On today’s show, we have a special guest. He actually has been on our show before back in show number 35. I am bringing him back on today because he’s got some updates to share with us. This show is about things like forecasting property values, looking at appreciation trends and forecasts. My guest today is Dr. Andrew Schiller. Dr. Schiller is the founder, CEO and Chief Scientist of Location Inc. He is responsible for inventing the search and neighborhood matching algorithms that powers Neighborhood Scout, which has been covered by CNN, Bloomberg Business and The Wall Street Journal among others.
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Understanding Neighborhood Trends and Forecasting Property Values
Andrew, welcome back to the show.
Thank you, Marco. It’s great to be here.
It’s great having you back on. I really enjoyed doing the show with you in the past talking about analyzing neighborhoods and the power of your product with Neighborhood Scout. I use it daily. I am a walking testimonial for it. I know you have been keeping yourself really busy. Why don’t you give us, first of all, a quick update or an overview actually of what Neighborhood Scout is and then we can get into some of the changes you’ve made later.
Neighborhood Scout has served about 65 million people since it was first launched in 2002. Neighborhood Scout is a platform where people can learn about locations with data on crime, schools, appreciation rates, housing market, vacancies, demographics and all that are built together into one simple to use platform and reporting mechanism. Much of the data and analytics in Neighborhood Scout are built in-house by our PhD scientists. Unlike many other types of services or sites where they simply aggregate existing data, we are primarily a source of and builder of high-end analytics, predictive analytics, trends and information that can help people make really informed decisions. That was our specialty. We baked it into Neighborhood Scout.
I am a geographer. I have always loved places. The whole idea about Neighborhood Scout is to reveal the truth about locations. We have no vested interest in people moving to or buying property in any particular place or even moving or buying at all. We want people to be as empowered as possible. To tell you a personal story, when I bought my first house in 2001, it was a year before launching Neighborhood Scout. My first daughter, Wendy, was not quite one year old at the time. I was just finished with my Geography PhD program. I was well-trained. I was able to find information and aware of the importance of location. We selected a lot on a quiet, dead-end street in Worcester, Massachusetts near hiking trails and within walking distance to local shops.
One year later, I launched Neighborhood Scout. I quickly entered what was important for us in a neighborhood. At that time, for us personally, we wanted good public schools, affordability, educated neighbors, and low crime for example. Neighborhood Scout delivered a map and my eyes were permanently opened to a new level of understanding. We should have bought two miles away. I didn’t even know. The answers were right there at my fingertips. I could make educated decisions. It was a great enlightenment.
Now, as of about a week ago, fifteen years later, that great enlightenment is happening again for me personally with Neighborhood Scout’s new arrival of information. We have gone from about 310 or 320 analytics and data elements in an individual Neighborhood Scout report to now well over 640. So much of it was things that we built in. We call a lot of this forecasting and trend information Scout Vision. This enlightenment of using Scout Vision to forecast data, for every neighborhood and micro neighborhood in the US, I can now see where to buy, when to buy and why a property is a better bet. With this tool, I can make the best and most successful decisions for my life that I couldn’t make before. It’s very similar to when we first launched Neighborhood Scout all those years ago. I was newly awakened to the possibilities and the understanding of my environment that made such a difference.
While Neighborhood Scout has been live for ten years, I have been thinking about how would we be able to better track the trends and the forecasts of real estate and micro neighborhoods all around the country. Because you know that you are not just visiting a place when you invest in it. You’re basically, usually there for a few years at least, if not longer, either as a home buyer or primarily as an investor. What we realized is that things are changing all the time. What it looks like today isn’t what it looked like a few years ago. It is almost certainly not what it’s going to look like a few years from now. How to understand those trends and those trajectories of change is something that has been very interesting to me for a long time.
For about ten years, I have been thinking about this problem. That’s a long time to think about a problem. I think if I were quicker, maybe I could have done it in five years. We started with the idea, we were noticing that there were these things that were coming up. Did you know that in 1969, real estate in Nantucket off the coast of Massachusetts was less expensive than the average real estate in America? It’s true. You could’ve bought a home in Wichita, Kansas and at that time the home in Nantucket may have been less expensive. By 1989, the real estate on Nantucket had become some of the most expensive in the world. Something had happened there. Wouldn’t you have liked to have known what it was? Now the rents that it can command are so astronomically high.
