5-Minute PRIME: Bite-Sized Investing Insights

Since August 2021 the S&P 500 is up about 70%. The typical American home is up about 19%. At the dinner table, that settles it: you should have bought the index.

It's the wrong comparison. A rental earns four ways, and a price chart shows one of them — without the loan that bought the house. Count all four on a typical 2021 rental and the index still comes out ahead, but by a fraction of what the price chart suggests. Then...

You have two complete applications for one Columbus rental. Your written rule says gross income of at least three times the rent. One applicant clears it at 3.09 times. The other, self-employed, sits at 2.70 times and misses it by five hundred dollars.

Then you run the line your listing never asked for. After rent and debt payments, the applicant who qualifies keeps $2,300 a month. The one who doesn't keeps $2,620. The first earns $...

In Houston, 4.3% of single-family homes listed for rent were listed for sale within the past three months. The owners tried to sell, couldn't, and became landlords instead. That share has tripled in three years, is more than double the 2.0% national rate, and is the highest of any metro in Zillow's data, as reported by the Houston Chronicle.

If you own a house you'd rather sell right now, the question is the same anywhere prices pea...

Across the biggest metros in the country, flat rent has two separate causes. One is a wave of new supply that the market absorbs and moves past. The other is a renter who is already paying 30% or more of their income to rent — and that one does not pass.

Where both hit at once, rent has barely moved in a year. And in eight of those metros, every one of them in Texas, Florida or Arizona, unemployment is now rising too. For an o...

Two weeks under contract cost you twenty-four basis points. The re-quote landed at 7.70%, and the payment on a $138,750 loan went up by $23 a month. That is the number you spent a week angry about.

It is not the number that decides anything. The same spreadsheet that shows the $23 increase also shows the property running $64 a month short — and $41 short at the rate you are mourning. The rate move made a negative number more n...

There is a warning every new investor hears within about a week of mentioning a cheap market out loud. You'll never be able to sell it. It gets delivered with total confidence, often by someone who has never owned there.

It is worth taking seriously, because the thing it is pointing at is real. There are markets where you buy in an afternoon and spend nine months getting out. It is just pointing at the wrong variable — and the...

A tenanted rental, priced at two hundred and forty thousand. The rent is real — someone is already paying it. The financing is lined up. And the lender's number comes back almost thirty-eight thousand dollars short of the asking price.

Nothing is wrong with the house. Nothing is wrong with the rent. What most investors do next is treat that gap as a verdict on the price — and it isn't one. Swap the financing program and ...

Every screening rule has a pass and a fail. Almost nobody asks what a pass is made of.

Run a rent-to-price screen across the country and a handful of markets clear it. They look like the answer — the one place the math still works. But the markets most likely to pass are small, and the smallest of them never reach the page at all: 157 metros carry a home-value index and no rent index, so they cannot produce a ratio and never e...

You wrote the criteria in June, and they worked. Eight or nine properties a week worth a second look. You passed on every one of them, which is what a screen is for.

Three weeks ago the same saved search started coming back empty. Not one line of the criteria had changed.

In this episode of the 5-Minute PRIME Podcast, host Martin Maxwell walks through the three options on the table and shows why the number that emptied the search i...

There is a version of the first-deal story that everybody tells. You fix your credit, you save the down payment, you get pre-approved, and the only thing left is finding the building. That story is missing a step.

On a three- or four-unit FHA purchase, the loan runs a second test — and it isn't about you. It's about whether the building's own rent can carry the payment. Your file can be spotless and the deal can still die on...

You are eleven days into diligence on a Florida rental and you have done the careful thing. You did not take the broker's word for the property tax. You pulled it off the county's own parcel page — $4,392 a year — and underwrote that.

The number is right. The county will bill exactly that. And it is still not your number.

In this episode of the 5-Minute PRIME Podcast, host Martin Maxwell walks through the three options ...

Two metros. One of them screens tenth-best in the country on rent-to-price. The other screens fifty-second. Run the same two through one more line — a line published by the federal government, free, for every county in America — and the tenth-place metro finishes forty-eighth, while the fifty-second finishes thirty-second and walks straight past it.

Nothing about either property changed. Neither rent moved. Neither pri...

The tenant handed back the keys on Tuesday. The unit is clean, structurally fine, and dated — original oak cabinets, a laminate counter, appliances from 2011. It rented at $1,350 against a metro median of $1,474, so you already know why it sat at the bottom of its comps.

Your contractor quotes $9,500 for a full kitchen: eighteen extra vacant days, and about $175 a month more in rent. Run the payback and it comes to 4.9 years...

A unit turn takes about a week of actual work. The unit sits empty for about a month. Almost every operator spends their energy on the week — chasing the contractor, arguing about the paint, checking whether the flooring crew showed up — and almost none of it on the other three weeks, which is where the money actually went.

The federal number says the average American rental is vacant about 7.3% of the time. Run that a...

The deal is real. The rent is real. And at 20% down the coverage ratio lands at 0.99 — fifty-four dollars a month short of the 1.00 the lender needs.

Fifty-four dollars. On a deal you have already underwritten, already toured, already talked yourself into. The gap is small enough to feel like a rounding error and large enough to stop the loan.

So you have three moves, and they are genuinely different bets. Bring 25% down in...

You get the quote on a Tuesday. A rate, a loan-to-value, a minimum ratio that looks easy to clear. Nothing in it is false. Six weeks later the terms that show up at closing are not the terms in that email — and no one lied to you.

Two lenders published documents this summer that explain exactly why. One publishes a marketing page advertising a minimum DSCR of 0.8, with a little dagger next to it, and says nothing at all abou...

You did three months of work on an Orlando rental. The job base checked out. The population trend checked out. The rent history checked out. You were two days from writing the offer — and then the headlines hit. "Orlando home prices are falling." "Sun Belt correction deepens."

So you check the number, and the number backs the headline. That same house was worth about $398,000 a year ago. Today it's $387,000. Eleven thousand d...

Half the country's home prices are falling — and the other half is quietly compounding. In June, 197 of the 895 metros we track were down year over year on price. The correction is real. It just isn't national.

The map also flipped. The metros falling hardest are the expensive ones everyone chased in 2021 — Austin, Naples, Denver, Tampa. The metros quietly rising are the cheap ones: Peoria up 7.4% at a $175,000 typical ...

You did everything right. You stopped screening on the metro median, you found the cheaper band, you drove the zip codes on a Saturday, and you found a duplex you'd actually live in. Two hundred sixty-five thousand dollars, two units, one of them yours.

And the math is good. Not "good if rents rise" — good today. The tenant covers twelve hundred fifty of a twenty-one ninety-five payment, which puts your housing cost at nine ...