Home Listing Prices Fall for 16th Straight Week (and It Could Keep Coming)

Dave:
New listings are growing, creating more inventory and opportunity for investors. A massive new housing bill makes its way through Congres and more and more agents are getting fed up and just quitting this business altogether. These are the headlines you should be paying attention to to grow your business and it’s what we’re diving into here on On the Market Today. I’m Dave Meyer alongside Kathy Fettke, Henry Washington, and James Dainard. Today we’re breaking down the latest signals in the housing market and what they mean for real world investing decisions over the next couple of weeks. This is On The Market. Let’s jump in. What’s up everyone? Welcome to On the Market. I’m here with Henry, Kathy, and James ready to break down today’s week’s headlines. Let’s just jump right into it today. James, you’ve got some story for us about some housing trends you’re seeing. Tell us about it.

James:
Yeah. I brought in an article from realtor.com and it’s really, it’s pretty broad. It’s the weekly housing trends. It kind of covers a broad range of what’s going on with the market right now. We got interest rates jumping around, inventory’s starting to increase. I think these are really good things for investors to always be paying attention to, especially as you’re doing dispose because you got to set your expectations right. But what this article talks about is the median listing price as of May was down 2.29%. So average prices fell 2.9%.

Dave:
Really? And

James:
This marked the 16th consecutive week of annual price decline in the 28th week flat down pricing.

Henry:
Wow.

James:
And so we’re on this slow, slow skid, but that also makes sense because we’re going into the summer months.That is to be expected. But the year over year, that’s a little bit more than I was thinking it was going to be because last year it was pretty slow at this time too.

Henry:
This

James:
Is when all the tariffs came out last year and it was like everything slowed down. Now we have the geopolitical stuff going on overseas, exact same feeling. But I would say this feels a lot worse than it felt even with the tariffs and the tariffs felt pretty bad. It’s like no one wants to make a decision. And with rates, I think are bouncing around a lot more than they were then. They were still moving last year, year over year, but this is getting pretty jumpy with the rates. So active inventory climb, 2.3% year over year as kind of more homes are coming on and less they’re selling. But the weird thing is right now we’re really active in the market. I got listings in all different price points and there’s definitely some sweet spots. And what I am seeing though is the stuff on the lower end of any market, doesn’t matter if it’s an expensive market or a more affordable market, that stuff flies off the shelf.
It’s gone.
But what I’m also seeing is a lot of canceled listings. Right now, showing velocity is really low. There’s not that many people looking in a variety of price points. I can tell you that much. Anywhere from our listings range from 400,000 all the way up to five million. Nothing’s getting a lot of showings in any of these price points, all different areas. But the more affordable stuff is clicking off in the first three to five days. The more expensive stuff, that’s where you’re really, really sitting. And so what’s happening is that the sellers are getting so freaked because they don’t get any showings and they’re canceling their listings. I’m seeing listings cancel at 14 days, 20 days. And they’re like, “You know what? It’s slow. Market’s not time to sell.” And so I feel like there’s a lot of FOMO sellers testing and pulling, which actually is not a bad thing when you’re going to dispo because it kind of takes inventory away from peoples and it actually makes people have a little bit of sense of urgency.
But inventory is starting to increase over and over and we’re definitely starting to see it. Pendings are down, absorption rates are down. And then the interesting is though year over year is homes only spent one day longer to sell on average days on market. I don’t know how that logically adds up.

Dave:
Maybe it’s just people are negotiating quicker. I feel like back in the day, you would probably wait 45, 60 days before you’re going to significantly lower your price. But now to your point, James, it’s like after two weeks, if you’re not getting a lot of traction, people are starting to freak out. So they might just take a low offer sooner. I don’t know. That’s the only way it makes sense to me.

