Hello my friends, and welcome to another episode of Passive Real Estate Investing. I'm your host, Marco Santorelli. So I've been doing this stream of market spotlights lately and it's great. The feedback has been wonderful. We've done, I think three different markets just in the last month and a half or two months. This might be the fourth, maybe the fifth, but fourth market spotlight that we're doing. One of the perennial markets that we've been in for a very long time is Birmingham, Alabama. It is a great market. There's a lot going on there. It's kinda like a hidden jewel in a way because a lot of people don't even think about it or talk about it much because it's not like a major metropolitan area. But we've had investors investing there for a long, long time with great success, very strong cap rates and cash on cash returns. It's still an affordable market. There's just a lot of great things to say about Birmingham. So I wanted to bring on one of our fantastic property providers to talk about the Birmingham Metro and what we have going on there and all the good stuff that they're doing.

FREE copy of The Ultimate Guide to Passive Real Estate Investing.

If you missed our last episode, be sure to listen to Client Spotlight with Cameron Anderson 

So with that, Stephanie, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

Well, it's great to have you on. It's been a while. In fact, we were just talking about this before we started recording. I, you were saying it was like four years or something like that bef since we had you on. Is that really true

? We'll have to go back and check, but I know it's been a while.

Yeah, it's, it's long overdue is basically what you're saying.

Yes, exactly.

. So I'm excited to share, I guess, this market with people because number one, we haven't talked about it for a while, so it, it's overdue. Second, it's just a market that has inventory on a regular basis, good inventory. The numbers really make sense and it's easy for even beginning investors or investors that don't have a lot of down payment capital or investment capital to get started with. So it's really a great market and friendly for everybody. Let's begin. I guess talking about the question I always ask first, and that is from a high level, why should I as an investor invest in Birmingham, Alabama?

reat question. So I'm a little partial. I'm a native. I was born and raised in Birmingham and I find it to be just an incredible place to raise a family. I have so many friends and family members here, so it's just overall it's a wonderful place to live, a wonderful place to raise my children. But at a high level, our GDP is nearly 30, I'm sorry, 63 billion and it's increased 29% over the last 10 years. We ranked 24th out of 288 cities with the lowest cost of living in the us. Our unemployment is only 2.5% when the national is around 4.6. Then we have an average household income of around 58,000 where the US average is 35. And finally we are 49% tenant occupied. So we always have a really steady pool of renters that are looking to occupy our properties. And we, I'll get into this more with you later, but we have a wonderful diversification when it comes to employment. So we're not dependent on one industry.

That's actually a, an interesting question about the economy. I'm not overly familiar with the Birmingham market. What are some of the major employers or what's driving the economy? I mean, you know, every, every market is broken down into different industries and some of them are very heavily focused on finance. Some of them are heavily focused on oil and gas, which, you know, that you could argue I guess Houston is to some degree, although it's gotten better over the years. What is making up the Birmingham economy, if you will? What makes up industry there?

Our number one employer is actually medical. So you know, that's not going anywhere. We also have a big presence of manufacturing,