How to Money · Friday, July 3, 2026
Joel and Matt note that current market conditions, including dramatically increased home prices and interest rates, coupled with historically low inventory, have made housing affordability the worst it's been in 40 years, according to the NAR. This makes it significantly harder to find profitable rental properties compared to a decade ago.
“And that's because home prices have gone up dramatically over the past few years, and interest rates have gone up in a major way over the past twelve months as well. We've talked about that last week. And inventory is essentially at all time loves as well, which is also keeping prices inflated. And so this means that housing affordability it's essentially the worst it's been in forty years. This is specifically coming from data from the NAR, the National Association of Realtors, And so that doesn't mean that becoming a real estate investor is impossible, but timing does matter a little bit.”
“The fact that there's very little supply, well, how many of those are actually going to make good rentals too? Because there's million dollar homes on the market that almost never make good rentals. It's usually the less expensive homes that make for a great rental property. And so when you're talking about a low supply, high demand, higher prices, higher interest rates, you just really are talking about like all of those factors kind of pushing against the likelihood that you're going to be able to find a great rental property exactly.”
“But today it's just gotten incredibly difficult to make the numbers work unless you're willing to take those more intense approaches like house hacking.”