Appreciation in real estate is widely misunderstood by most people.
There are four ways to make money in real estate. Cash flow, taxes, mortgage principle paydown, and appreciation.
Three of these four are often misunderstood in how effective they are.
Appreciation in real estate is the one we’re focusing on today.
I want you to learn the truth.
Before I bash appreciation too much, here’s what the leverage lovers and BRRRR investors want me to explain first.
If you buy a house for $100,000 cash, and that house goes up by 4% in a year, the house is now worth $104,000 and you’ve made 4% on your money.
Not amazing.
However, if you buy a house with $20,000 down on a $100,000 house and it goes up 4% in a year, it is now worth $104,000. You’ve made $4,000 on a $20,000 investment.
You’ve made 20% on your $20,000 investment. The mortgage magnifies the benefits of the appreciation.
That’s a benefit of appreciation with a mortgage.
Of course, if you mortgage a property and it goes down in value, remember, you still owe that monthly amount to the bank no matter how low the price of the house goes. If the market crashes, you still got to pay that mortgage back at whatever price you originally borrowed for.
This was the big problem with the last real estate crash. It’s called being upside down on a mortgage.
Borrower beware!
Here is something I hear people say a lot about appreciation that makes me cringe.
It goes something like this:
“Well, I know I’m not making any cash flow on this house, maybe even losing some money, but that’s ok, because I’m in this for the appreciation.”
WHOA!!!!
This attitude is especially common in high cost of living (HCOL) cities.
Why?
It’s really hard to get good cash flow in a HCOL city. The price to rent ratios are way off. There is also this belief that these cities are great for appreciation, and you can’t go wrong buying because they will go up enough in value to make it worth it, even without the cash flow.
I’m here to tell you, this is not always the case.
If you want to make money in real estate, it is wise to invest for cash flow first. You want to have an investment property that makes a predictable cash flow each month. You’ll get this whether or not appreciation happens.
If the house appreciates on top of this cash flow, great.
My point is, do not bank on appreciation alone.
It’s a dangerous investment strategy. I’ll explain why.
Let’s talk first about how one makes cash flow. It’s important to understand this before we can analyze why appreciation alone as a strategy doesn’t always work.
The 1% rule
Read my article on How Much Money Will I Make From My Rental Property?
According to the 1% rule in real estate, if a property can rent for 1% a month or more of its acquisition cost, then it might be a worthwhile rental. Less than that, probably not worth it.
Acquisition cost is the cost of buying the property plus the cost of all the rehab costs of getting it ready to rent.
If you buy a house for $80,000, spend $20,000 rehabbing it, then your acquisition cost is $100,000. 1% of that is $1,000 .
If this property can rent for $1,000 or higher, it might make a good rental. Less than that, maybe not.
It is a well-known fact that you can’t get good cash flow in HCOL cities.
Why?
The 1% rule doesn’t work there!
In San Fran, a house’s purchase price will be $1 million. 1% of that would be $10,000 a month.
This house will rent for probably something like $4,000 a month. You are nowhere near the 1% rule. It’s a poor investment as a buy-and-hold rental!
So then why do people invest there?
Well, many will tell you, they are investing for appreciation.
And I’ll tell you…
Bad idea!
People have a fundamental misunderstanding of appreciation in HCOL areas. They believe it’s much larger and more prevalent in these cities than other locations.
It’s not.
It’s just more visible when it happens.
You can thank the media for that. And your friendly real estate agents.
It’s true that in HCOL cities like SF, NYC, and Honolulu, it is more likely to have years where prices go up 15%-20%. This may even happen 2 or 3 years in a row.
Wow!
But what people don’t realize is what happens for the next five to ten years.
Sometimes, nothing.
What I mean by that is, even though you get these big jumps periodically in HCOL cities, on average, the appreciation in these cities over the long term is not much different than most cities across the country.
It’s not much higher than the 3% average you see nationally over the long term!
I can illustrate this perfectly with what happened on my first house in Alexandria, VA (right outside Washington, D.C.)
I bought a house in Alexandria, VA in 2003 for $280,000. I thought I was overpaying and it would be the worst financial decision of my life!
I was wrong.
Two years later, the house was worth $400,000. That’s an increase in value of 42%.
I’m Rich! (on Money)
At this rate of appreciation, I’ll be a multi-millionaire by the time I retire!
I tried to buy more houses, but the prices were rising so fast, I ultimately chickened out.
I rented that house out over the next 13 years. It wasn’t a great rental. It didn’t meet the 1% rule, and therefore didn’t make much money, but I figured I would make it up on appreciation!
