Homebuyer Cancellations Spike, New Price Forecast Shows Slow 2026

Dave:
More buyers are canceling their contracts right now, which is a little bit scary for sellers, but presents a big opportunity for buyers. Moody’s Analytics just released their long range housing price forecast and we’ve got frauds on the rise in real estate that you need to keep an eye out for this and more on today’s episode of On the Market. Hey everyone, welcome to On the Market. I’m Dave Meyer. Joined today by Kathy Fettke, Henry Washington and James Dainard back together after all being together in person at BP. K. It was so nice to see all of you, Kathy. I recorded last week, but I gave you credit for starting a 2000 person dance party by yourself at the club the last night in Vegas, so thank you for doing that. It really ended the conference in a bang.

Kathy:
Oh my gosh, I had the best time ever and I just was sad the next day when it was all over and I missed you guys. It

Dave:
Was good. Well, it was a great time, so it was great to see you all in person and hope to see more of them on the market community in person at the next BiggerPockets event, whether it’s BP Con or one of these small local events that we’re talking more about doing in the near future. Today we’re going through headlines. We’re going to talk about buyers canceling deals. We’ll talk about the long-term. I’m talking 10 year forecast for the housing market. A couple of instances of fraud that investors need to look out for and more. Let’s jump into it. James, start us off. What do you got for us?

James:
Alright, my news article cancellation rates hits record high in 2025, 56,000 US purchase agreements were canceled, which are 15.1% of the homes that went under contract, so people are bailing off of their deals and the rate before in 2024, I was at 14.3%, so we’re really only up 1%, but we are seeing as someone that’s in the market doing a lot of deals right now, there is a ton of deals getting canceled and I think this is really important for all investors right now as they go to sell anything, to take the time and make sure that your deal doesn’t fall apart when you have a market that is very low transactional. Like 2008, we had the same thing going on, not a lot of transactions, and if we could hook that magical buyer, it was essential that we got them to the close table. What the article really talks about is buyers aren’t emotionally connected to these properties. One example was the home buyer’s diamond ring fell in her toilet and flushed down during her inspection period and that was just too much for her to handle and she couldn’t buy that, just can’t buy the house. It just shows you the mindset of where we’re at right now. Everyone’s all pins and needles,

Dave:
But that kind of makes sense that buyers have gone back and now they don’t need to be bidding like crazy and they’re just going back to having a normal level of optionality. Totally.

Henry:
That’s exactly what I was thinking. This is what happens when there’s more inventory, right?

Kathy:
Yeah.

Henry:
Also from when they put it under contract to when they’re about to close 10 more houses came on the market in their price point and they start looking at those too, even though they’re under contract. So yeah, if the wind blows the wrong way, they’re like, well, I’ll just go buy this other one.

Kathy:
That’s exactly what I was thinking is it’s a buyer’s market and people are not familiar with what this means as sellers in particular, and maybe some agents don’t understand that in the old days, meaning a few years ago you couldn’t even do inspections and a lot of people ended up buying homes that needed a lot of work that they didn’t know about because they were so frantic to get into the market and that’s always a dangerous situation. I couldn’t believe that there were sellers saying No inspections best offer cash only, but that’s what happens in a seller’s market because there’s not enough inventory. When there’s too much inventory, then all of a sudden the buyer has the power. That’s the bottom line. Hey, this house isn’t good enough, I’m going to go get the one that’s better.

James:
And I do want to point out, I don’t actually think it’s a buyer’s market right now. I think it’s just we’re getting back to normal on market times. There’s lower transactions, there’s just less people looking and that’s why I also think there’s a lot of transactions flipping too. One theory I have is it’s the window shoppers that have been looking for two years and because real estate people really have to do their jobs now, before it was like, James, I’m a broker and do you want to buy a house? This is going to be great. Let’s go get you one. We’re just going to throw mud at the wall until we get you one. Right now those bodies aren’t there anymore and real brokers are going, I have to work the leads of people I’ve been talking to for years, but they’re also the window shoppers who are the most nervous and they’re the ones that will flip off a lot more and I think the biggest thing for investors right now, debt is expensive. It is way more expensive than it was three years ago. It takes longer to sell your properties. Now I personally offer performance of deals we bought we’re at least 25% longer in debt cost because of the times we cannot lose that buyer. And so where I see a lot of it is just investors don’t want to spend any more money worrying about their payment and all these other things, but you cannot lose that buyer, so make sure you get your pre-inspections.

