Jo Garner joins Aaron Ivey in discussing the current state of the mortgage industry and the opportunities for real estate investors, with the rise in non-traditional types of lending. How has the market changed compared to a year ago, with interest rates going up and house prices stabilizing? They note that there used to be a lot of competition from big hedge funds buying properties, but that has decreased, potentially presenting an opportunity for individual investors to purchase properties and create a positive cash flow. They discuss different types of loans, such as traditional financing and non-traditional financing. Traditional loans require a good credit score and typically a 20% down payment, while non-traditional loans, like the DSCR loan, focus on the rental income of the property and have less strict requirements. The non-traditional loans may have higher interest rates but allow for more flexibility, including buying properties under an LLC. Overall, the conversation highlights the changing mortgage landscape and the various financing options available to investors.

Aaron Ivey
0:00:06 – Well, hello and welcome back to the podcast. This is Aaron Ivey, principal broker and owner of Enterprise Property Management and EPM Real Estate. Today I’ve got with me Jo Garner, long time friend and consummate professional in the mortgage industry. Hello Jo.

Jo Garner
0:00:37 – Good morning Aaron. Thanks for having me on.

Aaron Ivey
0:00:38 – Well, absolutely. Thank you for coming on with us. Hopefully this is the first of many podcasts like this.

Jo Garner
0:00:41 – Good. Yes, I agree.

Aaron Ivey
0:00:43 – Yeah. So let me tell you a little bit about Jo. So she is a licensed mortgage officer for over 30 years and has been working in the Memphis market but also all around the country. She’s the host of Real Estate Mortgage Shop on iHeartRadio and the author of the book Choosing the Best Mortgage, The Quickest Way to the Life You Want. So Jo, I love talking to you. I’m so glad to have you on the podcast. For the listeners that are out there, Jo included me on her radio show.

Jo Garner
0:01:11 – Yeah, it’s been a while. We’ve got to get you back.

Aaron Ivey
0:01:13 – Yeah.

Aaron Ivey
0:01:14 – Oh, I’d love to come back. Absolutely. And she’s on iHeartRadio. Can we mention the station?

Jo Garner
0:01:18 – Yes, WREC, AM 600 WREC in Memphis, 92.1 FM in the Mid-South, and also on your iHeart app, the search for WREC all over the country.

Aaron Ivey
0:01:30 – Fantastic. And so one of the more interesting things that I’ve heard about Jo recently in the several years that I haven’t spoken to her about the radio show, first of all, everybody in our town knows her. WRC 600 AM has a cult following for Saturday mornings.

Jo Garner
0:01:47 – Yes, 9 o’clock. It’s called Real Estate Mortgage Shop. 9 o’clock central.

Aaron Ivey
0:01:51 – Jo is friends with all of the other radio hosts that are there on Saturday mornings on WRC. Anyway, so you get to hear radio shows about gardening. We get to hear radio shows about building and construction, and we get to hear a radio show with Jo about mortgage and lending.

Jo Garner
0:02:08 – I know it’s a lot of fun and it’s fun to do it with friends. So definitely was happy having you on and hope to have you back. It’s all about giving information that people can really use today. And hey, radio is such a powerful medium, Aaron, because you can tune in today or you can catch the podcast later You can hear what you want to hear when you want to hear it. It is plugging into Professionals who can help you make better decisions they can lead you around the The potholes and avoid some very expensive seminars you can really Get to from where you are to where you want to go by having just the right people on with you.

Aaron Ivey
0:02:51 – Absolutely, and you know, on your radio show, I’ve heard you speak to, oh my goodness, bankers, insurance agents, insurance agency owners. I’ve heard you speak with builders. I’ve heard you speak with just people in every aspect of the mortgage industry. And so one of the things that’s super interesting about you is that you are networked probably better than anybody else that I’ve ever met in this industry.

Jo Garner
0:03:16 – It’s a hobby, Aaron. It’s a hobby. I love to hang out with people who like to talk about things that interest me, which would be real estate and financing and investing, just like you.