I sold that house in 2016.
How much did I get for it.
Drum roll!!!
$400,000.
What!?!?!?!?
The price hadn’t gone any higher than what it was 11 years earlier in 2005.
No growth.
If you do the math, that’s 42% / 13 years = 2.6% appreciation a year.
Wait, that’s not awesome!
To put that in perspective, over that same period, money invested in the S&P 500 index would have returned 118%.
Yes, please!
You might be tempted to say that I’m picking a certain time period or a city where it happens to look bad, but there are several random periods in HCOL areas where you will get a similarly low rate. And while sometimes in can be much higher, it can also be lower.
My point is, you have no way of knowing what appreciation rate you’ll get. That’s why you better have good cash flow, and then take appreciation if and when you get it.
Maybe the problem is the city. If you want to make a fortune with appreciation, go to the best place in the world for it.
I recently spent some time in Hawaii staying with my good friend Doug Nordman.
He retired from the Navy to never work again, unless you consider surfing and helping others retire early as work.
Check out his blog. www.the-military-guide.com
Nothing is better than hanging out with him and his wife in Hawaii.
Why?
We spend our days surfing, talking about real estate, blogs, the military, finance, and early retirement.
That might seem weird to some of you, but it’s heaven to me!
He bought two properties in Hawaii.
Maybe that’s where all his money comes from. It’s the massive appreciation from those two houses!
Everybody knows properties always appreciate in Hawaii!
Let’s take a look…
I asked him about depreciation on his two properties and he gave me a great reply via email. He wrote this:
Without getting into cost basis and improvements and depreciation, we bought the first home as a FSBO in 1989 for $277k. 29 years later it’d sell at roughly $750k (gross before closing costs, but we’d FSBO again). That’s a 3.5% APY compounding.
We bought it at the peak of the Japan-fueled real estate bull market in 1989, but the property was in terrible shape and cheaper than the other 50 homes I viewed. We added a lot of sweat equity in the 1990s: new landscaping, new shake roof, a bathroom rehab, paint, carpet, ceiling fans, window blinds. Last year’s rehab (kitchen & both bathrooms, porcelain tile, new fence) was another $70k of improvement. Today’s market is again at a peak but we’ve added $150k to the cost basis for what is now a premium property.
Overall I’m calling the appreciation at about the rate of inflation.
As a rental, the capitalization rate has been 3%-4% for most of that 29 years. (When my spouse’s parents were living there the cap rate was zero, but that’s arguably a landlord’s emotional choice.) We’d be taxed on 21 years of depreciation recapture. The capital gains would also bounce us up into AMT territory, although it’s been a while since I researched that.
We bought our second home in 2000 for $405k. In retrospect, that year was the pit of Hawaii’s decade-long real estate recession which had started after Japan’s real estate bubble burst. The house was in horrible shape. The owners had died in 1997, the house was in trust for their teens, and the trustee was a brother-in-law who just wanted outta that job. In retrospect we stole it when nobody else would even look at it.
We poured a lot more sweat equity into this place: paint, carpets, a bathroom rehab. In 2011 we paid a contractor $120k to rebuild the family room end of the house, along with a bunch of other improvements. The photovoltaic & solar water systems would retail for $30k today but we DIY’d them in 2005 for $15k.
Last August our home appraised at $1,033,000 (we refinanced the mortgage). That’s 5.7% APY on $405k after 17 years. However the $120k contractor’s improvements and our other DIY work has raised our cost basis to $550k, so perhaps a more reasonable appreciation is 3.8% over 17 years.
I agree with your appreciation myth! We’ve done much better leveraging our mortgages into the stock market and making the payments out of my (highly reliable) pension. I’ve tracked one 2004 refi that’s generated just over 8% after-tax on a 5.375% 30-year mortgage… and our last refi restarted that at 3.50% for 30 years.
So I’ll summarize what I take away from Doug’s situation. On his first property, both his 3.5% APY he made on appreciation over 29 years and a 3-4% cap rate is extremely unimpressive as a rental property.
It illustrates my point perfectly. Hawaii is not a paradise for real estate investors. It’s not a given what you lack in cap rate you will make up in appreciation.
Far from it!
On his second property, he buys a distressed property at a low in the market, pours tons of money and sweat equity into it, and even does a $120k rebuild and adds a solar system that retails for $30k.
That additional investment reduces the appreciation to 3.8% per year over a 17-year timeframe.
That’s decent, but a lot of that is forced appreciation. Take those expensive improvements away, however, and it’s less impressive.
In fact, in Hawaii the years 1988-1995 as well as 2005-2009 for appreciation were either very unimpressive or outright bad.
