Hello and welcome to another episode of Passive Real Estate Investing. I'm your host, Marco Santarelli, and this is the only and first show on passive real estate investing. I started this show back in 2015 and it's been a great success. We've got literally tens of thousands of listeners all around the world, mostly in North America. I get emails literally every week thanking me about the show, asking me questions. I respond to many of those questions via email. I keep some of them and I batch them together for the occasional Ask Marco episode. So if you have a question about real estate or real estate investing, or the economy or housing or investing in general, or even a personal question, by all means send it over. I will certainly consider it for the show and I do my best to respond to every single one of them.

But again, you know, like I started the show back in 2015, I aptly titled this show, Passive Real Estate Investing. Although it's not just about real estate investing, it's about investing in general and the economy and finance and money and currency and mindset and personal development. So I hope you enjoy the show and appreciate it. Remember to subscribe. It only takes you three seconds to subscribe to the show, whether it's on iTunes or Stitcher or anywhere else or even on YouTube. We're starting to slowly migrate all of this stuff onto YouTube. It'll take a little while, but we'll get it all there. And then ultimately it'll be a channel that mimics the show itself. But today it's another episode of housing trends and market updates. So with that, let's look at where we are with the economy, mortgage rates and the housing market in general.

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If you missed our last episode, be sure to listen to Start with Strategy (with Dave Meyer)

Let's also consider what to expect going forward with real estate prices and housing supply and demand, because that will impact you as a current or even future real estate investor. It's good to look at trends and the big picture, but you'll also want to keep an eye on your local markets that you invest in or markets that you're considering to invest in because you want to know what's going on in terms of housing trends and anything related to the market that may drive the market up or drive the market forward or maybe pull the market back. And of course, my team of investment counselors are here to help you if you ever want to take a deeper dive into anything. And everything that I talk about on this show, and there are so many different episodes, it's not just a mono color monotone type of show.

I talk about a lot of different topics. I try to mix it up, not too much, but I do mix it up. But if you want to talk to my team of investment counselors about anything I talk about on the show and take a deeper dive as it relates to your real estate investing goals or just real estate in general in an effort to help you because we feel that if we help you, you ultimately work with us and it's a win-win symbiotic relationship. But with that, let's jump in. So today I wanna start with a conversation about affordability, because this is something that's talked about in the media a lot. In fact, almost all the time it's certainly on your mind because affordability applies to your own housing as well as your customers, meaning your tenants that are buying into the, into the space you sell called a rental property, whether it's an apartment or a single family home or something in between.

It's really your product. It's the rental space, the housing, the living space that you provide. So affordability is still poor, but technically it isn't the worst it's ever been. Affordability, which is in our case here, defined as the median housing cost divided by 125% of the median income ratio. So in other words, what I'm saying is if you take the median housing cost and divide it by the median income of the people in that ...