Kathy:
I mean, you have got to price your property correctly. This is the time to be an excellent listing agent. You didn’t have to be a great listing agent over the past decade. You just put out a signpost, be higher than the last comp. Here you’d get multiple offers. It wasn’t that hard, but now you have to be an expert because buyers understand this. They see the headlines. They’re not stupid. They know that this is a buyer’s market. There’s a lot of inventory and they can negotiate. So you don’t want that. You don’t want a bunch of people trying to negotiate. So just price it right and that pricing it right does not mean you’re going to price it at the price it was two years ago. And that’s where so many people’s heads are at. Or even three months ago, three months ago when rates were lower, you might’ve had a little more flexibility on pricing, but not right now.
People are scared. You’ve got interest rates high. They’ve got to be able to add that in to the cost of what the lender’s going to look at, which is the costs. Can this person afford it? And so you better be able to price it right so that it adjusts for the higher mortgage rates. That’s the bottom line.

James:
There’s numerous reasons why some homes sell faster than others. And like Kathy just said, you got to have a good broker that can really break down your pockets and neighborhoods and be able to identify what your house is versus another property. Because if they can’t explain that to the buyer, it’s going to be a serious problem on getting them to pay what it’s worth because buyers a lot of times don’t know the quite difference between maybe a zip code or even what this street’s worth versus this street or what this pocket’s worth. And you really have to explain it. But like right now, things are still selling, but you have to separate yourself. And so I think a part of it too, like what we’re doing right now is we’re trying to build in a litle bit of extra budget upfront to throw in splash items to make it that, “Hey, this house has this and everything else doesn’t have this.
” Whether it’s an outdoor kitchen or it could be, we just installed this really cool wet bar for the show and we did this almost like rustic bar with fleeted glass and walnut cab. It’s like you got to make it to where you have a lasting impression when they’re leaving because buyers that are looking right now are serious, but they also have every excuse in the world not to buy that house. They’re looking for the reason not to buy and you have to solve that by either price, quality, or how do you separate that off? And so we’re spending a lot more time as we go into the summer months, even if we’re going over budget, we’re throwing an extra five, $10,000, which is like five to 10% of our budget at these houses to pop it up and just try to move them faster because the debt is really killing all the deals.

Kathy:
It’s just understanding a buyer’s market versus a seller’s market and people get so confused about the difference between those two. But when it’s a seller’s market, you have the power, you could just put your property on the market as is people weren’t even doing inspections when it was a frenzied market. It’s not like that today. It is a buyer’s market. The buyer has the power the seller has to submit. You have to really appeal to today’s buyer.

James:
And own your strategy. If you’re going to price your home heavy because it’s a unique property or it’s on a great location and it’s different than everything else, you might not sell in the first week, but don’t be that irrational emotional seller that’s like, cut the price after two weeks. If your home didn’t sell in two weeks, you either overprice it if you’re cutting it, but buyers look at that. They see the emotional drop and they’re like, “Oh, time to go get … There’s blood in the water.” And so if you don’t sell in the first two weeks and you push the price, own it because you’re just giving away money if you start cutting price that quickly.

Henry:
So if I’m hearing you guys correctly, you’re saying you need to hire an agent that is good at their job and knows what they’re doing. And then as the investor, you need to be good at your job and know what you’re doing. These

Dave:
Expectations are unreasonable, Henry. You know what?

Kathy:
Don’t hire your sister or your best friend because they just got licensed and you want to support them.

