Is the Rise of Remote Work Giving Real Estate Investors More Opportunities?

As more and more people work from home—a trend sped up by the pandemic—do real estate investors have more opportunities than before to invest in rental properties?

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

How would you look at that market?

How do you uncover whether remote work is giving you a better or worse opportunity to invest in real estate? Where would you start if you were to analyze that online?

Chase Leavitt

What we've been looking at here, flexjobs, and other websites... understanding major companies and what they're allowing, and then when you're researching that market... yes, you still want to look at the core jobs that are within that market but look a little bit further.

I think a good place to top my head is talking with other property managers, other rental community communities who are your tenants?

Who are your tenants? Where are they coming from? They're gonna know that and that's going to give you a good idea of Okay, there. A bunch of coming from California, Adobe, Amazon, whatever the case is, just look a little bit further.

And that's a good start.

Sherida Zenger

The city may have some information for you, as far as you know who's signing up for new utilities, they're not going to give you exact people's names, obviously. But they could say, Hey, we're having an increase in our population.

Well, what's bringing the people here? I think you can try to start to narrow that down a little bit. I think it's going to take a lot of time to figure out the trends of remote work, but I think it definitely is something that is starting to trend a little because

Steve Olson

You can tell if people are coming. But why are they coming? Right. And we've seen up in Boise, where we do a lot of work, its lifestyle, its affordability, although voice has just become astronomically expensive, compared to where it once was.

This is all a compared to what proposition. If you're coming from Portland or Seattle, Boise is still very, very affordable.

But I remember I pulled the costar reports for Fort Wayne because I wanted to see what was going on. And I saw a vacancy rate of like 2% and 16% YOY rent growth.

It doesn't tell me why or who but it says people are coming here, right? They're showing up, it's driving rents up.

So you can take that and you can say okay, they're definitely coming. Will they keep coming? Or what does that look like? Because I think that cities and counties and states do things that make people want to come. As you talk to the city, you find that out. I met with a couple of mayors and they talked about all the policies they had enacted. And you can kind of piece that together because it's just not enough anymore to look at the press releases of "so and so is bringing in 2000 new jobs."

That's great. But there might be a lot more that you're missing.

We don't have the exact solution there. But our intent is to bring something to everybody's attention about what you should think about when you consider a market for build-to-rent investing. Getting a picture of the job situation is a little more nuanced than it used to be.