Every place is going on a path, and to understand what those paths are is very important. If you fast forward to more recent times, into the 2000’s, wouldn’t that have been incredible to know that Brooklyn was going to come up like it has, particularly, which neighborhoods in Brooklyn? That’s a big burrow with hundreds and hundreds of neighborhoods. Where is it going to go up? Where is it going to go up the most? Where do the rents go up the greatest? Where can you get the greatest value in a timeframe? Fast forward even more, you can think about Oakland in California and how that’s come up. But which neighborhoods in Oakland had come up and why? Which ones have gone up the most? That has inspired us.
We took two years to build data and analytics. We think about how we could track the trends of places down to the micro neighborhood where people are buying property. The type of thing where people are living, not just at a broad city level or a county level or not even as broad a as a zip code, but right in close just to the block and a few blocks around that. Through a lot of effort, we realized that a lot of the data we needed to build this didn’t exist. We had to build it. We set on a path with a team of PhDs to try to work this through, thinking more like geographers and economists, but economic geographers. This culminated in the Scout Vision suite of data analytics that are part of the new NeighborhoodScout.com.
That was a great overview. I got three questions out of that. Let’s start back to your story. I don’t want to leave that alone. You mentioned that you bought a property back in 2001 and you should have bought two miles away. Two miles is not that far. What was it that you realized after you did your analysis that told you you should have bought two miles from where you actually did buy?
It was a combination of all those things that were important to us. The public school, you may not remember back, but in 2001, public school test data and public school quality ratings weren’t as available as they are now. But we launched that in Neighborhood Scout. We could quickly see that the elementary schools and other part of the area where much superior. We also saw that the trend of the real estate values in the other area were much better. The character of the neighborhood, the things that are important to us as people who are going to owner occupied and live in it included the educational attainment of the neighbors.
In this other area, while our block, our street had a good educational attainment in the first place, the other one was even higher and more broad than just our street. We actually were able to find more people that we would have more in common with in a place that was likely to hold its value and go up in value more, and also provide better schools for our children or at least initially our daughter, Wendy, and later on our daughter Isabel than the other place that we had bought.
You talk about data a lot. I know you are a PhD. You are heavily driven by data and you probably surround yourself with a lot of data. But you talk about letting the data tell the story. Can you explain that? What does that mean exactly?
I think every piece of data, a set of information analytics, is a story. It’s almost like the paint on a paintbrush that you can put on a canvas to tell a story. When I see data and see patterns in that data, it tells me a lot about what’s happening and why. Some of the things that really were driving our thoughts about telling stories with data was that large part real estate values and rental values, we could envision them a lot like you can envision fluid dynamics, where they go from high to low, like water would rush downhill and then pond up.
In places that were relatively high rents or high expense but they were surrounded by lower cost and lower rents, there would be very little pressure to continue to push those values up. If it was a place that was lower rents and lower cost property that was surrounded by areas that were more expensive and increasing more, there would be a lot of pressure to push the values in the lower cost areas up, including those rental values. This was part of our thinking on the way to analyze the information amongst, I think, there’s over 200 different data elements in the way that we’ve been looking at the information. We were able to ascertain which places were likely to go up by the patterns of this fluid dynamics of values around them. These stories would unfold through maps, unfold through interesting combinations of things.
For example, people move out of the city, like New York City, to move to the suburbs for various reasons. Maybe they want better schools, lower costs, a little more space to raise their children. They still shouldn’t divorce themselves entirely from those things that were so important that they were getting in the city. One of those is access to high paying jobs. It all comes down to the fundamentals. If the place has good access to solid employment, you are better able to command rents, have lower vacancies and real estate values will maintain or increase. What we found time and time again, is that those places in the suburbs that are closer in to jobs that are near a transportation hub and combine good schools are the places that tend to hold their values the most and go up the fastest.
One example of this in our local market here in the Boston area is the eastern part of Arlington, Massachusetts. Arlington was just a generic town probably 20, 25 years ago on the edge of Cambridge. Because it had a subway stop right at the edge of it, on the red line, because it had decent quality schools, a lot of people who are maturing after going to Harvard, MIT, Boston University or any of the other colleges and universities in the area, fell in love and had children. They said, “Where should we move?” They moved to the next town out, but it still had that access to the city. When you combine those two things, it really took off in value. It has done great. That’s one of the things that I always think about when I am thinking about the trajectories of a place. A place that may not have been much, but may have been near so much and how that transpires to drive values and of course drive rents up and vacancies down.