Henry:
That was going to be my question, which was like what is your process to make sure you hold onto that buyer? And I was going to ask you about, I haven’t done them, I think I’ve done it once. What’s that process look like for you?

James:
We’re very rigorous in our punch out and we got this way in 2008, and so we have a three-step process. First thing is project manager or myself, if on the project we meet the contractor, we go through and we blue tape everything, then our listing broker because they have a different set of eyes, the ones that are going out and getting ready to get it listed, they are going through and they blue tape it themselves as well. So we have two sets of blue tapes going on and then we always have a pre-inspection come through a third party to look for any other sorts of issues with the house. Some investors don’t want that because they say, Hey, I don’t want to know about it, I don’t have to disclose it. I’m the opposite. I want to know about everything. That way we can go through that list and tell the buyers upfront if we’re not going to do something and what we did complete and what I will say is when that buyer gets in contract, their inspector is going to find a completely different list. That’s the way this goes

Henry:
Every

Dave:
Time,

James:
But what it does is it shows that potential buyer that we care.

Dave:
Do you actually share the pre-inspection with the buyer?

James:
We do. We are proactive. We go take photos of what we completed, we show invoices, and then one thing that we’ve also worked into our process is we pay the money to have that same inspector go sign off on everything because our team was doing it, but then it’s like, no, no, no, we want a third party to do it. And again, it’s not about the items, it’s just showing that flippers have a bad name too. They want to get things done, get it done as cheap as possible, don’t care, but it shows that potential buyer that we care about the product that we’re selling and that goes a really long way. We sell a lot of houses, they’re taking longer to sell, but we don’t lose many in contract and so take the time because if you lose that first buyer, you’re going to sell it for less and it’s going to take longer.

Dave:
That’s very good advice. I think for anyone who’s experienced this, I agree with you. It doesn’t necessarily seem like we’re fully in a buyer’s market because prices aren’t even dropping that much. It’s just that everything’s taking longer. I think people are really choosing to sit back and be as picky as they possibly could. It feels like for a couple of years it was the equivalent of Black Friday target people were just sprinting into the housing market and just grabbing whatever they could and just checking out really quickly. And now we’ve gone back to a normal shopping experience, which you’re saying and pointing out has some implications for sellers, but as a buyer this is a much better situation I think than we’ve seen in years. The flip side of these challenging selling conditions is that acquisitions are getting much, much easier. I’ve gotten more phone calls from agents and people in the last two months that I have in a long time with people offering actually good deals and for me as an investor, it feels good. People are competing for your money again instead of you having to go out and find opportunities and beg people to take your money for their deals.

Henry:
Yeah, no, it’s like that here too. My agent always keeps us up to date on inventory in our market. He told me we just hit four months of inventory on the market, which puts us at a neutral market. So technically here in northwest Arkansas, not a buyer’s market yet, not a seller’s market yet. We’re hovering right in the middle, but it looks like we’re moving towards a buyer’s market if inventory continues to rise. So you need to be able to track those things because all this does is help you adjust your underwriting. If you’re going to get more deals across your desk, like Dave’s saying, you better know how to evaluate them. I was literally having a conversation with a wholesaler right before this podcast and he was asking me could I raise my offer by five grand? It’s just five grand. Can you go up five grand? And I kept telling him no. I was like, this is where I need to be. I am just not willing to go above even a little bit on my numbers because I need that margin for holding costs. That margin is a big deal right now, and so even five grand, five grand is like two months of holding costs. That could be the difference between making money, breaking even or losing money if the deal sits too long. So no, I can’t go up on my numbers, so you really have to pay attention and evaluate your deals and underwrite appropriately

