Our tenants are working from home...

Clip from a recent episode of the Build-to-Rent Podcast. In this episode, we dove into recent economic shifts and what the increase in remote work has done to hurt/help real estate investors.

Watch the full episode, here: https://youtu.be/lHJQ1BVdPBk

Steve Olson

I remember, and this was in April, or maybe March of 2020. Some stuff was going on if you hadn't heard. And I had a fourplex under contract for an investor. And somebody needed to go do a walkthrough of this fourplex and get some pictures.

This is at the time where like, can you like to go to somebody else's house? Like if you go outside the Coronavirus is going to immediately kill you. Right? That's what people were kind of acting like because nobody really knew what this was at the time. And so the governor had just, we never had like a firm stay-at-home order in our market here in Utah.

The governor basically said you should do it. And most people did for a little while, and then we all got tired of it. In Utah, everybody has a bunch of kids, you're just not gonna stay in your house forever. It's not happening.

So I go to this fourplex. And I was thinking how's this COVID thing going to impact multifamily real estate. And I remember in three of the four units, one of them wasn't home, who knows where they were three of the four.

One of them, a woman was a nurse, she was doing telehealth, she had a desk set up in the kitchen, she was talking to some patient I heard more than I should have HIPAA, right. But she was going through this, this diagnosis, perfectly able to do it from home.

The next was a guy in tech of some kind, he was working at home, he had three monitors set up, he was dug in for the long haul. And the third one was another guy think he was in some kind of a sales job that could be done remotely and over the internet and phone and such.

I thought that's interesting. These people are gonna keep paying their rent, they're not barred from going to a job, they're not going to get laid off. It will be very interesting to see how these companies adapt.

You're gonna build some product, you're gonna rent it out. You're worried? Is it growing? Are there jobs? Do the tenants have a place to work? And in the past, we would say that economy is one-dimensional. It's not really growing.

With COVID, accelerating this remote work thing. Does this matter anymore?