I love your example of Nantucket. That is a great example of being able to see something in the future that didn’t exist at the time. I guess you need the data and the tools. We deal with two types of people. Those that are analytical. They love the data and they feel comfortable around it. Then there is another type of person. Their eyes would just cross and glaze over if they were surrounded by that much data because they wouldn’t know what to do with it. They wouldn’t know how to analyze it. They would just feel overwhelmed and it becomes a stressful environment.
When you have a tool like Neighborhood Scout, I am sure there are some others out there, you have got to be able to “dumb it down” to the point where you can extract intelligence out of it and not just be looking at a bunch of numbers. I guess that’s what you help people do with Neighborhood Scout, right?
Yes. We talk about data but I am using it generically. We really turned it into information and knowledge. It is very straight-forward to be able to take large sums of data and turn them into simple indexes, where it is easy to read and understand. For example, when we look at the trends and forecasts of a place with Scout Vision, we look at two major dimensions. That is the opportunity for the appreciation potential over the next three years, and the investment security. We have a simple one through five rating. The opportunity could be a five, which we call a rising star. The investment security could be a one or a two, very low or low, which means based on its past record of appreciation and the existing fundamentals in the neighborhood, you have a lot of upside but you also have a lot of risk.
You can actually just look at these two scores, opportunity, one to five, investment security, one to five. You can see how much opportunity you have available to you and how much investment security that you need to feel comfortable in making that type of investment in that location. It really is all about timing. Just because something has a great opportunity or maybe even has decent investment security, it is really based on a time frame. It doesn’t mean that this place is going to become the next Brooklyn. It just means that over the period of the next few years, you are likely to be able to see rises in real estate values and rents in that area. It doesn’t it will go on forever. The one thing we have certainly learned by doing these in looking at things is that real estate isn’t only about location, location, location. It is also about timing, timing, timing.
A lot of people think that we look into a crystal ball and we try to make predictions, but when you base those predictions upon facts and data, then you can call them leading indicators. My question to you is, what do you consider to be the leading indicators that affect property values? That could be answered on two levels. We can talk about the market or the MSA, and you can look at the neighborhood level. Those are probably different, but I am not so sure, so I throw the question out to you.
We think of everything as being nested hierarchically. What that means is that neighborhoods have characteristics and conditions within them that will help position them to do well. But they will only do well if your metro region and the economy is doing well. If that really is your constraining element, then your metro region may have lots of opportunity to do well and lots of promise. But it will only do well if your national economy is doing well.
We build models at the national level. We build models at the metropolitan and regional level. The outputs of both of those are actually input into the micro neighborhood models as well that are controlling. I always tell the example of a neighborhood that is in Buffalo, New York and a neighborhood in San Francisco, California. They are both pretty similar. But that doesn’t mean that the Buffalo, New York one is going to have the same trajectory as the one in San Francisco. The regional economy is just so different. The demand and the supply is just so different that it would be folly to lump them together. It’s almost like there were two people passing on the side walk that happen to be close to each other at that moment, but it doesn’t mean they are going the same place.
Would you say it’s like a wave inside of a wave inside of a wave? The bigger wave carries everything within those smaller waves?
Yes. I absolutely would say that’s true. Some of the things you want to look at are how the regional economy has been going over time. We all seem to think that if things have been going well, they’ll probably continue to do so and if things have been going poorly, it probably will continue to do so. It’s hard to tell when those inflection points are. We spend a lot of time thinking about these inflection points. There are a few major things that go on at the national level that drive these. We also look things in trends at the metro regional level. One of those key fundamentals that is always important when it has to do with real estate values, rent values, vacancies, is housing affordability trends. We look at the years of the median household income needed to buy the average house in each metro area. We track that over time. We track it all the way back to 2000.
For example, in 2000, it took just a little over two and a half years of the average income in America to buy the average house. It’s pretty low. By 2006, it took almost four years of the average income to buy the average house. Today, it’s about three and a half years of the average income to buy the average house nationwide. Real estate is all local. If I look at the Los Angeles area, I see that in 2000, it was over four and a half years of the average income to buy the average house. By the time in 2007, it was nearly eleven years of the average income needed to buy the average house. That’s unsustainable. Things came tumbling down. From 2007 to 2009, it had dropped to below eight years and it continued to decline. Now, it is back up again. It’s around nine years in the LA area. Nine years of the average income, household income in that metro to buy the average house.
Which is still very expensive, and that’s probably also true for San Francisco, for places like Manhattan, Washington D.C. The affordability is such a key indicator for me. When you look at that, you are also looking at trends. Here is a question for you. It is relatively easy to follow trends because you are looking at a slice in time. It is today and you are looking backwards at the past. How reliable is it when it comes to forecasting? Some people say you are looking at a crystal ball. How accurate and how reliable is forecasting?