Aaron Ivey
0:03:26 – Yeah, well that’s right. You and I are a lot alike. So today I just wanted to take a second and talk to you about our investors and the mortgage situation that they’re in right now. Obviously we are in the middle of 2023. And so for the last, I don’t know, nine months or so, the mortgage landscape has been very different from the landscape that we were experiencing for the previous five or six years. And so I was wondering if you could just help our investors just briefly understand where we are now as a comparison to say one year ago.

Jo Garner
0:03:59 – So we are in a different landscape and it’s just like when you get on a sailboat and you start to sail. You know where you are. You know where you want to go most of the time. And you’ve got to read the wind and you’ve got to read the waves. Reading the wind is looking at the market. What is the market overall doing today versus what it was then, I think is what you’re what kind of loan products, what kind of customer am I experiencing today? What can I, what resources can I use to get where I want to go? The market, the wind and the waves have definitely changed. Two years ago, we were in a very abnormal market where mortgage rates were just artificially low. I mean, we were looking at people buying homes to live in them. They were getting a 2.875 to 3% rate on a 30-year fixed rate to buy a home they wanted to live in. Investors were coming in in the fives on a 30-year fixed. Rents were going up 18% a year back in 2020 and into 2021. So you had a huge wide margin of profit there for investors. And that was a good thing, but it also presented challenges because we had a lack of inventory. You had a seller’s market, and you also two years, a year and a half ago, Erin, you had these hedge funds that were coming in and swooping up hundreds of homes, taking away the affordable housing inventory. What little we had, we were losing to huge hedge funds. Today, the profit line is skinnier, but it presents opportunities for investors who want to come in and they don’t want to just own a house for a year or two and then sell it like a stock. They want to invest in that property and create an income-producing vehicle for them to use, not just for a year, but maybe five years down the road or more. Now that the interest rates have gone up and house prices are beginning to stabilize, rents are still pretty high but we’re not seeing them go up 18 percent a year. And that’s a good thing too because you don’t want to price out your renters. But on the other hand, it’s really caused hedge funds coming in and buying 100 homes at a time. It’s caused them to wane on their appetite for doing this. So we’re not seeing that, at least in the Memphis market like we were two years ago. Where’s the opportunity? The opportunity is there for an investor, maybe from Memphis or maybe from another state, that want to come in and buy a property or two or ten that will create a positive cash flow for them and grow into that income. So that’s where the opportunity is. We don’t have the competition from these huge hedge funds today that we had two years ago.

Aaron Ivey
0:06:58 – Well, I mean, I think that’s a great thing. I can tell you that we experienced a lot of competition in the investor sales market during that boom time. In fact, there was so much competition specifically starting in late 20 and going all the way through to war and I guess the middle of 22 and of 22 so much competition and there was so much inflation and the actual cost of the real estate the acquiring of the real estate right all those things that our investor which is not a corporation it’s not a hedge fund we are working with normal people like you and me right you know who want to buy one house this year or maybe two houses this year or I’m working with an investor right now and you are working with the same guy. Yeah, who’s got some, you know, he’s got equity in his land where he lives and he’s wanting to somehow use that equity for investing here in Memphis. So the most amazing thing about being in this industry and I think you would agree with this is that even in markets like this there are people who need to buy real estate. They need to be able to take advantage of the fact that they’re sitting on cash or they’re sitting on equity or they may have just inherited cash or you know, so there’s an interest in optimizing how that cash behaves in the marketplace. One of the things that I often talk to investors about is how much money they need to put down on a property. A lot of investors, they, like you said, are in the buy and hold scenario. You know, they want to hold this house for let’s say 10 years. That’s their goal. For that investor, they’re often willing to put down more cash because it lowers their interest rate, it lowers their their indebtedness, and that’s what they want to do. I think the investor now more so than ever is looking to get in with the least amount of money down, which for an investor I’m assuming is still 20%?