Henry:
My aunt just got their license. I have

Dave:
To use her. Well, actually, let’s talk about that in a minute because that is the article I was going to bring I want to talk about. So let’s get to that. But before we do, we’re talking a lot about selling. The other thing people should recognize is like days on market going up, the increased inventory, the increased new listings means there are going to be more deals. We’re talking a lot about the difficulty of selling, which is true, but these things work hand in hand, as Kathy said, they’re yin and yang and when it’s difficult to sell, it’s easy to buy. So I think that is an important thing to remember. You obviously want to buy deep and figure out and do the right things, but the idea that inventory is going up is encouraging to me. It’s still super low. It’s below pre-pandemic levels in most places.
Getting back to a normal amount of opportunities to look through as an investor to me is exciting. I’m happy about that. I will say though, given everything you just said, James, I don’t expect this to get better soon. I don’t know about you, but I’m not holding my breath that we’re going to see a big uptick in activity. When the war started, I said, I think pendings and total sales might go down this year, which is crazy because we’re at a super low level already. But it’s really hard for me to imagine demand picking up in the short term because rates are super volatile. Inflation came out yesterday, it’s accelerating. So Fed’s not going to come to anyone’s savior. The bond markets are kind of revolting. There’s new articles out about the savings rate in the United States is plummeting. Credit card delinquencies are going up.
It’s like all these things are happening. It’s hard to imagine demand going up except maybe from investors.That’s I think the one place where we might see activity is like investors typically buy in any kind of market and if sellers are willing to negotiate, that’s where I think the opportunities are going to lie. But I wouldn’t expect … I don’t know about you guys. I’m not holding my breath for a wholesale recovery anytime soon.

James:
No, not at least till Labor Day guys. Market sucks until Labor Day.

Dave:
Why Labor Day? Just seasonality?

James:
We always get a Joel. And that’s the thing. As you’re going to sell, know your markets. Where are the pops? I’m even holding on to a couple houses to list them right now and see if they work out this deal overseas to maybe drop some of the energy costs down. Maybe we get some relief there. Timing is really important. Labor Day always gets a jolt. You go dead time, labor day gets a pop and then right after Thanksgiving we get another pop and then it goes into slow, steady, dead till January. And know those market times, because if you’re trying to dispose something, you might want to hang onto it. Might make sense for two weeks, drop it at the right price, get the offers.

Dave:
All right, great topic here. This is something we got to watch because everything’s just changing. Inventory was down a month ago. Now what’s up? We’re just seeing everything change so rapidly. So we’ll obviously keep you all posted on the market, but expect a slow summer. I think that’s the main headline here for sales and for buyers, there’s going to be motivated sellers. Go

Henry:
Shopping. Keep an

Dave:
Eye out. Be patient. Go shopping. Exactly. But I was going to go last with my story today because you brought that up, Henry. I’m going to just go to my story here, which was an article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal today saying that real estate agents are quitting the industry right now because of that. Henry doesn’t need an article for this.

Henry:
Because it’s hard.

Dave:
Well, honestly, I was kind of surprised. They were like, agents are quitting during a slow market, which by the way, always happens.This is just kind of what happens. But they said that NAR, National Association of Realtors, has seen a decrease in their overall membership from 1.6 to 1.4 million in the last four years. And I was like, man, I would’ve thought more agents had quit by now. 200,000. In the last four years, this is the hardest four years since 2010 in 15 years. And most of these people aren’t doing deals anyway. We know this anyway, what is it? It’s like the 80 / 20 rule. 20% of agents do about 80% of the deals and NAR is expensive. You have to pay dues. So I’m just curious what you guys are seeing in terms of the quality of agents. Or James, Kathy, I know you are agents, Henry, you work with them all the time.
Who is succeeding? What kind of agents are doing well in this kind of market?