James:
And be proactive. That’s the key right now have multiple different ways that you can take down a deal with different types of financing. Usually when we ran our performance it was like, okay, how long is the construction going to take? That’s more what we were worried about and it’s like, all right, 60 days to close plus two months. Now I’m throwing plus four on because it’s just you got to bring in that extra time. And I also have to look at the returns differently, but going back to the article, you have to be proactive because a lot of the buyers are walking because they get their inspection and they throw these crazy numbers at the cost. You’re like, wait, you want me to pay it? Give you a hundred thousand dollars credit because my hot water tank is 12 years old and my roof only has five years left, and you want a gold toilet. I got you. But there’s also other things you guys right now, like with the government shutdown, there’s different types of loan products that are at risk and you got flood insurance, you got FHA. We have a mortgage broker on every one of our listings has pre-qualified that listing for rate buy downs, different types of financing options. And so that way when the buyer goes, oh, the loan I was going to get, it’s just not working out right? I’m going to wait this out for a while until this settles down.
Why?
What if we can get you a better loan where your rate’s lower, right? And these are ways that you can keep your deal together, punch it out, make sure that you provide that buyer the resources. Because unfortunately you guys, a lot of times their broker does not, and so we like to do the broker’s job by giving them other options so they don’t walk from the deal.

Kathy:
All I could say is that the way I define a buyer’ss market or a seller’s market is in a buyer’s market, the buyer has more power In a seller’s market, the seller has more power. So to me, having several subdivisions in different cities around the country and also just being on the buyer’s side as well on the sell side, it’s been very slow, but those are new homes and they are harder to sell because they’re more expensive. But on the buy side with our single family rental fund, it is totally time to negotiate. So it works great on the buy side these days for us and on the sell side is definitely harder.

Dave:
It’s just a perfect example of how every market has its trade-offs. Sometimes it’s better for sellers, sometimes it’s better for buyers. Sometimes it’s harder to find deals and there’s more competition, but you get tons of appreciation. Sometimes appreciation is slower, but it’s easier to find deals. The whole point of being an investor, the whole game is to adapt your strategy and your tactics to what’s going on. That’s why we have this podcast, so good job listening to this, but what we’ve talked about so far in today’s episode is just what’s going on short-term in the housing market, but I want to turn our conversation to the long-term prospects of the housing market. There was a new study that just came out showing where housing prices are heading by 2035. We’re going to get into that right after this break.
Welcome back to On the Market. I’m Dave Meyer here with James, Kathy and Henry talking the latest headlines. Before the break we talked about how more buyers are canceling and that does have some potential implications for the short-term direction of the housing market. We’re seeing things flatten out. A lot of markets are turning negative personally think more are going to turn negative over the next couple of years, but we are in real estate investing for the long term. It is not about what’s happening in the next six months or year or two years at least for me, I am in this industry because I believe in housing over the long run, and I saw an article this last week where Moody’s Analytics came out with their forecast for where housing prices are going to be through 2035. This is a very reputable company. They put out a lot of detailed information about the housing market and what they’re showing is that they think by the end of 2035, prices are going to be up. Anyone have any guess? 10 years?

James:
I’m going 11.5%,

Dave:
25%,

Henry:
20%.

Dave:
Kathy almost dead on

Henry:
23.5%. I mean technically I was the closest without going over. So price is right. I would’ve won.

Dave:
Bob Barker’s not here though, Henry, but both of you are very close. So what they’re expecting is that prices will go up 23% over the next 10 years. Now, I have some thoughts about this, but what are your reactions to that 23% over the next 10 years? Anyone have any feelings about that?

Kathy:
It’s only like 2% a year. Yeah, that’s very

Dave:
Normal. That’s right.

Kathy:
That’s super. Just normal and kind of like you said in your keynote, Dave, just like not overwhelmingly exciting, kind of boring, but the kind of market I like, I’ll take two to 3% any day. I

Dave:
Agree. I love it.

Kathy:
Yeah, that’s how

James:
I feel about

Kathy:
It.

James:
So boring. You need some anxiety in your life.

Kathy:
This is how I underwrite deals at two to 3%. That’s what I expect. That’s what I want. I just don’t want negative two to percent, that’s all.