So I want you to stop believing that in these special cities house prices always go up, up, up, and everyone gets rich.
It’s what real estate agents like to tell you and what you read about in no-money-down real estate investing books.
But it just ain’t true!
So what do you need to know.
Out of all the ways to make money in real estate, cash flow is the most certain and straight-forward. This is something you can plan and strategize for. It’s within your control.
Appreciation is not within your control over any short amount of time. The only thing you can reasonably plan for is over a very long period you should see something like 3% appreciation per year on average.
Yeah, that’s enough to keep up with inflation, but I wouldn’t plan on buying a yacht quite yet.
Here’s my caveat before I get beat up too bad on comments.
Yes, some of you will have your story about how you bought in the right city at the right time and made a ton of money in a few years.
You will claim that you are smart enough to do that every time you buy a house. In that case, you should also be a day trader.
I hope you are, but I doubt it! Your appreciation was largely due to luck.
I did the same thing in 2003 with my townhouse, but as you can see, since I didn’t sell in 2005, my appreciation was unimpressive because of the lack of appreciation over the following 11 years.
Maybe I’m not at good an investor as you.
Appreciation exists, and it can be magnified with the help of mortgages, but it’s not as epic as some make it out to be.
Cash flow first, and take appreciation if you get it.
Do you agree? Think I’m being unfair and cherry-picking examples?
Let me know in the comments section.
I have 20 paid off properties that are cash flowing great. Read about my approach to real estate:
Conservative Real Estate Investing
Rich on Money
Interesting scenarios with your VA property and Doug’s Hawaii property. Particularly with Doug’s, I would have though the rate would have been higher. But maybe I have been listening to the marketing machine as well!
In my market in a South Carolina I also invest for cash flow and other returns I can control (like principal paydown). I do seek out locations and properties I think will appreciate. But I don’t count on it in my upfront analysis.
I have used leverage in my case (although you know I like your free and clear approach as well). I think the ideal scenario for leveraged long term holds is to borrow at a lower interest rate than the cap rate. That arbitrage on a long term mortgage is very profitable. For example I have 8-10% cap properties and 4-6% interest rates. Positive leverage can be great! But HCOL cities with 3-4% cap rates have no chance to do that. Their mortgage costs the same or more as the income property produces, so it is all speculation. The only scenarios I like in that case are flips or short term holds where I force the value up, cash out, and recycle into the next property. But still more of a timing game than I want to play these days.
Thanks for tackling this topic Rich! Good to think about.
Chad, appreciate your comment on the site. I have no problems with mortgages being successfully and responsibly used in real estate. In most cases, it will lead to more wealth. I somehow never got around to it!
We’ll see!
Maybe the right deal will come around.
Rich,
Good post on one of the ways to make money on real estate. it’s not only HOLC but also Small HCOL cities such as Bozeman, MT. Therefore, I searched for a rental and scored a nice one. Savings will be invested in Vanguard index fund.
I look forward to the other three – maybe have a mini series similar to Jim C.
Speaking of Jim, he introduced A Noonan Moose of Frugal Fringe and in the post, he makes money off of appreciation but living in in the property many years and investing the difference in the S&P 500. I think you will find his analysis instructive.
https://www.frugalfringe.com/case-studies/i-just-sold-my-home-of-21-years-should-i-have-rented-instead/
Again, great work you are doing and I look forward to your next post.
Semper FI,
Luis
Thanks for the link to another interesting post!
Rich-
Glad to see you kept this going since moving to Korea. I agree 100%. Cash flow first. Anything else is really risky. There were a lot of losers in the mid-Atlantic region over the last 10 years. You could have bought your house at 400K and sold at 400K 10 years later. I’ve known many that this happened to. Paid off rentals are the way to go. I recently had one vacant since last November(long story..). While it was no fun to not be receiving rental income, I did not have the worry of a mortgage.
Keep up the great posts-
T
Thanks for the great comment. I’m glad you had that property paid off. I had a small fire in a property that wasn’t a covered loss. Also a long story, but glad it was paid off! $hit happens in real estate. Things don’t always go as planned!
Hi Rich,
This may be off topic, but I have a question about property tax for out of state investors. I bought my first rental in SC, I live in CA. The first year, the property tax for the SC property was about $500, the next year, it went up to >$2000 (!) because I was an out of state investor. Is this normal? And do all states do this? How do you go about doing your calculations when you don’t know how much the property tax can go up? Thanks in advance!