Jo Garner
0:08:45 – It’s 15 to 20% depending on which product you use. Most people are going to put at least 20 percent down. Always say you can buy anything for nothing down if the numbers work. You just have to use a different loan secured on something else for that 20 percent. But it goes back to what’s going to give them a good capitalization rate. So it may be taking cash and putting 20 percent, 25 percent down.

Aaron Ivey
0:09:12 – Yeah. Well, I think right now, one of the things that we’re seeing is, and that we’re hearing from our investors, is that the cost of acquiring property, which includes the interest rate that you’re going to be paying out monthly, is so high along with the high cost of the properties themselves, right? Like they are valued higher now than they have been, I think, in American history. And so the margins for profit are very slim. You know, and so a lot of the investors that are speaking to me, they’re looking for different types of vehicles that are maybe cheaper to get into on the front end. And so one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the podcast is to talk about where those opportunities are in financing. Because if there’s anybody that can do in inventive or out of the box thinking, it’s you. And so I figured you’d be able to give us some ideas about you know what the current investment mortgages and then What some of the other products are that you are working with some of the ways that you’ve been very out of the box?

Jo Garner
0:10:12 – Well, there are two basic types of loans one of them is traditional financing The other one is non traditional outside the box as you said Aaron on Traditional financing for an investor you really need to have a pretty decent score. There are traditional investment products that will go as low as a 640, but you’re not going to get great terms on that. You need to try to keep your credit scores optimized at least 700, 740 or higher to get the decent terms. 20% down is the most popular 25% down payment. 15% occasionally if you’ve got somebody who just absolutely needs 15% down but you’re going to pay for it on the monthly side because you’re going to have private mortgage insurance. So 20% down, 25% down, traditional financing, income to debt ratios including the house where you’re living if you have a mortgage on that, your credit card minimum payments, car payments, and if you don’t have the house you’re buying rented it’s going to be the principal and interest taxes and insurance and association fee on that too. But those ratios need to stay no more than 45 to 49 percent. They’re going to sometimes I’ll get them accepted at 50 percent that ratio if they’re really clean. They have a lot of good reserve money that’s going to be left over after closing. So then you’re also looking at a whole different array of products, which I call non-traditional products. These have really gained traction, Erin, in the last two years because of all that we went through with the low rates and high demand on money, it became harder to qualify to buy a home on traditional financing two years ago simply because there was so much demand and there’s only so much money, right? That’s loosened up a little bit now, but non-traditional financing really gained ground. It’s still gaining ground, especially for people who want to buy and hold. And one of the most popular products that we’re seeing is we call it the DSCR loan, and that’s just an acronym that stands for debt coverage. All we do is look at the income on the house you’re buying. What is the house you’re buying renting for right now? If the lease amount per month is $3,000 a month then we want to make sure that your principal interest taxes and insurance with association fee does not exceed $3,000 a month or if it’s $2,000 a month we want to make sure the PITI doesn’t exceed $2,000 a month. So that one is so easy, so quick. We do have to verify your assets to make sure that you’ve got enough money to put down. The minimum down on that is around 20 percent. You’re going to get a better rate if you put down more money, but we have to verify those funds. We have to verify, we have to get your credit report. We need to make sure you’ve got good credit. We need to get a good title on the property. That property needs to be in good condition because on that particular loan product we’re going to do an appraisal interior exterior something think about that one is really good especially for self-employed they may control a lot of money but they don’t show a lot of profit so if you try to go traditional underwriters are going to shake their head and say you know this guy doesn’t make enough money to qualify for even half of what he’s going for. But we know they have the money, they control the money, they just have a really good tax accountant. That person, this debt coverage loan is really good for them. Also in that bracket are people who may own already 10 finance properties. Traditional financing, they have a limit on how many finance properties you can own, otherwise they’re not going to lend you anything. These non-traditional lenders have a lot wider berth for that. They don’t care if you own 10 or 15 finance properties. If you qualify based on the income on this property you’re buying right now and your mortgage payment is not going to exceed the amount of income you’re receiving, you’ve got good credit, you’ve got a good property, good title, you’ve got money, you’ve got a little war chest there. That is the perfect product for that person. It’s quick, a lot less verification on income.