Dave:
Exactly. Well, what they’re forecasting is in the next two years, they think that’s going to be a little bit more painful. They’re saying in 2026, nominal home prices are going to go up just a half a percent, 20, 27, 1 0.3%, and then from there, going back to normal levels of appreciation, two to 3% basically every year for the eight years after that. Now, I understand if you’ve gotten into the industry in the last five years, you’re probably like, that sounds terrible. But if you last 60 years, the average appreciation rate in the United States is 3.4%.
And what’s often lost in the conversation about appreciation on housing is a lot of appreciation is just inflation. Housing historically has marginally been better than the rate of inflation. And that’s not a bad thing because one, if you’re using leverage, you actually do better than inflation and two, inflation sucks. So using real estate as an inflation hedge is actually a really valuable thing. But I just want people to understand this because I think this age of investing purely for appreciation is coming to a halt. Now, there are certainly pockets of the country and places where you can still do that, but in normal times in the real estate market, you can’t just count on appreciation to grow wealth in any old average market in the United States in any old average neighborhood. So you need to do one of two things. You need to get really good at identifying markets if you want to do that appreciation play or you need to go back to fundamentals of real estate investing, which is buying great assets at great prices, renovating them, fixing them up, making them better, and then operating them well.
All that I’m saying here is that you just need to do normal things as a real estate investor, but I really just want to make sure people know, I see this on social media all the time. Investor appreciation, investor appreciation. You can do that if you’re very good at identifying the places where it will grow faster than this because there will be places of course that will grow faster than this, but you cannot count on this in a lot of areas, in even the ones that are growing quickly. Right now, I invest in the Midwest. I like it because it’s affordable and there’s cashflow, but I’m not counting on this appreciation that we’ve seen in Milwaukee at 11% for the last two years. That’s not going to continue. You should know that and you shouldn’t count on that. And if it happens to happen, great, but please do not count on that. We are not in that era anymore.

Kathy:
Well, let me tell you, James, I’m speaking to James that it’s not as boring as it sounds because Dave and I and Henry wouldn’t be so excited if it were seriously that boring. So if you have a buy and hold property and you, let’s just say a hundred thousand dollars property, you put 20% down, that’s $20,000. Let’s just say the property goes up 2% in one year, that’s $2,000. You put 20,000 in, so you made $2,000 on a $20,000 down payment in one year. We’re not talking about cashflow. You got to add the cashflow in there, the tax benefits, the loan pay down, but if we only look at appreciation, that’s a 10% return. So it’s not 2%. And that’s where people get confused. They think if you paid all cash, you’re making 2%, and that’s why owning real estate in slow growth markets with all cash is not the best return, is probably the worst return because then you’ve got expenses and stuff, but if you have leveraged, that is where you make your money and that’s why like Dave, I like the Midwest, I like the south, I like affordable places because I could still find homes in that a hundred, $200,000 range and make these kinds of numbers work.
So anyway, that’s why I’m a fan girl of 2%.

Henry:
Man, I love boring real estate. It’s the best. It’s the so much better. It’s the best. It’s predictable. It’s worked for so long, James, just go jump off a cliff every six months and you’ll get your dopamine dump and then just buy some boring real estate.

James:
Are we having an intervention right now? Is this the deal junkie intervention?

Dave:
But in all honesty, I think what we’ve seen over the last few years is we saw this crazy sellers market. Now we’re moving. It’s not a crazy buyer’s market, but transaction volume in the housing market is so slow right now. It is 20, 30% below. To me when I look at this, and I do think prices need to at least in real terms need to come down a little bit. We need more affordability in the housing market, and if we can get it more affordable and prices just grow at one to 3% every year, we’re going to get back to that boring, old, predictable housing market where you’re not worrying about how days on market are changing every single week or these things will just be much more predictable. They’ll move a little bit slower, and to me, predictable equals profitable. If you know what’s going to happen, you can adjust your strategy to make money from it and to build a business around it. It’s the lack of certainty that’s difficult to navigate in whether the market’s booming or slowing down. It’s the uncertainty. That’s the trouble, not necessarily whether you’re in one kind of market or another.

