Well, today I want to talk a little bit about Covid's impact on the rental market, both past, and future. I have a special guest coming on here in a couple of minutes, but I just wanted to touch upon it to a small degree, because this is really shaping housing trends and especially rental housing trends. You know, we are living in an environment right now where affordable housing in the US remains very, very low. In fact, most of the housing stock under the $200,000 price point, and I'm talking nationwide here makes up only 10% of the housing stock out there. So it's very difficult to actually find an investment property that usually makes sense at the 200,000 to $250,000 price point and below all the way down to 100,000 or so that housing stock only makes up about 10% of the market.

And it's diminishing the affordable housing in the US remains very low, almost historically low, actually potential homeowners have just been nervous because of COVID. You know, job security has been in question for many, many people, and they're not sure how that's going to unfold going into the new year 2021 and rental housing trends are now including more and more online and virtual type tours. And that's actually one of the main trends we're seeing virtual features become commonplace in terms of applications. Those are being signed online tours are not necessarily being done in person they're being done through virtual tours, video 360-degree tours, even full-featured facilities, such as, you know, larger a grade apartment complexes are bringing in virtual workouts and virtual exercise classes and even virtual wine tastings. It's just kind of crazy. And I know this doesn't apply to most of us listening to this because we're investing in single-family homes, duplexes, fourplexes, and whatnot.

But for those of you that are invested in apartments or syndicated large deals, I mean, those are the trends we're seeing. You know, another one of the trends that COVID has been pushing in terms of the rental market is the importance of location. The location has become less and less important, especially if you have the ability to be mobile or you're an open job seeker, and you're looking for a new opportunity. Well, the entire United States, in fact, the world is your oyster. You can go anywhere. And for many people they're able to work from anywhere. So you could live wherever you choose and work from wherever you want. And interestingly, more and more companies are actually allowing employees to work remotely through the technology that exists today, you know, be at Zoom or Skype. And, you know, obviously having a mobile phone and the laptop with an internet connection, a lot of work can be done remotely.

And we've seen this pretty much everywhere this year with large corporations that actually have call centers. The call centers have been either scaled back or closed, and people are actually taking phone calls and support calls from their homes. So this is just an ongoing trend. And I think it's going to roll back to some degree, but not entirely. And it'll be more and more commonplace to be able to work remotely from home or elsewhere. And this is also pretty true for cities that have large number of employees, very densely populated cities because a lot of people are either refusing or have a reluctance to actually being cooped up in very dense metropolitan areas where there's a whole bunch of other people, at least until the fears subside with everything going on with COVID and how that's just being perpetuated and propagated and whatnot. So location has become less important and we're seeing tech hubs all over the place, losing people to the suburbs and rents dropping in these cities like San Francisco, San Jose, and any other market that has a very densely populated downtown or central core where there's a lot of tech-related jobs because a lot of these tech jobs can be done remotely.