Aaron Ivey
0:14:32 – Is there a difference with the rates that someone would spend on a traditional loan versus the DSCR?

Jo Garner
0:14:38 – Very good. You hit it right on the nail. Okay, on a non-traditional loan, let me give you an example. I’ve worked with clients who said, let’s compare a traditional versus a non-traditional loan. We did that. They’re paying on a traditional mortgage, they’re going to pay like 8%. They’re going to pay a couple or three points depending on their credit score, depending on what the loan to value is, loan amount. The non-traditional loan on the other hand, they’re going to pay probably nine and a half fixed rate. And the non-traditional loan for investment properties usually has a prepayment penalty on it for like one to three years. You can buy a point or so and buy out of that prepayment penalty, but these are buying holes. So most people don’t care about that. That one, again, it’s easy, it’s fast to get into they don’t have the restrictions on how many finance properties that person owns they can just go and go and go and acquire and acquire and acquire property using that program versus the traditional program I like both if you’ve got a first-time investor good credit 20% down they’re buying it in their own name not their LLC traditional will give you a lot lower interest rate, no prepayment penalty, a lot of pluses there. The other trend, Erin, that we’re seeing are people are risk-averse. They don’t want to own a house in their own name. They want to own it in an LLC to kind of give them at least one layer of protection from perceived liability. Traditional mortgages, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, they will not allow you to buy the house or refinance it in the name of an LLC. They’ll let you do it in a revocable trust, but not an LLC. Non-traditional loans, on the other hand, will allow you to buy and refinance properties in the name of an LLC. This is a huge plus for a lot of investors today.

Aaron Ivey
0:16:45 – So you said traditional will not allow an LLC. Is that correct? And the non-traditional will allow an LLC? So I’ve had investors that have purchased through LLCs in the past. Has that, has something changed or?

Jo Garner
0:16:57 – Yes, that is correct. Okay, so there was a recent change this year, and today is June the 2nd, 2023. There was a recent change a couple of months ago, and it was good and bad at the same time. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, if you were buying a home using hard money or maybe you just use an equity line on another house, let’s just say that you had an equity line on another house, you paid cash for this investment and you fixed it up. So now there’s no loan on that house and because you’ve got the equity line you use on a different house to buy that. So now you need to do a cash out so you can pay off your equity line on the other house, right? Well back in the old days Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac said well you got to own that house for six months before you can do a cash out if you want to get the full 75% of that higher value otherwise we’re just going to let you take out what you put into it the sales price basically. Well a lot of your small investors it may take them six months to fix up the house no problem and then they get 75% of that much higher value. They’re happy. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac came out this year and said, no, no, we’re going to change the rule. Now you have to have the house. You have to own the house. You have to wait 12 months. 12 months. Well, of course, the mortgage people are all taking this sigh, you know, like, oh, no, you know, that’s that’s just too long. But at the same time, they changed that rule and said, you have to own the house 12 months. They said but now We’re going to allow if you own a an LLC that’s on that property for 12 months We’re going to let you count the time that your LLC owned that property as long as when you refinance it It goes into your own name. Well That was good and bad for traditional mortgages. They did allow the time that your LLC owned the property to count in the seasoning, which they did not do before. On the other hand, they extended out the seasoning requirement from six months to 12 months on a cash out refinance. Let me say this though, Aaron. Most of my investors that I work with, what they do is they’ll go get a hard money loan, buy the house, the loan is now not secured on a HELOC on another house, but it’s secured on the house they bought. And they’ve included in the hard money loan some money for renovations. So when I refinance it, I don’t have to wait 12 months, because now we’re doing what we call a rate term refinance. In other words, we’re just going to pay off the loan that’s currently on there. It’s not a cash out anymore. So yes, it still has on traditional, they would still have to have the house in their name or convert it to their name. But they wouldn’t have to wait 12 months because now we’re paying off a hard money loan secured on that house that they bought and renovated and the hard money loan has the cost of repairs in it, it shows up on the closing disclosure. Rate term, no seasoning. That’s how we’re getting around the 12-month seasoning piece.

