Is Buying an Investment Property Still Worth It? The Investors Still Buying Have Changed Their Playbook

It wasn’t that long ago that the decision to buy an investment property was fairly straightforward: If you could do it, you should do it.“A few years ago, you could buy a property, benefit from rapidly rising rents, and watch the value appreciate almost immediately,” says Miltiadis Kastanis, a South Florida real estate agent and executive director of sales at Compass. But now, “that environment has changed.”Rents have fallen year over year for 38 straight months, mortgage rates are hovering in the mid-7% range, and the expenses that sit between a landlord and a profit—from insurance and property taxes to maintenance and repairs—have climbed in many markets.Given those headwinds, it isn't surprising that some investors have pulled back, purchasing 7% fewer homes than a year ago, according to the latest Investor Report from Realtor.com®.What’s more surprising, though, is how resilient investors remain compared with everybody else.While overall home sales and non-investor purchases were well below their 2017 to 2019 average in the first half of 2026—19.4% and 21.6%, respectively—investor purchases were still 4.2% above that benchmark.So what are investors doing differently?“The bigges...