Showdown of The Century (Round 6): Investing in Big Cities vs Small Towns
In this episode, Tom and Emil battle it out in the hotly debated question of whether to invest in a big city or in a small town.
---
Transcript
Michael:
Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Remote Real Estate Investor. I'm Michael Albaum and today I'm joined by my co hosts,
Tom:
Tom Schneider
Emil:
and Emil Shour
Michael:
And today we're gonna be having another showdown episode, we're gonna be doing big city versus small town, which do we like better for our remote real estate investing. So let's get into it.
Real quick before we get into it, I ate pizza for dinner last night, and it was really hot when I came out of the oven, and I just burned the roof of my mouth. Is that ever happened to you guys where it's just like so raw?
Tom:
Definitely. I'm very risk averse. When it comes to heating food. I just played safe my microwave. I programmed it to not go for over 30 seconds and if it's something that takes five minutes, I just stand by plugging in 30 seconds and then it's just safer that way. Mouth pain is terrible, like teeth. tooth pain, anyways, yes, that sucks when you burn your mouth.
Michael:
I'm just an adult baby like, you don't break your mouth.
So for those of you who don't know, or who have never listened to a showdown episode, what we're gonna do is we're gonna debate big city versus small town. And then we're going to swap sides. And so the person who took small town is going to have big city and vice versa. So we get to hear the CO hosts pro and con argument for both big city and small town so we get the full viewpoint and vantage point for how they think about these things. And I can see them both frivolously I don't know if that's the right word writing down notes. copiously taking notes.
Tom;
I'm not doing it for those frivolously.
Michael:
Frivolously!
Alright, so Emil, are you taking big city or small town first?
Emil:
I am going to take big city. And when we talk about big city here, before we get into it, let's define that for audience. What are we defining as a big city? Are we talking a Los Angeles and New York, a Chicago? Are we talking secondary cities, tertiary cities?
Michael:
I'd say secondary and tertiary cities.
Tom:
I'd say big cities, let's say the 10 biggest cities in the United States. So like, I'd say, Atlanta, Orlando, Houston, Dallas, New York, LA, those ones, what do you guys think? I mean, I'm just kind of shooting from the cuff here work. But the little cities got to be little, little cities. You know, I think the middle middle ground is off the table.
Michael:
I don't want to have ever heard of the cities that you're talking about.
Tom:
Indianapolis, you're not in this debate.
Emil:
So we're not going to go into like which city in particular, but just in general, in general, like big population cities. So the top 10 are New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Diego. That's interesting, Dallas and San Jose. So that's the top 10 markets. And then we'll cover the other end of the spectrum where you're just talking about like, you know, a small town in Michigan or something, for example, right?
Michael:
Yeah, yeah, perfect.
Emil:
So I'll take a large city to start perfect, Tom, you're on small town.
Tom:
Beautiful.
Michael:
And Emil I want to give you the floor first. So tell us why you are such a big fan of big cities.
Emil:
I'm not a big fan of big cities, but I'm gonna pretend to be for this show.
Michael:
So for the debate for the debate.
Emil:
To me, there's three that really stand out. So those three are population, rent growth and appreciation potential. So in bigger cities, you have a lot of people, meaning you have a lot of tenants, which is good. As a residential real estate investor, I want to know my tenant pool is large, that's a good thing. For me, that means I have a lot of tenants. Good to know. The second one I mentioned is rent growth. So typically, in larger cities, you know, Los Angeles in New York, some of those top 10, we mentioned, you're just going to see much higher rents than you would in a small town.
And I don't know if we've covered it on the podcast before, but the lower your rent is on a monthly basis, the way I like to look at it is you have a smaller margin of error. So sometimes you will see like a 50 or $60,000, home that rents for five 600 bucks. And they're like, Oh my god, the cash flow. And the numbers look amazing. But what they don't realize is one big expense can really wipe you out in terms of cash flow for the year, because a roof costs what a roof costs, have it fixed. And so when your rent is low, yes, it could look good. If everything goes right all year, your yield will look great. But in reality, you'll have those big costs come up and they'll crush your cash flow.
So in larger markets, your rent is higher and your rent growth is typically higher as well, because populations big It's a place where there's a lot of demand, a lot of people live there. So rent growth, you typically can see go higher.
And the third one is appreciation potential. So those larger cities, that's a lot of times when there's a bull market, that's where you're seeing a lot of the appreciation happening like meaningful appreciation, right? You buy a property that's worth $500,000 in it goes up 10% now you just made 50 k in equity, let's just say same 10% on a $75,000 home, you only went up seven grand right?
So just your equity, growth potential through appreciation is just going to be much lower. So to me, those are the three things that really attract investors to big cities.
Michael:
Does any of that thought process thesis change? Because of COVID?
Emil:
I don't know. I mean, yes, it does, like I live in Los Angeles. And I know that rents have actually declined, especially in multifamily, because a lot of people have either left the city to go to the suburbs or moving out of state or whatever it is. So I know rent growth and multifamily has gone down population. I mean, that's what's affecting it right. There's just less demand for housing gear. So that's driving rent wrote down, but on the flip side, right now, appreciation is skyrocketing in California, because rates are so low. And this isn't for multifamily, right multifamily is based on how the acid is performing. So if you have lower rents, the cap rate is going to be higher, which means you're gonna have a lower price when you want to sell it. But coupled with that low interest rates, so it hasn't really affect like even multifamily values have gone up as well, it's kind of been negated by low interest rates.
So on one end, it's hurt cash flow. But on the other end, you know, I've heard that a lot of La multifamily like their net worth is skyrocketed because of all this appreciation.
Michael:
Good to know Tom, your rebuttal?
Tom:
Three letters, two words, baby ROI, cash flow, when you go to that small town to buy, well, first of all, small town, just a great way to live, you know, slower paced living. But let's get back to the discussion, I digress. So your returns traditionally are going to be significantly higher on a cash flow basis. In this smaller towns, if you look at just the ratio of the rent to the price of the home, it's going to be higher, there's going to be higher returns.
Now true. There's some downside of typically, there are smaller economies. But if you're looking to get in and looking at these returns as a gross yield, as cap rate, smaller towns are gonna find higher returns. And the reason for that, I think a big reason for that is there's just less competition when you go into these big cities like the Phoenix is and the Dallas's there are these huge institutions that have these fancy calculators that are buying houses all the time, when you go to these small towns, there's not that competition. So you as an investor, being a hard working smart person that you are, you can go evaluate houses and not…