Today I am talking to you from Salt Lake City. I'm in a hotel room. The acoustics are not that great. So hopefully that won't show up in this particular episode, but I'm here to do a video interview for a new series on money that's coming out soon. So that's tomorrow and I figured I would tackle one of the Ask Marco questions here in my inbox.

So, today's questions are from Brock and he says, thank you, Marco, for all the great information you provide with every podcast episode.

You're welcome.

I am working towards being able to do my first deal, working with Norada Real Estate. And I can't wait! My question, it may be a bit long, but feel free to cut it up as you see fit. What are the effects you have seen in the cashflow real estate markets from COVID-19 for example, does there seem to be less, more, or the same demand for cashflow homes, and what effects have been seen in home supply? Are there certain possible changes you are keeping an extra eye on or is it too soon to see concrete effects? I guess in short, do you see now as a better worse or the same as before time to start getting involved in turnkey investing because of the effects of COVID-19 on the country? Thanks again, Brock.





Okay. Brock. Well, great question. So I can kind of boil the answer down to this. There is just as good of a time to be acquiring rental property. Now, as there was a month ago, as there was six months ago, as there was 12 months ago, the fundamentals have not changed.

The underlying demand for housing is strong across the country. Even in some of the overpriced bubble markets, there is still a lack of supply keeping prices up or pushing prices up to levels of appreciation that are above 5 to 7%. Now we've seen a lot of that slow down this year and that's okay. We need some breathers, but that is predicted and expected to continue. So we are still going to see strong growth. And the bottom line is, is that we all need food, shelter, water, and clothing, and housing is just a fundamental necessity. We need a place to live. And a lot of the markets, especially the markets that we're in, have strong demand for housing. There's a lack of supply. And this whole thing with COVID-19 has actually perpetuated the problem because people who would normally move and sell their house, haven't, there's a lot of people who are still out there and more coming out of the woodwork that actually wants buy housing and rentals that are now out there looking for a property that can't find it because supply was low to start with and now it's even tighter.

So there's not as much inventory. In fact, in a lot of markets inventory is below two months' worth of supply, meaning that if there were no new inventory coming on the market, the existing demand for the housing in that particular market is going to dry up in two months or less. So fundamentals are strong and we are just not keeping up with putting new housing units on the market and to perpetuate that problem with COVID. So many contractors and builders had to basically put the brakes on for a prolonged period of time that they weren't actually out building a new product or renovating existing products to put new housing units out on the market. Now, from a tenant perspective, when I say tenant, I mean from a rental perspective, this is maybe not what you're asking, but maybe it is a, so I'm going to throw that in there, here, the country, as we are seeing is slowly beginning to reopen, you know, a lot of States and markets are now in, you know what, they're calling phase two and phase three of this reopening with COVID-19 pandemic, but there's still a lot of industries that are affected and experiencing economic effects.

And, you know, we still see shutdowns and slowdowns. The rental industry has remained active throughout this pandemic, a very active actually. And I'm going to give you a couple of stats here, but you know, we're still not out of this upset if you will.