Hello and welcome to Passive Real Estate Investing. I'm your host, Marco Santarelli. Well, we are doing yet another market spotlight today. I think I have four in total on the agenda here for the two month period that we're covering. And Memphis has been, I've said this so many times on the show, Memphis has been kind of a perennial market for us. We've been in the Memphis market for practically 18 years, almost nonstop. So we've always had opportunity, an inventory there. It's a market that I actually really like. The numbers just pencil out and there's always opportunity. So I thought, wait, you know, we haven't done a, a market spotlight on Memphis for quite a while and we're due for one. So today I brought one of our great, fantastic property providers in the Memphis, Tennessee metro area. Robert, welcome to the show.

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Thank you, Marco. It's such a, an honor, a pleasure to be here. And of course I have to give it back to you. It's a thrill to be on the show as somebody who has not only partnered with Norada for many years now, but been a follower of your thought leadership when it comes to entrepreneurialship real estate investing, asset protection. It's a real thrill to get to sit down with you and spend some one-on-one time with your extraordinary leadership. And it's it's just, it's a dream of mine come true. So thank you for having me.

Oh, geez. Stop it. Come on, . You're, you're far too kind, Robert. I appreciate that. Well, let's have some fun today. This is unscripted casual conversation about, you know, what you're doing in the Memphis Metro about the Memphis Metro. Why should people invest there? What are the opportunities? I mean, we know there's opportunities. So let's kind of just start top down. I always like to start with the big picture, the market. So from a high level, why should I or anyone else be investing in the Memphis, Tennessee market?

That's a fantastic question. And you know, what I'll do is I'll tell you about my journey to Memphis briefly. Cuz I'm originally from Rochester, New York in the upstate area. You know, I did my undergraduate work at Syracuse. I taught for a while in the New York State system and got my master's degree also in New York. So when I came back here in 2000 I actually came in the educational space on a doctoral scholarship. It was amazing to me how inexpensive property prices were, how low the property taxes were, how low the cost of living was, and also the fact that the state of Tennessee has no income tax. And for me, as a young broke graduate student 23 years ago, you know, those were great factors. And I was like, wow, I can't believe that I ended up here. And over the years, as I got into the real estate space, of course, I, I, I bought my first house back in 98.

But as I got into the real estate space in Memphis in 2003, something that I found out, which you wouldn't know until you got into it, is that the rents here are extraordinarily high per square foot relative to the rest of the national average. And also over 50% of the population of Memphis are renters compared with about 27 and a half percent average kind of per capita major municipalities. So those things that impressed me as a young broke college student all speak to the current Memphis market today. We have seen a little bit of appreciation over the year. I think that that is a function of a strong Memphis market. I do think that has to do with some of the federal reserve's, quantitative easing policies, which, you know, we don't need to get into, but is driving all prices upward. But when you take that and you factor in some of the tremendous investment opportunities here, the cash flow that you can get when you leverage into conventional loans and the lenders help shoulder the burden o...