James:
I will say I don’t think it’s boring. I think there’s actually a lot of opportunity in that model right now, especially since dirt is low. People don’t want to buy dirt, so you can get rentals on some really good land right now, and if you put that 20% down, that’s how you really enhance that value, but slow and steady, it wins the race.

Dave:
All right, well, this is a great conversation and just something for everyone to keep in mind. Again, it is not something that you can’t navigate, but it’s something you need to adapt into your strategy. We do have to take one more quick break, but when we come back, we have some stories that are a little bit concerning about fraud. To me, this is the real risk in real estate right now, more than anything going on in the market is fraud is on the rise, and we’re going to bring some of it to your attention to make sure that you can navigate around it and make sure you avoid it in your business. We’ll be right back. Welcome back to On the Market. I’m here with Henry, James and Kathy talking about the latest headlines. We’ve talked about long-term forecasts, buyers canceling, more contracts. Henry, what do you got for us?

Henry:
All right, so on October 1st, 2025, the Federal Trade Commission announced that due to a lapse in government funding that it’s mechanisms for fraud and for reporting fraud and identity theft would be unavailable to customers during the government shutdown. So several services such as report fraud.com and identity theft.gov will be temporarily closed. They won’t be making any updates to the website. In other words, anything that they’re tracking in terms of the fraud and what’s going on in the country is not going to be updated, reported on or put on the website, and so that is opening the door for more fraud to happen in the country as a whole. But as it relates to real estate investors, I just think this is something that we need to be paying attention to because with technology and ai, it is very easy to trick people, and so you just need to be aware of what’s going on and that fraud is on the rise and being careful.
We do things like, I wired money last night. You need to be aware that wire fraud exists and people know that it’s harder for those things to be reported on. It’s harder for those things to be tracked, and so there’s an increase in wire fraud. I got a call yesterday. Someone showed up at a job site. It’s not even a job site, it’s a house I have listed on the market. It was a concrete company and they were ready to do a concrete job at my property. I didn’t call them. I don’t have a project manager. Nobody else would’ve called them. So there was something weird going on that this guy showed up. He was obviously upset. So you just need to be careful and make sure that we’re paying attention, extra careful attention to our deals, our underwriting, there’s title fraud happening. There’s situations where people are trying to deed properties into other LLCs and people can lose their properties. So think about wire transfers and closings, secure emails and communications from your bank. You want to be able to verify that if you get a secure email that it is actually from your bank before you open it.

Dave:
How do you do that? What are the things you do, all of you to avoid these kinds of frauds? I am so paranoid about these things. Do you guys have any tricks for it?

Kathy:
For wires, you’ve always, at least for me, I always call the title rep. I’m even afraid that I’m not talking to the actual title rep, so I ask, oh, I do the

Dave:
Same thing.

Kathy:
So I ask, tell me about my file and make sure it’s the right company and look it up online to verify that I’m calling the right company and then verify the wire instructions over the phone. It just, I’ve seen it too many times. It happened to us on a development where $300,000 got stolen. We were able to claw it back, but not all of it.

Dave:
I’ve honestly been thinking about just going back to cashier’s checks. I’m like, I’m just going to stop wiring money because at least a cashier’s check it takes longer, but at least there’s recourse for it if something goes wrong and you can walk in somewhere and hand it to the person, you know need to do it with.

James:
Yeah, we got stung for 40 grand on wire fraud,

Dave:
How

James:
It was a process we had to update. We had our ops person that’s been with us for, he’d been with us a really long time. He had authorization to send wires for us. He’d been with us over 10 years and someone had cloned my email and they watched me for months
And they saw how me and him communicated via email, and when they sent him an email, it looked like I wrote it and he didn’t think much of it. It was a 40 grand earnest money wire and it fired out, and that was because we had authorized it. We didn’t get our money back. It was gone, and so we had to update our processes like that doesn’t happen anymore. My business partner and I, we used to verify each other’s wires quite a bit, just get the money out. We don’t do that anymore. If it’s my deal, I’m verifying if it’s his deal, he verifies. And so yeah, you really do got to be careful.

