Hello my friends. Welcome to another episode of Ask Marco on the Passive Real Estate Investing show. I hope you're all doing great. I can't believe it. October 31st is around the corner. Yes, Halloween is around the corner, and that means we are 10 months into the year with only two left, and 2023 will be another year behind us. It's amazing how fast time goes by and it just seems like as the days go by and as the weeks go by and as the years go by, time seems to go by faster and faster. And we all know that's not the case. Time is fixed for all of us. It goes by at the same rate and same pace.

It's just a perception of how fast time actually goes by. But in either case I hope you are having a great year and enjoying yourself and having a fruitful, successful investment portfolio under your belt, and you continue to build on that, and we're here to help you in any way we can.

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

If you missed our last episode, be sure to listen to Five Profit Centers That Make Real Estate the Most Powerful Investment 

So, you know, just a quick snapshot about the you know, the national stats, if you will. And I'll go into more detail about this in a future episode actually just around the corner. But you know, when you look at how things have progressed this year with rocketing mortgage rates and a bit of a cooling in most markets around the country, in some cases, more than a bit of a cooling, you know, we're still up year over year. If you look at current stats right now, and again, I don't like talking about real estate at a national level because I don't want to generalize real estate as being one national housing market because it, that doesn't exist.

All real estate is local and even hyperlocal, but you know, it's a metric. It's just like a thermometer. It's an indices. You just look at things holistically, but then you break it down into granular components and that's how you actually should be looking at real estate. But again, just putting your finger on the pulse of things, existing home sales nationally speaking is up a little bit. It's about three and a half to 4% year over year at this point in time being October, which is not bad. I mean, it's, it's not great, but it's certainly not bad. Employment has been relatively strong, it's come down, but it's still about 2.1% year over year as far as employment growth. New home supplies are still lagging even though they're up over 7% year over year. What's interesting is that we're still under 1 million permits being pulled so far this year when, you know, from listening to this podcast that we need closer to about 1.5 million to 1.7 million permits per year to provide enough housing inventory to keep up with the demand for housing.

So that means it's tight if you're a buyer or a homeowner looking for a, a place to live. But if you're an investor, the other side of the coin is the silver lining, and that is that the limited supply and the strong demand is actually pushing prices and rents up for you. So it's good if you're a landlord. So if you're on the equity train and you're in real estate, it's doing very well for you. But at the same time, if you're still looking for more inventory, it's a bit of a challenge because you're having to kind of fight that. Which leads to my next point. You know, the months of supply out there in terms of the resale market is still historically speaking and relatively speaking, very low. It's only about three and a half month’s worth of supply out there, meaning that if we didn't build one more new home today, we would only have about three month’s worth of inventory to keep up with the demand that we have.

So we would be out of inventory in three months, not a good thing. But overall, you know, many markets around the country have cooled off but are still overpriced. And again, you know, it's a relative term, but it is overpriced from historical standards.