Real Estate Investing Update: Current State of the Market, Market Predictions and Strategies During Downturn

What is the current state of the real estate market and is there a recession coming up? What are some investment strategies for healthy investments? Jeremy Roll, president of Roll Investment Group, shares his knowledge.

Read this entire interview here: https://tinyurl.com/ykutphd6

What do you think is the state of the market now? What's on your mind in terms of the economy and your investments?

On the economic side, one of two dominoes has fallen that is going to impact investors in general: 1) interest rates spiked up which caused a lot of other domino effects and a huge adjustment in prices. When there's a 20 or 30% price adjustment in the stock market, everybody calls it a crash. I've not heard anybody call it a crash but that's factually what's happened here on the real estate prices. Some assets have gone down more, and some have gone down a little less, but on average is 15 to 30%. And I think that's domino number one. 2) The domino that I am still waiting for is a recession that I think is a very high probability based on macro data. And then when you get that, you would typically have a stock market crash. Unfortunately, this time around, there's a direct correlation between the length and an inversion of the yield curve, and how long that goes for, which is at a record right now. If you were to chart it out, which I've seen and I've done, it implies a 45 to 50% stock market crash, which even when I say that I can't picture it, but that's what theoretically should be happening, taking history and applying it to today in terms of the length of inversion.

I'm bracing for a very major second domino to fall and not a lot of people are talking about. A lot of people are talking about interest rate cuts, I'm expecting at least one and possibly two before the end of the year. But I think what a lot of people tend to forget is that the reason why they cut rates is because there is a recession or a recession is about to happen and the economy is doing bad. It's not just randomly happening.

We had some interesting data today. They released the CPI data, it was -0.1 month over month and it was at 3.0% over a year, that's the regular CPI. The core CPI was at about 0.1%, I think 3.4 but it's trending down. There's a very high probability that it's going to continue to trend down because 43% of the CPI is comprised of what they call the owners’ equivalent rent, which is a highly likely 18-to-24-month lag indicator of rents. The CPI number has been overinflated for a long time.

How many deals do you have right now under your belt? And how are they doing?

I'm highly diversified because I have been doing it full-time for so many years. I'm currently in over 60 active LLCs, and I've been in over 150 to 200+ over the past 22 years. They're all different because some of them are from the 2000 era and some of them are from last year, or even this year. One thing that I think was very important is I didn't invest in any floating rate bridge loan deals, which was very difficult to not do because in 2020 to 2023, let's say, literally 90%+ of anything I got was that. If you wanted to invest in anything, it almost always had to be that, but it didn't match with my bucket, which I typically look for a 10-year fixed rate loan long term because I'm looking for predictable cash flow. I sidestep that so I'm not dealing with any of that, thankfully, although a lot of people are and I feel horrible about what's going on right now.

Jeremy Roll

jroll@rollinvestments.com