February 11, 2023 | Short-Term Rentals, Young Investors, Super Bowl Betting and When to File your Taxes

<p>Short-Term Rentals We've talked a lot about the affordability problems when buying a new home, but one area we haven't discussed as much is the real estate investor. The short-term rental craze I believe created new investors who thought it would be easy to make money in real estate. Looking at the numbers, in 2021 investors made up 24% of single-family homes and in the first half of 2022 that number was still around 22%. This compares with a range of 15-16% annually going back to 2012. Unfortunately, things have started to change in the short-term rental market. According to the Wall Street Journal, one investor in Encinitas was able to rent her 2-bedroom condo for $1,000 per night on a holiday weekend, but she has had to drop her rates to $275 per night due to waning demand. The problem is not the demand, but it comes from the oversupply in the market. In fact, nights stayed were up 21.3% in the month of October when compared to last year, but listings surged 23.3% during the same time frame with 66,000 new rental properties listed in the month of October alone. With rising interest rates and lower rental rates, it becomes a whole lot harder to justify an investment in these properties and some prior investors could become at risk of not being able to keep up with the cash flow required to maintain the house. I believe this will lead to less demand in the housing market and a potential source of supply if investors need to sell underperforming properties. These factors could help bring down home prices even more. Young Investors Young investors across the nation who experienced big losses in investing are now pulling away from investing in stocks. Goldman Sachs estimates households will pull as much as $100 billion in 2023 from the stock market. This will hurt companies like Robinhood who encouraged young traders to do a lot of trading. Back in March 2021 Robinhood had as many as 4 million trades per day, that has now fallen to about 1.2 million trades per day. I personally think this is a good thing, many