Forecasting really depends on how good the information is that supports the models you are looking to try to understand the future. Oftentimes, models can be built so that they over fit. They’re only good at predicting values within a certain small range of how the data was built to begin with. What we try to do with the way we build the data is we try to build it so that it can take into account ranges that haven’t even been even experienced in the past, so that we can look into the future and see how things could occur based on novel combinations of characteristics.
When we look at patterns going back in time, a few of the things that we see that were really important to help us understand the future was not only the cost of borrowing money, but it was also the liberalness of people allowing the money to be lent. That is, how easy it was to get credit? At some point, it got a little too easy. What happened at those points, a lot of shaky loans were provided. We track access to credit over time as well as the cost of credit over time. Those two things are very helpful, along with affordability for each metro in sniffing out possible bubbles in the market. That helps us with some of our forecasts into the future.
Andrew, I am not sure we completely answered the previous question I had about leading indicators and how they affect property values. We were talking about neighborhood level and market level. Access to credit is one factor that drives price. I want to just let you finish answering that question, about what leading indicators there are that affect property values.
Some of them are supply. Some of it is demand, that is population growth in an area. A lot of it has to do with the income in the metropolitan area. Also, we’ve taken a look at the trends and the conditions of how Wall Street is treating the industry clusters that are important in your local metropolitan area economy. If those are getting hurt over a certain time period, then that would start to affect the modern economy in your area. Think of places that may have extracted oil or natural gas. Those things go through boom and bust cycles, like Midland, Texas or perhaps the Dakotas. You can see how this could rise and this could fall, their fates on these. We can track those through looking at how those small industry clusters that are very specific to the types of things that they do in those metro areas are faring on Wall Street over time. Not just a day, not just a week, but over a time period.
Some of the things that are leading indicators are the housing affordability, the years of average household income needed to buy the average house, vacancies, educational attainment, income at the local metropolitan area, job creation at the metropolitan area, population growth or decline within just half a mile or a mile or two miles of your location. It’s the accessibility of transit stations or train stations to where you are located. It’s also one of the key things.
Also, having this idea of good bones is very important. You have interesting architecture. You have certain characteristics that provide you with some amenity that people are interested in moving to. Like Asbury Park, New Jersey became gentrified after being down and out for some period of time. A lot of it had to do with beautiful old Victorian houses near the seaside. Those were basically some of the elements that could be considered good bones. Also, an educated populous in New York City that was interested in moving there and try to fix those places up because there was a price differential that made it worthwhile to do.
Those are some of the many factors. There are still many hundreds of them. But one of the other things that’s interesting is trends in crime. That is one of the things that really will keep a place for going up in value in urban and suburban areas, the risk of violent crime. If we see violent crime risk dropping as a trend, that’s a really good leading indicator in a particular neighborhood area. That place is maybe prompt for other things to happen as long as there are other things that are taking place at the same time. Maybe there’s good transit. Maybe there is reducing vacancies, good access to high paying jobs nearby and a variety of other things that are important that are culminating in the opportunity for change. Crime is a wonderful leading indicator. The crime trends, not just how much crimes are there. Some places it’s almost like it’s not how much money you make, it’s how much money you used to make. It’s the same with crime. It’s not necessarily how safe it is now, but it’s how much more or less safe it is now than it was.
Is that to say that the crime trend is more important than the amount of crime in an area?
It tends to be, because people are looking at the differences. There’s probably a breakpoint where it’s still too high. But at some point, it will drop lower and it will open it up. It’s almost like an economic release. Now, people are willing to venture in there and invest. They feel more confident and comfortable doing so.
I see areas that make great rental neighborhoods. It’s just a solid, stable area. The numbers are great. The neighborhood is clean. But these areas have very poor school ratings, yet they make great rental areas. How important is the school rating to an investment property or an area when you’re looking at it from an investment perspective?
It depends on who you are trying to rent to. In some cases, it wouldn’t make as much difference, I think. If you are an owner occupied and have children, it’s probably a big deal. It takes a long time to build a great school system. It is hard to find a great school system that isn’t already priced high. It is hard to make the numbers work from a rental perspective when you are purchasing property. Occasionally, you can find them. I think that if you can, if it’s a multiple bedroom property, then you can usually do very well on the rents because they will command higher rents. But so often they command even higher prices, which make it difficult to work from a numbers perspective.