Aaron Ivey
0:20:06 – So that’s really incredible. I may have heard of some previous restrictions on refinancing a loan within, like, one to two years. Was that something that was more common? Or is that the same as a prepayment penalty? Like how would you –

Jo Garner
0:20:21 – You’re talking about prepayment penalties, like on nontraditional loans. You’re absolutely right on those some of those have two to three year prepayment penalties each year that you own the property and have that loan the prepayment penalty is reduced commiserately you know with the time that you’ve owned it and over that three year period after three years there’s no prepayment penalty that’s what you’re talking about on non-traditional loans traditional loans do not have the prepayment penalties that is a big plus for traditional.

Aaron Ivey
0:20:49 – That is cool, except for in the situation with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac. Right. We’ve moved now to a 12-month seasoning.

Jo Garner
0:20:56 – Right. And a lot of your non-traditional loans programs, some of them, they’re portfolio loans, so they each have different guidelines on those. So some of them have a three-month seasoning, some of them have a six-month, but I don’t know any of them that have a 12-month seasoning requirement for a cash-out refinance.

Aaron Ivey
0:21:17 – Since you brought up portfolio lending, can we talk about that really quick? Is that something that you have connections with as far as commercial lines of credit?

Jo Garner
0:21:25 – When you say commercial, though, let’s clarify what that means. The lending that I do is a residential mortgage loan originator. I do one-to-four unit residential properties. So we call them conventional at the mortgage desk. Got it. So we call them conventional at the mortgage desk because commercial sometimes gets confused with a little like a retail center or a warehouse and we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about residential properties, one to four units.

Aaron Ivey
0:21:52 – Understood. So I think specifically what I’m talking about is it’s a larger line of credit that investors are often able to obtain with a bank, usually a regional bank, and they’re able to use that as a lending,

Aaron Ivey
0:22:06 – you know, vehicle.

Jo Garner
0:22:07 – Yes, a war chest.

Aaron Ivey
0:22:08 – Yeah, a war chest for multiple properties. And so, are you able to assist investors in obtaining lines of credit like that?

Jo Garner
0:22:16 – I do have connections, as do you. Right. And that’s one advantage of working with somebody like you, Aaron, or somebody like me, because we already have those connectors of people who can help our investors get started building that war chest. We also call it credit line launching pads. Right. I love that. Because they’ll take the credit line, they’ll go buy a house for cash, fix it up, then they’re going to come back to me, they’re going to pay that off, and now they’re going to have it available to go do the next deal.

Aaron Ivey
0:22:46 – Yeah, that works. And again, just to your point really quickly before we move on Jo and I know a lot of the same people in this industry and One of the reasons why we have Jo on the podcast right now and not one of these other contacts is because Jo is so Accessible she you can clearly hear that She’s got so much knowledge and so much experience in the industry and she’s accessible and she’s an optimist And I love it And if you would like to connect with Jo you can reach her at her website, Jogarner.com, and that’s J O G A R N E R dot com, or you can call and text her at 901-482-0354. In later podcasts, we’ll talk about Jo’s views on interest rates, and we’ve mentioned the date earlier, here we are in the middle of 2023, we’ve got a ton of investors that are just, honestly Jo, they’ve given up. They’ve just said, you know what, we’ll do it next year. Because they’re wanting to use these traditional methods for financing real estate acquisition, but then they look at these interest rates and they think that it’s only about the interest rate. And they think that this is going to be this way for the rest of the year. You actually have a very unique perspective on where interest rates are going. Can you just touch on that just a little bit?

Jo Garner
0:24:04 – Well, I could be eating my hat.