Henry:
And just so people know, these are things that you guys were doing prior to the government shutdown, and so now that the shutdown is in place, there’s more opportunity for people to take advantage of you. So you must be diligent. You can request that your bank send you secure emails that require you to log in with an email and a password in order to review the email, so at least you understand or know where that’s coming from. I have the phone number, the personal phone number of the banker’s I deal with the most. I’m always able to call them separately and make sure that, Hey, is this email from you guys? Is this wire transfer happening today? Right. It’s just about taking the extra step and taking a little more time. If you get an email that just feels a little funny, call and verify,

Kathy:
And it’s AI that’s really going to take this to the next level,

Henry:
It’s scary

Kathy:
Whether the government shut down or not. And a good friend of ours, somebody was able to fake his voice and did a Zoom call and it was his voice saying, I need $300,000 transferred. And a bookkeeper was like, okay, they didn’t do video. That was the difference. But now video’s going to be good enough.

Dave:
They’re going to

Kathy:
Be able to do that, especially for those of us who are on video a lot. It’s so easy to fake us. So I don’t really know how you prevent that, but I think it’s going to take companies bringing in specialists on that to protect their computers because people, like it was James that said, they can log into your computer and start to watch the communications and send emails as if it’s from you. Is that kind of how they did it?

James:
And that was back in 2016. So this, they’ve gotten a lot more advanced. So you just have to invest in those things. But as you build out your businesses, you got to start planning ahead for this. Like, oh, I got to build in fraud security into my budget for the year instead of marketing. It’s just different.

Dave:
Alright, well, we actually have one more story about fraud before we get out of here. Kathy, share this one with us.

Kathy:
Yeah, this one really bums me out because it is someone I know, I’m not close friends, but a colleague that I would run into at conventions and conferences and stuff and is actually doing a similar business to what Real Wealth does. But this headline is from United States Attorney’s Office, central District of California, former CEO of Orange County based private equity fund charged with conning investors out of $62 million via bogus promissory notes. So this is Marco. He is got a podcast in real estate, well-known ada. It’s basically ada. He was selling turnkey properties, kind of just a very bread and butter business, doing great. Then in 2020 he started sending out emails about raising money for, I think it was cannabis warehouses. Bottom line is he was raising money through promissory notes, which is basically just a promise to pay. It isn’t secured to anything. According to information filed on Monday, centrally solicited hundreds of investors nationwide to invest in these unsecured promissory notes ranging from 25,000 to 500,000 and promised a high yield monthly interest rate. Here’s where people should have been like monthly interest rate, approximately 12 to 15% over three to seven years. Basically. He wasn’t able to do that and the promise couldn’t be kept because it was such a high offer. I think probably cannabis was yielding huge returns, but then he started investing in theater and crypto and it sounds like all of that would’ve been okay. If somebody says, give me money promissory note, I promise to pay you back, we’re going to invest it in crypto. It doesn’t go well. You can’t collect, it’s not secure to anything.
There’s no fraud there. If you agree, we’re going to invest in this, it doesn’t go well. I don’t think you can sue. I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong. Where he made his mistake is then he continued, at least according to this, raising money and paying off the former investors, which is of course Ponzi. So there’s so much to unpack here. Number one, please guys, don’t invest in things that people are saying you’re going to get 12 to 15% a month. That’s very hard to do.

Dave:
Yeah, that just doesn’t

Kathy:
Make sense. Come on,

Dave:
If it’s too good to be true. Was that monthly or annually?

Kathy:
Maybe it was wrong. He promised via marketing a high yield monthly interest rate. Maybe it was 12 to 15% a year. It’s perhaps worded,

James:
Which is

Kathy:
A weird here,

James:
High return.

Kathy:
I mean, that’s pretty standard and sure, I’m sure he could have achieved 12 to 15% a year. That’s not uncommon. Yeah, that’s

Dave:
Reasonable.

Kathy:
But when things go bad, if you are operating the deal, just tell your investors, don’t try to raise more money to make up for the mistake. Unless you tell the new investors, Hey, we’re raising money to make up for this mistake. Oh my gosh, this might be the 10th person I know who’s done a Ponzi. It’s like maybe they’re just afraid to admit that didn’t go well. Everything would be okay if he just was like, Hey, it’s not going to work, but then you can’t raise more money. So anyway, what do you guys think?