I see areas all the time that have just average or below average school systems, but they are just great rental areas. They have been for a long time. I don’t see a trend towards the negative. It just seems to be a good area to continue to invest in. Even with crime, I see the same thing. Where an area doesn’t have a good crime rating, it looks relatively poor, but it is an area that doesn’t have an increase in crime. It happens to be what I call neighborhood normal. It’s the norm for the area. People understand that, yet they still want to live there and there’s a large tenant pool for that area. It doesn’t affect me and it doesn’t bother me as an investor to look in an area like that because I know that’s just normal for that area.
That makes total sense. We have done a lot of analysis looking at crime and what the correlations are in certain places. A lot of it has to do with stability in the neighborhood, people who have lived there a long time, people who provide pressure for it to behave a certain way. Sometimes some of the greatest neighborhoods have relatively high property crime rate, but a modest to moderate level of violent crime. Sometimes there are neighborhoods that are simply solid working neighborhoods. Places where firefighters and Department of Public Works workers live and their families and it is very solid. What I had been referring to before was trying to ascertain those trends where things are going to switch their trajectory or change from one type of place to another, not so much those places that are going to stay the same and stay the same. That’s more of what I was addressing in my previous comments.
This is the big question that I would have and I am sure a lot of investors would have. If I was a new investor or let’s just say you’re out looking for your next property and you are looking at neighborhoods. Price growth is an important factor for you. What would you say are the key neighborhood price drivers that you should look at or you would look at or I should look at as an investor at the neighborhood level?
I would look at access to transit. It’s a very big one. I would look at vacancies being lower or trending towards lower. I would look at a nice mix of renter and owner occupied properties, not all rent and not mostly owned either. I would look at some, like you were mentioning about places that stay and stay and they are solid. I would look at stability in the neighborhood, which is how many people, what percentage of the population is here now lived in the same address last year or even five years ago. The more stability you have in the neighborhood means that people feel comfortable with the way it is and they are not looking to leave. That’s a really good indicator of a place where people feel good about being there enough to continue to stay.
What would you call that term? Is there a name for it? How would you even do that?
There is data that we offer on Neighborhood Scout that looks at transience.
I just simply call that turnover. You have that data. I have not focused on that.
It is very helpful to see that. There are some places where there’s a turnover of 70%, 75% per year. There are other places where the turnover is less than 5% per year. It is a really big difference. It is a nice indicator to take a look at, even if it is not specific to your property. It tells you a little bit about the character of the neighborhood and what to expect in that neighborhood.
Tell us about these additions and new tools that you have put in the new release of Neighborhood Scout, because I’ve noticed there’s quite a few of them.
We did a few things to make things easier for people to use it. We enlarged the maps. We made it mobile friendly so you can access this on your phone and really use it very easily on your phone. We have allowed people now and users so they can unlock individual reports as they go, one by one, in addition to subscribing and getting like an 80% discount on that.
A lot of the content we’ve done and features of the product itself have been a little different too. A couple of those are that we have increased the number of data elements that you will find in a report to 640 with tabs that are overviewed with a full text description of the neighborhood, real estate demographics, crime, schools, trends and forecasts, including what is happening at the metro area. Those are big additions to the reports. We also now support a PDF printable version. In the pro package, there are no ads on the site as well. It is nice and clean and easy to use.
The data in the crime section that we have updated ,which is kind of interesting, is that in the past, we gave you a crime index on a zero to 100 scale based on how safe the neighborhood is, relative to other neighborhoods in America. Then we showed you the total crimes per thousand people, the violent crimes per thousand people and the property crimes per thousand people. Now what we’ve done an addition to that is we have created an addition total crime index. We have a violent crime index on a zero to 100 scale to make it nice and easy to understand, and a property crime index on a zero to 100. Then we did the same thing with the zero to 100 scale for each of the major types of crimes. You can quickly, at a glance, see what types of crime are most and the least of an issue in that neighborhood. Whether it be something like burglary or petty larceny, or if it’s something more serious like a homicide or armed robbery or the like. You can see that quickly through a nice little glance on these indexes on zero to 100 scale.
The Trends and Forecasts tab also brings in new information on how the school quality is trending over time, how the educational attainment in the neighborhood is trending overtime, if the vacancies that are going up and down. Also very importantly, another indicator that I forgot to mention before, is unemployment. Not only do we show you what the unemployment rate is in the neighborhood relative to the nation, but we show you what the average annual change net has been over the last five years. You can see whether it’s a stable place with a somewhat higher unemployment rate, or if unemployment is going down or if it’s going up and at what rate it is going up or down.