Aaron Ivey
0:24:06 – Well, these are projections.

Jo Garner
0:24:10 – But I will tell you strongly believe that if we stay on the trajectory where we are now and again today we’re in the first part of June 2023. Erin, I believe that rates are going to go down by the end of the year and I have a number of reasons to believe that. First of all, mortgage rates are not tied to the Federal Reserve. They never have been. They move independently because they are strongly connected with the 10-year yield, the 10-year bond yield. Not all the time does it move with it. Most of the time it does. The bonds are moved by inflation. When inflation is high, bond markets don’t like it. They go up on their yields, try to keep people buying bonds instead of running to the stock market and other things. So they raise their yield. What happens when the 10-year bond yield goes up? Well, the prices on mortgages go up generally. Not 100 percent, but generally. As we see inflation come down, and the Fed is doing a lot of work to do that, as we know. up on their rate multiple times which has caused another problem with banks. So again, everything spins around the bond market. If we were just simply looking at inflation, we would already have much better rates right now, much better rates. But we’re also dealing with banks who are big buyers of bonds. And with the Fed going up as fast as they have, it’s put pressure on these banks. We’ve even seen bank failures. So what are banks doing? Not only have they stopped buying bonds, but they’ve started selling bonds in order to make up for the deposits that are bleeding out. Because people are afraid. They come in, they take their money out of the bank. Banks have got to put something back. So they’re selling bonds. What happens when you have massive selling of bonds? The bond market has to go up on the yield to attract other investors. When the bond market goes up on the yield, what happens to the rate? Mortgage rates go up. So that’s what we’ve seen. We’ve seen inflation coming down over the last couple of months, where normally you’d see mortgage rates come down, but they haven’t. They’ve gone up, you know, and finally over this past weekend, they began to put together a resolution for the debt ceiling banks began to take a sigh of relief this week and people started coming back in the bond market so mortgages went to a two-week low price immediately. Of course today you know BLS report comes out and inflation looks a little hotter so we’ve lost some of that not all of it so what I’m trying to tell you is this is the background of why I believe that rates are going to go down. Is this a good thing? Yes and no. Yes, because it’s going to cost us less to borrow. No, because we are sitting on a seesaw. Mortgage rates are at one end, home prices are on the other. Okay, let’s just remember our high school School Economics 101 first day we learned about supply and demand, right? Right. Okay, so we have a very limited supply of homes right now this year and we can’t build them fast enough. When mortgage rates go up, which we’ve seen them go up, demand starts to pull back. People are sitting on a fence. I don’t know. I don’t want to do this. I’ll wait till next year, just like you said. So demand goes down, mortgage rates go up, when demand goes down, what happens to house prices? They go down. So you’ve got mortgage rates sitting on one end of the seesaw, house prices on the other. Now you have mortgage rates start to go down like I think they will and if you lower, this is a proven statistic, if you lower mortgage rates 1% in this market, it is projected that you will suddenly have an influx of 5 million more homebuyers that have been over here sitting on the fence for the last few months. When you have that much influx of demand on a limited supply of homes, what happens to the price of homes?

Aaron Ivey
0:28:16 – It goes up.

Jo Garner
0:28:17 – The price of homes goes up. Mortgage rates go down, house prices go up. Mortgage prices go up, house prices go down. So we’re not really in a scary market, and this is my opinion, right now. I’m not talking about in the next three years. That’s another podcast. But right now, we are in a correction. We’re in a normal correction of the market. And what I’m trying to come to, Aaron, is what you said. People are sitting on the fence. I want to wait until mortgage rates go down. Do you really? Because you’re going to pay more for the house. Right. You want to wait for house prices to come down? Well, great. Mortgage rates are going up. So what are you gaining? Do it today.