Owner occupants were likely living in that property before you. They get a much more favorable rate. You are paying the rate for someone who is an owner, but doesn’t live in the property. In the future, you can always check with the tax assessors office and they can tell you what your taxes will be.
My house I bought last years taxes were $1300 (based off old owners value) this year it will be around $3,500 this is on a $250k house haha it’s so ridiculous I have to laugh :-/
That’s horrible! way too expensive! there is a way to challenge these assessments. Every city has a process that’s a little bit different, so you need to check.
We ended up selling our house 2 days before thanksgiving. We had roughly 130k into it (48k down payment, 46k in reno, and 36k in paid off the mortgage in 3.5 years not to mention pocked the extra BAH. BAH is over $2,140 and mortgage was $1,340) We walked away with another 70k all in all 200k from the sale of the home plus waiting on our escrow of $5k+ and prorated insurance premiums. I put a good chunk of this money in a 2.23% CD that expires next July. My husband is AF we PCS next August so renting for now. If we move to a low cost area we plan to flip another house. Do you think the housing market might crash again? What would you do with this money in the current market and our situation? Husband is 6 years out from 20 years, he’s a master Sgt, we have 2 kids, he’s the main bread winner I have a very small part time gig. Thank you
I should add. He invests 20% of his base pay in his TSP and I am on target to invest 6k in my IRA.
Max his tsp, his ira and your ira every year until you no longer can afford to (after retirement). In my opinion, this comes before real estate investing.
Are you maxing tsp, and both of your IRAs? Have you paid off debt, including student debt? Cars?
No way to know what’s going to happen with the market. If anyone is sure, that doesn’t mean there right.
It could skyrocket, it could dive, anything in-between. I think you could flip, but be more conservative. Make sure there is wiggle room for mistakes, dips in the market, pandemic lockdowns, etc. Build in more profit. When I invest, I like to have some equity in the deal, especially these days. 20% down is great if you can get it.
Rich, it’s only letting me reply to myself. We have no debt what so ever. We own one car it’s a honda 2015 and we have $30k saved for a 2nd car. Kid’s colleges are paid for 2 years prepaid and 2 years with the GI bill (my husband transferred his GI bill to both kids and has fulfilled his time commitment). Between the 2 of us we have $131,000 in our retirement accounts. We are 32 and 35. I will try to convince my husband to max out his TSP he thinks 20% is already excessive. At 20% base pay he will be on track to save $11267.2 in his TSP in 2021. His TSP is 38k roth and 45k Traditional. We use to do all roth but changed to traditional to capture the earned income tax credit/EIC. 2020 will probably be our last year of being able to get the EIC so would you suggest we invest 50/50 or all in the roth?
I really like what you said about investing in cash flow first when you want to make money in real estate. My friend has a property that she wants to invest in and maybe she should rent it out for a bit first. Thank you for the advice about how you should have an investment property that makes a predictable cash flow each month for you first because appreciation is no guarantee.
Spot on with your focus on the 1% rule and cash flow focus. I have found that 1% is easier to target, and much less labor/time intensive when buying modestly sized multi fam apartments versus SFR’s. It’s all about comfort with leverage, but the cash flow, pay down and depreciation benefits are nicely magnified.
Thanks for the comment. All my properties are 1% with SFH’s. It’s possible, but not in every market!
Rich,
Just found you by way of Coach Carson. Like your attitude ;).
I wanted to ask. Since you live overseas, do you actually manage these properties yourself or hire a local property manager.
I am a full-time investor and quasi digital nomad. I have not invested in real estate due to concern about being overseas. But I see you have pulled it off.
If you have already written about this issue of managing while being overseas, my apologies in advance. I just stumbled onto your blog and haven’t seen all your articles.
Sincerely,
Tom
yeah, I write a lot about how i use a management company. Take a look at this article. https://richonmoney.com/finding-best-rental-property-manager/
too bad you didn’t realize the opportunity to sell and make a windfall on your real estate, markets cycle, including the stock market where there is no guarantee of success.
My point is, there is no way to know when the right time to sell is, unless you go into the future and look backwards, and then its painfully obvious to everybody. Invest for cash flow! Appreciation is just gravy you sometimes get!
Hi, I saw your excellent post about appreciation and am wondering where demolition figures into these calculations? I specialize in taking properties than are dilapidated and rejuvenating them to a holdable product. While the rents I collect go up, I can’t help but wonder if the renovation process comes to an end at some point. How many structures do you know that are around after say 300 years? The statistics we see are for home sales, where are the properties that are being demolished figure in? Maybe rebuilding is just considered a large CAPEX?
Not factoring in demolition. Something I’ve never considered. Most haven’t considered.