We also track household income over time and per capita income over time to give people a sense of what’s happening in that particular neighborhood. At a metropolitan level, we also look at a variety of other indexes that look at how the job creation is going in there in the metropolitan area. What the wage changes are in the metropolitan area, how the stock market has been treating those areas’ industries and a variety of other things that provide a good context if it’s a great place to go looking.
There have been some metro areas that have done so well through time, like recently Austin, Texas. Our data showed that metropolitan area is probably nearing the top. It’s at or above its historical all-time high for that years of the average household income needed to buy the average house. It’s become unaffordable. We predict that over the next 60 months or less, it’s going to begin to see a cyclical decline in its real estate values in the Austin, Texas area, as well as the Dallas-Fort Worth, area, which has also become overheated as far as values are concerned on a historical perspective for those metropolitan areas.
Other places that you wouldn’t expect, look like they’ve got several more years of good run up to do in them, like Las Vegas, Nevada. Based on it, they are still recovering from having such a value’s decline so much back in 2008. You can see all these types of trends and these patterns and forecasts into the future for the metropolitan area trends, and the neighborhood trends and forecasts into the future in the new Neighborhood Scout platform. I hope you guys will come by, take a look at it and let me know if it’s helpful.
People can go there and get a free report. I like what you’ve changed. It’s easier to understand. It’s more graphic. You put a lot of focus on the trends and forecasting. There’s a lot more in terms of data points. I like that you can get very hyper local, which I think is an important thing. I do talk about looking at metro areas as a starting point with investors, but you have to drill down into a more granular location. It’s not just the areas or the suburbs, but it’s even the neighborhood level that you need to consider.
I think you’ve done a great job. With the free report, people can go over there and give it a try. Like I said, I am a testimonial and an endorsement. I don’t get paid for saying any of this. I use it as a tool and I’d like other people to use it too. I think it’s a great job. Andrew, is there anything else that you’d like to share with our listeners before we wrap it up here?
Not at this time, Marco. But if you’ve got some interesting stories about how people have used Neighborhood Scout to help them make decisions or that it gave them some insights that kept them picking the right places, I would love to hear it. My own personal story is something I am glad to share and I would love to hear other stories as well.
Great idea. They can find you and your work at NeighborhoodScout.com, is that the best place?
That’s it. That’s exactly right. Thank you so much.
Andrew, thanks for spending some more time with me here today. I am sure we will have you again in about a year’s time.
Thank you, Marco.
Have a good one.
You too. Bye.
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I hope that episode was helpful because when you are talking about data and analytics, for some people it’s a little too complicated. They just want the bottom line, “What does it mean to me?” For other people, they like charts, graphs, looking at data and trying to figure out, “Is this the best option out of many options, out of multiple markets?”
Keep in mind that a tool like Neighborhood Scout is exactly that. It is just a tool. It is a powerful tool, but it is one of many. You also need the right team. You still need people working with you and for you, such as your property manager, your consultants, your lender, mortgage brokers, etc. You need the right team of people around you to help you make those decisions that are able to get in on the ground floor and give you the boots on the ground type of information you need.
Just use Neighborhood Scout and other tools like that to give you the macro and micro type of data that helps you make a decision as an investor. If you do that, you will be well informed and you will be able to make more intelligent decisions and hopefully avoid or minimize any kind of risk that comes along with any kind of investment, real estate included.
I will say that I’ve met Andrew in person about a year ago or six months ago out in Miami when I was speaking at one of the IMN events. He is a very, very bright guy. He is almost too smart for his own good. He just knows so much. He knows how to take a bunch of data and pull stories and intelligence out of it. It’s just a lot of fun working with him.
If you haven’t downloaded our free report, we have a great little e-book called the The Ultimate Guide to Passive Real Estate Investing. Download that for free at our website, NoradaRealEstate.com. If you have any questions you’d like me to cover in an upcoming episode of Ask Marco, just send those to me through our website at PassiveRealEstateInvesting.com. You can just click the Ask Marco button and submit your question. I will reply to you directly. If it’s a good question for our audience, I will read them online. Don’t forget, if you are in the market for some property or building a real estate portfolio, take advantage of our free strategy session with one of our investment counselors. If you are listening to the show for the first time, remember to subscribe. We try to put out a weekly episode, so that will help you along. Thanks for listening and we will see you on our next episode.
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