Henry:
Look, man, it’s hard out here in these investment streets for everything. But first and foremost, it doesn’t matter what the market is doing. You should be shopping and looking for a quality agent no matter what the market is doing because a quality agent is going to be worth more than the commission. You’re going to pay them for the deals that you’re going to do with them. But it’s absolutely the 80 20 rule. 20% of the agents are doing 80% of the deals. So you need to figure out who that 20% is. Yes.
And so my take on this is talk to title companies about who the repeat agents are, who are the agents who are doing volume, doing volume of deals who they see on a consistent basis and see if you can connect with them. They’d be happy to pass their names on because agents work on a referral basis. And so your title companies are going to see the same faces over and over again.That’s the person you want to start with talking to. Because you’re right. If you’re doing deals in this business as an agent, you are doing something right. Either you’re great at farming for leads, but it’s not just getting the lead. You’ve got to keep the business once you get it. You’ve got to serve your customer.
And most agents, I saw a stat recently that the majority of good agents business is repeat customers and repeat clients. In other words, they’re not going to be doing volume unless they have people who are coming back to them over and over again. And if they have people coming back over and over again, that means they’re good at their job. So once you find who these people are, then it’s our job to be able to ask the right questions. You need to know enough about the real estate market to ask your agent questions about the market, not just what’s the average days on market, but understanding list price to sale price ratio. What’s that trending at right now? What did it look like last year? How much inventory do we have on the market? What constitutes a buyer’s market and a seller’s market based on the amount of inventory we have on the market?
These aren’t questions that should throw a good agent for a loop. Most agents should be able to either answer them off the top of their head or be able to get back to you pretty quickly with that information. And then also asking your agent about strategies that are working to sell properties in this market. What ideas do they have about listing a property aggressively at a lower price point? One of the things that we do is we strategically undercut the competition, right? So we’re pulling the comps, we’re seeing what they’re listed at and we list lower and we try to make our property look better. What does that do for us? It guarantees us showings. And in any market, a good agent should be able to tell you how many showings it takes for you to get an offer on average. So if you can increase the amount of showings you get in a short period of time, you should by default increase offers in that amount of time.
In our market, it’s about nine showings to everyone offer. So if I can get 10 showings in the first couple of days, I pretty much guarantee air quotes, guarantee myself, getting an offer statistically. These are things your agent should be able to tell you. If you can’t have these kinds of conversations or they sound like they don’t know what you’re talking about, then you need to move on to the next one.

Dave:
Totally agree, Henry. And it’s a great time for people to reconsider and make sure that they’re working with a great agent who’s going to help them through this. I also just want to say to all the agents, I know we have a lot of agents who listen to this show. First and foremost, I’m sorry, it sucks out there. The market is really brutal for real estate agents. It stinks. It does. I mean, volume is down so much. It’s hard. There is a smaller pie for people to compete over, but you got to compete. As a real estate investor who works in multiple markets, the difference between some agents I work with and others is completely night and day. And I will just say the biggest difference between the ones I want to work with and choose to work with on a repeated basis and the others is just simple proactivity.
I will reach out to agents and I’ll have to keep asking them like, “What happened this month? Are you seeing anything?” They’ll put me on a drip feed that anyone can do, but I’ll send them too and be like, “Can you give me a write-up on those?” Whereas other people are selling me deals. They say, “Dave, I analyze this deal. Here’s an analysis of it. Here’s why I like it. Here’s the strategy you should use to go buy it. ” In other words, they’re just making it easy for me. That way I don’t have to look through the 40 listings that came up on Zillow this week. They’ve picked the two or three that they think are the most useful for me. That should just be standard in my opinion if you’re working with a real estate agent, but a lot of people don’t. I would say less than 20% of the agents I contact do something like that.
These are the opportunities you have to go out and sell yourself. And as an investor, you should expect that. And if you don’t get that, don’t work with that person.

Kathy:
It’s like being a small business owner. Every single real estate agent, you’re a small business owner. You need to know how to market yourself. You need to know how to go above and beyond to serve your clients and stand out, just like Dave said.

James:
You guys brokers in today’s market, here’s the questions you want to ask before you hire them. If they ask you what you want to sell the house for and they agree, go the other way. Brokers are supposed to be hired as professionals that give you honest communication and feedback.

Dave:
That’s an easy one. Yeah,

James:
That sounds great. And then you end up overpricing your home. You need honest communication. And sometimes a broker’s not going to tell you what you want to hear, but they’re telling you what you need to do to sell the house. And that’s based on experience, knowledge and what they’re doing. The next question I love to ask brokers is, what are you doing to sell the house? Because if they come up and they give me their packet and they go, “Look at my marketing thing. It goes into Zillow. It goes into realtor.” It’s like, who cares? It all does it. I could

Dave:
Do that. Yeah.

