting right now. We’re looking at a built to rent community in and around Atlanta where the numbers work a little bit better, but it’s still in a 5%–6% arena.

The thing I do like about a build to rent community is that when the market turns, you can sell the homes one-off, whereas if you build an apartment, obviously, you’ve got to sell the whole apartment. Even that is in high demand. Housing is just the one industry right now that recovered almost immediately. We were so panicked in March. We’re like, what are we going to do? Everyone lost their jobs. How are they going to pay the rent? It was just terrifying.

We brought all of our property managers together, all 15 of them in different states, and said what are you going to do? We brainstormed ideas and it turns out the stimulus money came and people were able to pay their rent. Then the PPP loans came and people were able to pay the next rent.

What we found out as well is these people really don’t want to get evicted. There’s an eviction moratorium and they could just not pay the rent, but they’re not doing that they’re paying. We have a higher collection rate than at any time because the last thing they want is to not have a place to live right now. Your living situation has moved to the number one priority.

Even with all this stuff in place, with the eviction moratoriums, people are not doing that. They’re paying the rent, at least in our communities. It’s an interesting time too, it’s a very good time to be in the business. I thought we’d be done by now. I thought we would see a correction, but here’s the key and almost nobody talks about this because it’s not what you learn in economics and most people didn’t take economics classes.

We have such a manipulated economy so that anything that would make sense probably doesn’t. Anything that you would predict probably you can’t because all of it just all falls on what the Federal Reserve is going to do and what stimulus is there. That’s what it always comes down to. Are interest rates high? Are they low? Is there liquidity? Can people borrow money? That’s what matters.

The Fed came in a huge way to save the economy with a band-aid solution. This is not a permanent solution. It’s not necessarily a good solution, but it’s what they did and we have to pay attention to it. The Fed just printed trillions of dollars. They printed more money in the last few months and they did during the entire great recession over the years’ time.

They did it in just a few months over this Coronavirus. $4 trillion just in stimulus and the Fed did unlimited stimulus on loans. What loans? Real estate loans. That tells you something. That tells you that the federal government wanted the real estate to survive because when real estate survives, it has an incredible impact on the rest of the economy.

Massive trillions of dollars of stimulus that really went into real estate so that people could continue to borrow money cheaply so that they could buy homes and keep the market going. And that saved it. Without that, we’d be having a very different conversation today. When that much money pours into the economy, you’ve got massive, massive money supply.

When all that money is chasing a very limited number of assets that, like we said, there’s a lack of supply on the housing side that you’ve got so much money chasing it with cheap dollars, that’s what’s driving prices up. If we were talking in March, I would not have expected that. I didn’t think that the housing market would collapse like a lot of people thought because I knew there was a lack of supply. I didn’t think it would collapse, but I didn’t think we’d have bidding wars and prices going up just a few months later. It’s insane.

Clint: How about then with the COVID impact? You have people in houses. Do you think within the next six months because of the banks willing to provide abatements on mortgage payments for a while? When that turns off and people have started paying their mortgages again, do you think there’s going to be any issues there and you’re going to see more supply come on because people that don’t have a job to go back to, because the economy has shifted and we’ve changed how we’re conducting business?

Kathy: There will be an uptick of foreclosures. There’s no doubt about that. But do not rub your hands together and think, oh, boy, I’m going to go through another 2008 and pick up stuff for 10¢ on a $1. That’s not happening. I’m sorry to break it to you. There will be definitely a softening in the high-end because there was overbuilding already. This was already on the table, so many of these things that were already in momentum just accelerated.

There was already an overbuilding of overpriced condos in big cities. Way too many came online. Builders could only make a profit on the high-end. That’s what they build. There’s not the demand for it and now you add COVID. Nobody wants to live in a skyscraper downtown anymore. It’s not cool anymore. If you can’t go out and go to restaurants, use the fancy pool or the gym, or go get your hair done down the street, why are you living in the city paying those dollars for? It’s not fun.

Those are going empty. We’re going to see possibly some good pricing in those for people who maybe want them, but otherwise, we’re just seeing across the board the huge demand for anything else.

Clint: You have a podcast of your own and you do a number of other things. Could you just tell everybody what you have available for them? People are listening to what they can receive, and I’ve got everything in the show notes as well. If they want to get a hold of you or join your podcast, find out more information?

Kathy: Yeah. The podcast is called The Real Wealth Show which you can find anywhere where there are podcasts, and we also have realwealth.com is our website. We do free webinars every week to really educate people on where to buy, what to buy, and how to do it. We have teams across the country that will help you find a property, they’ll renovate it for you, they’ll put a tenant in.

It’s really hard to do that when you don’t live in the area. It’s really, really hard. You get ripped off. It’s hard to manage your contractors next door. I got one in the house right now. It’s hard anyway. We just have other people do that who are experts in their area. You can get those details and it’s all free at realwealth.com.

Clint: Great, thanks for coming on. I know you got a lot going on down there and I hope people take advantage of and get the education because knowing where to invest is so important. There are a lot of people out there that will say this market is great or that market is great. I knew I fell into that trap way back in the day and I lost money.

Kathy: Me too.

Clint: Yup. We all do it, but you’ve taken it, you’ve turned it into a way to help people, so thank you for doing that. Thanks for coming on.

Kathy: Thanks so much for having me here.

Clint: All right. Take care.

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