Aaron Ivey
0:28:59 – Yeah, and you know, I feel like, and again this is just me being speculative, that between say 2015-16 all the way up through, you know, early 22, I feel like we saw an artificial depressing of interest rates and home prices, of course, they were going up, but there was not a consummate action on the part of whomever, the Fed, to raise those interest rates along with the cost of the pricing of the properties that were out there. So, I mean, yeah, there are a lot of people who bought a year ago and they got a great home. They may have overspent. A lot of people say, well, I feel like I overspent, but you know, it’s a beautiful home and it’s the home that I wanted and I got a great interest rate, right? So that makes them feel okay about spending so much on real estate. So we had a weirdness back, let’s say in, you know, 18, 19 to where it’s like, why are the interest rates are so low? This is free money. We knew all these investors were just out there purchasing because it just made so much sense. Investors could not believe how profitable it was on the buy for these properties. So that was weird, right? And now we’re moving into a period, like you said, we’re in the middle of a correction. So what I’m seeing and I think a lot of the normal people that are not mortgage and finance focused are seeing is, well, right now we’ve got interest rates that are high and we’ve got housing prices that are high. So I would assume that the market, I don’t know, like how does the market decide which comes down first? Because I feel like our seesaw is sort of stuck maybe in that middle.

Jo Garner
0:30:41 – You pose a very challenging question and you know, just to cut right through it, and I’m an investor too by the way, you can’t sit in the driveway, if you’re trying to go from point A to point B in your real estate investing, you can’t sit in your driveway in your car waiting so that all the lights will turn green by the time you leave the driveway. You just have to leave the driveway. You have to pull out, you have to start going, you’re gonna hit some red lights, you’re gonna hit a lot of green lights. And your GPS may say, hey, don’t take this road, take this other road, you’ll get there faster. You’re going to experience those kinds of things when you’re navigating your real estate investing, just like if you’re trying to go from one side of the town to the other. You know, I love buying real estate, but I think you need to get started. If you’re just going to be in the house for a year, and you know you’re going to sell the house in a year, well maybe you don’t. Maybe you need to sit on the fence if you think house prices are going to go down. Most people when they buy real estate, they buy it for five years, six years. From 1967 till December of 2022, home appreciation rates in the United States went up 867%. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to do the math. Over a period of time, you are going to have times when houses, prices may go down. But historically, your home prices are going to go up. So buy and hold is what I think the long game is for real estate investing, and you’re going to make money.

Aaron Ivey
0:32:11 – Buy and hold is what enterprise property management does best, and it’s what EPM Real Estate does best. We love to partner with our investors as they come in and they dream, and as they make money. I’ve got one investor that I just visited, we were talking about, came back yesterday from New York and so went and visited one of my investors there And he has had we’re coming up on I mean I guess 10 years 9 or 10 years of working with this particular investor, and we’re going to talk about him later We’ve spoken about him in previous episodes He has a vibrant portfolio of buying and selling and buying and selling as it benefits him over the course of his real estate investment timeframe, which right now looks like it’s going to be a lifelong timeframe. I believe that he’s going to actually, you know, leave a lot of these properties to his children. Having said that, there’s so much more that you can do once you’ve established that portfolio. So I agree with you so much that buy and hold is the way to go. Having a, you know, as large of a portfolio as you feel comfortable with, and even then, maybe forcing yourself to where you’re even a little bit more uncomfortable just so that you can take advantage of that opportunity. That is really the key in long-term investment in investment real estate. So I tell you what, I hate to do this, but I’m going to go ahead and close this out for today. There’s so much more that I want to ask you, and I feel like there’s so much more that you can tell us.

Jo Garner
0:33:34 – It’s been fun.

Aaron Ivey
0:33:35 – Good. Thank you so much for coming on. Our listeners are just going to have to wait until the next one. But just to remind everybody who’s listening, we’ve been speaking today with Jo Garner, a licensed mortgage officer for over 30 years, working here in the Memphis market. I could tell you more about her later, but here’s how to get in touch with her. If you want to talk to Jo directly, you can call or text her at 901-482-0354. Jo, it’s been an absolute pleasure.

Jo Garner
0:34:08 – Awesome. Thank you, Aaron.