James:
In a market that’s flat, your broker needs to be proactive. Just like Dave was saying, with working the leads, if you want to get a deal done, be proactive, take care of your clients, but also you have to pick up the phone. Sales are done on communication. Selling properties is done by talking to people, getting a read and bringing things in. If your broker’s not calling people and they’re waiting for them to reach out, you have to have a proactive broker get rid of them, move on to the next one. If people can’t tell me tangibles of what you’re going to do to sell, then you’re just waiting for someone to throw an offer on and ask me how low I’ll go. I don’t need that. If someone’s not shooting you straight, this is not the market to be fluffy in. It’s a real market that has real issues.
If you don’t price correctly, make sure the broker doesn’t cause that because they’re too afraid of you.

Henry:
It is important because you have to think about it from a volume perspective. Less buyers. Buyers have more options, which means every single showing you get is crucial. It is crucial to you actually being profitable or making money or selling your property. So if you don’t take this seriously and you end up with a bad agent, you don’t just waste your time. Yo waste the good leads that you get when you first list. It is so much more important now than it has ever been.

Kathy:
Yeah. I want to say one more thing. Get someone local, y’all. What are you doing trying to get an agent that’s not from your area? I see this a lot. Maybe you look up a good agent in the area, but they need to be really an expert in your little neighborhood. Look for recent sales in the neighborhood where you’re trying to sell and see who did it. Because the other thing to think about is when you’re a listing agent, you have open houses and you’re collecting all these names of people are in the market. People are trying to buy and you’ve collected those names of local people. So get someone local who has listed locally, who has done sales locally and they already come with a very active list of buyers.

Dave:
All right. We got to take a break. We’ll be back with two more headlines right after this. Welcome back to On The Market. James, Kathy, Henry, and I are here discussing the latest headlines. We’ve talked about big picture trends in the housing market. We’ve talked about agents quitting the market. Let’s turn our attention to what’s going on in Washington. Henry, tell us about your story.

Henry:
Yes, I do have a story about the … Wait a second. I’ve got something coming in right now. Oh, I’ve got Destiny’s Child on the line. Destiny’s child. They are saying that due to the increase in gas prices, a man hanging from the passenger side of his best friend’s ride is no longer a scrub. He’s just a man making smart financial decisions.

Dave:
Henry, if you’re going to quote scrubs, it’s TLC, not Destiny’s Child.

Henry:
Oh, you’re right. Oh, you’re right. I screwed it up.

James:
It wasn’t Destiny’s Child put a ring on it or something like that. That was the other song, yes. They

Henry:
Did want to put a ring on it, but yes. But they would not have put a ring on a scrub, but now they might.

Dave:
I mean, man, our pop culture references suck.

Henry:
All right. The article I am bringing is really just a part two from last week. So we’re talking about the bipartisan housing bill that was introduced. It has now just cleared the house and it is headed to the president’s desk for a signature. The House passed an amended version of the 21st Century Road Housing Act 396 to 13. I’m curious who the 13 were and why they voted against it. I would just like to know that.
Yeah. So on May 20th, 2026, this happened. So the bill now has to go to the president for signature before becoming law. This is the most significant housing legislation in a long time and now we’re pretty close to it becoming law. So to recap, some of the things that are in this bill is the institutional investor ban, which isn’t truly a big deal anymore because they changed some of the language around it, but it restricts into trusonal investors who own 350 or more single family homes from buying additional homes. There’s not a lot of large institutional investors doing this right now anyway. So that’s not a huge deal, but there’s also provision for the build to rent. And this is probably one of the biggest things we talked about this last week. So now people who are building build to rent communities no longer have to sell those communities within five or seven years that can actually keep those communities as built to rent communities.

Dave:
Win for Kathy.

Henry:
Win for Kathy.