Dave:
These are allegations so far. It’s just an indictment. There hasn’t been,

Kathy:
Yes, it’s allegations

Dave:
Only case yet, but whether it’s this one or other situations, it just seems like the world of syndications in real estate is rife with this kind of risk. This stuff just exists. So I am curious, Kathy, you raise money for syndications. How can people trust operators? I invest in syndications. It’s a great way to invest. I like it, but I do it with only people I know personally. This is someone you did know. So how can you protect yourself against these things?

Kathy:
Well, there’s a couple things in this. It says the balance sheet sent to investors hid more than $90 million in debt and included inflated assets in Ponzi scheme fashion, centrally made interest payments to investors using other investors’ money. So again, alleged, and this is just a press release from the attorney’s office. I knew right away this wasn’t a deal because unsecured, why would you do an unsecured note when you can do a secured note? For anyone who doesn’t know the difference, a promissory note is a promise to pay. But if a company can’t pay, I’m sure it was an LLC, you can sue the LLC, but there’s no money in it. It’s a limited liability company, so you’re not going to get anything back in an unsecured

Dave:
Note. It’s literally just

Kathy:
A prompt why?

Dave:
That’s literally what it’s,

Kathy:
Whereas a secured one, I’m in a deal right now where I lent money, the deal didn’t go well. It’s secure to the property. We’re going to take the property. We have collateral. What’s so great about real estate? So right off the bat, when he approached me about it, I was like, never in a million years. But how do you vet? Thankfully you guys have passive pockets to help people with the many, many intricacies of investing in passive projects with syndicators. There’s far more than I could discuss here, but track record is super helpful, but not everything because there’s plenty of people with track records who have bad deals. So you’ve, there’s a whole lot of ways.

Henry:
How about background checks?

Dave:
I like your idea, Henry. What about background checks? Can you go hire a old school private eye to go follow them around instead? Yeah,

Henry:
Depending on how much money you’re putting into it. Why wouldn’t you consider doing something like that? You background check for tenants in that Rent your property for a thousand dollars a month.

James:
I’ve done that before.

Kathy:
A private eye.

James:
Yeah,

Kathy:
I’ve done it. Yeah, I’ve done it after. Like I said, I know 10 people now who started off doing great business and then ended up in a Ponzi. It’s crazy. Yeah. Yes. Background checks.

James:
Investing in just a promissory note is such a bad idea. When you’re going to invest in anything, you got to vet the asset. What is it being secured against? Will it stand on its own if the operator goes away, right? That is your security right there. Then yes, the operator, you should check out, do they have assets? Do they own real estate? I’m not going to invest with someone if they don’t own assets. That’s weird to me. It’s all you’re doing is taking on debt everywhere you go. Are they responsible? Do they have good credit? Maybe they have a story about it, but good credit. Do they have assets and also do they have money? I’ve experienced all sorts of fraud in the last 20 years from Ponzi schemes to fake sellers with fake beads, with fake wholesalers, to fake contractors. Every time I’ve gotten stung, it’s because I kind of didn’t dig into the person good enough. I surface looked at it.

Dave:
All right. Well, this is a depressing the show. Well, thank you guys for bringing these stories. I’m joking about it being depressing. Obviously, we want to bring these things to light so people are aware of the things that are going on, because this happens, unfortunately in most industries, it happens in real estate and as people, it’s been a tough couple of years in real estate, and as people find themselves in compromised situations, unfortunately, sometimes they turn to unsavory options. We don’t know if this particular person is guilty or not, but we have seen a lot of convictions with these kinds of things in real estate over the last couple of years. So something to keep an eye out for, but as we talked about earlier in the show, a lot more opportunity coming in real estate, there’s better buying opportunity, and that’s something that we should all be excited about. So James, Kathy Henry, thank you all so much for being here. It was fun hanging out with you.

Kathy:
Always. So fun.

Henry:
Good times.

Dave:
All right, well, thank you all so much for listening to this episode of On The Market. We’ll see you next time.