Dave:
I honestly think that’s a win everywhere. I think that just makes sense.

Henry:
I agree with you. There’s also FHA lending reforms. So you can now get an FHA loan for a mobile home that was much more difficult or you couldn’t do it before. So this plays into the affordability. People are assuming mobile homes are more affordable. People who are priced out of the stick built housing market may be able to afford a mobile home, but it was hard to get loans for mobile homes. So this helps people who are in that boat to be able to get FHA loans for mobile homes as well as reducing or lowering the amount that lenders can lend on a mortgage. Typically, it was hard to get a loan for a mortgage of under $100,000 and they’re lowering that rate, making it easier for people to access lending for homes that are sub $100,000. And yes, people, there are markets where there are homes.
Absolutely. It does exist. Under $100,000. I see the comments right now. It is a thing. So this is a big piece of legislation. It can provide some help in the market. Is this the pill that’s going to solve all the problems? Probably not. This bill doesn’t just directly lower mortgage rates. It doesn’t immediately lower home prices and it doesn’t force investors to sell their current holdings. It’s not this magic pill that’s going to make that’s going to add all this supply and just make homes and real estate more affordable. But there are some things that help to move the needle for some buyers. For people who have been complaining that the government is doing nothing to help with the housing market or affordability, this is not nothing. It’s something. It’s not the end all, be all, but it’s something that’s going to help some people.

Kathy:
Oh my gosh. I feel like with the mobile home financing, that’s going to just have mobile home parks just take off. I mean, I feel like prices are going to go up so much because of that, but we’ll see.

Dave:
I’m encouraged by this. I do not think it’s a magic pill. We’ve talked about this a little bit, but I am just happy in general to see the government start looking at supply side solutions to housing affordability. So much of it where they’re just juicing demand short term helps a litle bit, but then prices just go up and it’s unaffordable again in the long run. More supply is traditionally considered the right solution. I think there’s some good ideas here. I love the idea of streamlining manufactured homes and track homes. I think that’s a way … Construction costs have gone up so much. That’s like a way that you could realistically lower construction costs. I will say this though, I think it’s a step in the right direction. I’m just making this number up, but I would get venture bet that 75% or 80% of supply issues are actually local and state issues and not national issues.
100%. I do think that this is helpful in setting a precedent that we need to fix this, but it’s going to come down to what state and local governments do more than any of this to whether this actually gets fixed or where it gets fixed. Because some places will do it and it will get better and others won’t and it won’t get better. And that’s just unfortunately the way that this works in our country.

James:
Yeah. I feel like when I hear this stuff, it’s always like, oh yeah, this is a good sign, but does it matter? Because for example, you want to streamline mobile homes and mobile home permitting in mobile and park. You still got to go test the soil. You still got to go through whatever environmental regulation that is going on in that specific jurisdiction and everyone is different. And until they get on the same page, it’s all hopeful wishing,
But nothing’s happening.That’s the reality. I mean, it’s like the international building code versus a city’s building code. They can supersede each other and the city gets to say what it is. I’m dealing with a city right now where we’re doing a cosmetic renovation. I literally was getting boiling as we’re talking about this because I’m like, oh yeah, really? Maybe the federal government should call Mount Lake Terrace. It’s like because we’re doing a cosmetic renovation. No structural walls went away and yeah, the house looked bad. Of course it did. We bought it. It was covered in sticker bushes, all the bad things, but the inside gut structurally were fine. Because we spent more than $50,000 on this property, which this house is worth a million dollars. That’s not hard to do. We have to bury our power lines. It required our permits to sit there for four months.
And not only that, we had to seismic upgrade a house that had drywall already all over it. These requirements make investors go, “I’m never buying here again.” Because you can’t buy it cheap enough to make this work. We paid 575 grand for this house. It’s worth a million dollars. That’s a good spread. Until you buy in that city, spread is gone. And until they fix that,
Housing solutions will never happen.

Dave:
Yeah. I mean, another example just here in the Northwest, Seattle’s actually been pretty good about upzoning. They now allow every 5,000 square foot lot, you can subdivide into four parcels, sell them off, build them. That’s a good idea in my opinion.
But James, correct me if I’m wrong, there’s all these little things that they forget to do. The cost to subdivide the power, for example, is like $20,000.What homeowner is going to do that? Or just these little things, permitting costs went up to … I think they raised the permitting costs because multifamily construction’s down. It’s like there’s no cohesive effort. It’s like these individual things maybe make sense in one segment of the construction or the renovation process, but so many things have to come together to actually make this cheaper and more efficient. And it’s just unfortunately not the way American government It’s work. It’s so bureaucratic and siloed that it’s very difficult to actually make it a cohesive plan to actually make this easy for people.

James:
Yeah. And they look at it as a way to open a cookie jar to get money for other things. They’re like, “Oh, look at these developers, investors. They got permits. They need this. We’re going to add some extra fees on. ” We had the MHA fee, which was they’re taxing you basically 18 to $25 a square foot just to tax you for affordable housing. Where’s the money go? You know where it should go? They should take half of it and put it back into the city so they can hire more people so they can issue more permits faster. All they do is open the cookie jar, they eat all the cookies, leave you with crumbs and go, “Hey, build more.” It’s like, no, you eat the crumbs now. I’m getting fired right now. I want the

Dave:
Cookies.

James:
Yes. Yeah.

Dave:
And we all

James:
Want cookies. We got to share the cookies. That’s the thing.

Dave:
Yeah. I don’t want to poopoo it. I think there’s some interesting things in the provision. I think it could help a little bit. The benefits are going to take a while and they’re probably not going to be wholesale and they’re not going to be evenly distributed throughout the country. So I just want people to be cognizant of that. But hey, we got a bipartisan bill through Congress. Amazing. When was the last time that happened? Look at housing

Kathy:
Uniting the country.

Dave:
There you go. Something everyone agrees needs to be fixed. Affordable housing. Let’s go. We got to take one more quick break, but we’ll be back with one more story right after this. Welcome back to On the Market, Henry. Kathy, James, and I are here talking about headlines. Kathy, what do you got for us?

Kathy:
Mine is a Kiplinger story and it is states with the lowest property tax bills ranked by affordability. So I brought this article just because it’s so important for investors to look at all expenses before buying. A lot of times I’ll see people … I know it sounds like duh, but so many times I’ll see people just look at the 10% rule. They say, “I’m buying this house for $200,000. I should be making such and such amount of rent from that purchase price.” And they’re only looking at those things and that’s silly because what you also have are insurance costs. You have property tax rates. What about growth and depreciation? There’s so many things to look at. Are you even in an area that it’s rentable? So there’s much more to the equation. But again, one thing people don’t think about, especially when buying perhaps in a place like Texas, you might get a good deal on a property, but you better look at those property taxes.
So what would you say is the area that has the lowest property taxes?

Dave:
Oh, I think I know this actually. Is it Alabama?

Henry:
West Virginia.

Kathy:
Yep.

Dave:
Wow.

Kathy:
West Virginia’s number one.

Dave:
Oh, sorry. I was doing it by tax rate. I think Alabama’s the lowest tax rate, but that might just be because West Virginia property values are so low. That may be it. Is that why? Yeah,

Kathy:
That might be it.

Dave:
Okay.

Kathy:
Yeah. The lowest tax bill. So it’s funny because in California we actually have pretty low tax rates, but our tax bill is really high because

Dave:
Our prices are high. Your property values are so high.

Kathy:
So people kind of forget that. I’ll talk to California investors. They’ll go, “I can’t invest in say Texas because their property tax rate is 3% and mine’s under 1%.” It’s like, “Yeah, but you’re buying a much cheaper property in Texas. You got to look at the whole … You’ve just got to look at all the numbers to make sure you’re getting what you think you’re getting.” And again, it’s just kind of an overlooked thing. Seems obvious, right?

Dave:
I think that’s a really good point here, Kathy, because I think a lot of the rules of thumb that people have used for estimating cash or investing, they were already not great a couple years ago, but I think they’re becoming almost useless. Something like a rent to price ratio, it’s helpful a little bit, but rent to price misses everything about this. It misses everything about insurance and taxes and any other costs of ownership in those areas. And those are rapidly becoming or already have become sort of like the differentiator in what markets are doing well, what types of investments are doing well. I did a show a solo on the market show the other day just about where stress in the market is and it’s places where insurance is going up. It’s places where taxes are going up. It’s not based on the principle and interest of mortgage.
It’s almost entirely related now to these secondary costs of ownership. And so you can’t just wing it anymore.You have to do the full analysis, which by the way, goes from taking 30 seconds to an analyze a deal to three minutes to analyze a bill. So it’s not hard. It’s not too

Kathy:
Hard, especially with AI.

Dave:
Just do the extra math. It is really worth it. I admit, I never used to call an insurance broker when I was analyzing. No, me too. Now you got to. Now you need to. It used to be in Colorado, now I need to do it because I just need to know if I can get insurance. It’s not even the price. It’s like yes or no, can I get it? So anyway, sorry to cut you off, Kathy, but I just think this is a super important point about buying right now is that you got to look at the big picture.

Kathy:
I will say for Henry, guess what’s number three, Henry? Arkansas is number three of very articles of property taxes and costs on daily essentials.

Henry:
This is a timely article. As I’ve been doing research for these shows, I believe a few, this was probably a few months ago, I saw an article about there were several homeowners who kind of bought a home because they were on the cusp of affordability. If the interest rate would’ve been a half a point higher, they probably wouldn’t have been able to afford it. And what they found out was that after their taxes went up, after they bought their home, they couldn’t afford to own the home anymore and people were having to sell and sometimes taking a loss or find themselves in tough situations. Investors know this, but not a lot of normal homeowners known as you can contest your property taxes. If they increase your property taxes, you can call and contest them. And all you would need to do is say, I think it should be lower.
And here’s a couple of comps. Your agent can help you pull some of those comps. Sometimes you don’t even need to have the data. You can just call down there and say, “Hey, I feel like this is probably higher than it should be. ” And a lot of the times they’ll take a look and they may lower your taxes and it’s not that hard to do. And there are now companies who will do this for you. Now they’ll take a fee, which is a percentage of whatever decrease they get you, but if you don’t feel confident enough to have these conversations yourself, those services are out there. So just understand you don’t have to accept the tax increase they give you. You can call and contest it. They may say no and then you will have to accept it. But most of the time, I would say well over half of the times they will adjust your tax bill.

Dave:
That’s a great point, Henry. One other tip here for buyers is I’ve had to learn this over the last few years. I did not think about this for a long time. When you’re analyzing a deal, figure out how frequently taxes are assessed in the market that you are buying in. That’s a great point. Because sometimes you might look at the taxes and they’re low, but in certain states, taxes aren’t assessed. They’re assessed every five years.
So think about that. The last time they were assessed was like in 2001 and prices have probably gone up 30% and your tax bill might go up 30% in a couple of months after you own that. So it is just worth checking this out and just trying to … You can’t know exactly what they’re going to assess it at, but talk to an agent, see what percentage-wise they think things will be going up and just check that out because that can be a little bit surprising. In states where the tax rate is low, it probably won’t matter that much. But if you’re in a state like New Jersey or Texas or these Illinois states with super high two, 3% of assessed value, that’s going to matter.That’s going to matter to your cashflow. So just one other tip to check out to try and avoid falling into any traps.
All right, great job everyone. Thank you. This was a fun show. James, Kathy, Henry, thank you for being here. Thank you all so much for listening to this episode on The Market. We’ll see you next time.