Florida Housing Market 2026: Crash or Buying Opportunity? | Lex Levinrad

Mike Hambright (00:33)

Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. I’m here today with Lex Levinrad. We’re gonna be talking about kind of a state of the union, what’s going on in the Florida market. I just saw an article yesterday that was talking about how disproportionately there’s more houses for sale in Florida right now than any other state. Obviously, Florida’s had a big upswing here. The question is, could it sink? Could it go down? And Lex is an expert there, so we’re gonna talk about that. The reality is, is we’re gonna talk about, you know, Florida had some woes during the last downturn. Could that happen again or is it protected or insulated from that? So

We’re gonna find out from the expert. Lex, good to buddy.

Lex Levinrad (01:03)

Likewise, Mike, good to see you.

Mike Hambright (01:05)

Yeah, it was good to catch up with a while. You’ve I know you’ve been on my shows many times over the years, but honestly I think it’s probably been four, five, six years. it’s been a little while.

Lex Levinrad (01:13)

It’s been

a while for sure. I mean I remember being on your podcast way back when, I wanna say probably ten years ago maybe, and it’s definitely been a while since I saw you in

Mike Hambright (01:22)

Yep.

Lex Levinrad (01:23)

person for sure.

Mike Hambright (01:24)

Yeah, yeah. So let’s let’s talk a little bit about well talk about what’s going on in the Florida market. Before we do, tell us a little bit about you and your background for those that maybe don’t know ya.

Lex Levinrad (01:32)

Alright, so I’m a real estate investor in Florida. I’ve been investing for now twenty three years since two thousand and three. prior to that I was a stockbroker and money manager for about twelve years. so I’ve been doing investing in real estate in in the state of Florida pretty much from the run up before the financial crisis through the financial crisis and then after the financial crisis, you know. So

I’ve flipped 1,500 houses and we’ve got 7,500 plus students that we’ve worked with. We’ve trained a bunch of students that are now active wholesalers, rehabbers, landlords. some of them run pretty big operations. We’ve got one student down here in South Florida that runs a two and a half million dollar year wholesaling operation. And you know, we we I was a landlord from 2003 till the financial crisis.

then we got into buying REOs and bank owned properties and then we learned how to flip them and we became really good at wholesaling. At one point we were in the top three wholesalers in the state of Florida, doing around 30 deals a month. and then we started noticing everyone we were selling the houses to were fixing and flipping them and making a ton of money. So we got into the fix and flip business in about 1213, 2012-13. And

when was it I back for many, many years? Everything working, wholesaling, fixing and flipping, landlording. And then around 2020 I was actually at a mastermind, I think 2019, when they were talking about taking some chips off the table and maybe deleveraging, and I started thinking, you know, we’ve been making a lot of money for like 11 years, it’s maybe not such a bad idea because I don’t really want to go through the financial crisis again, at least the same way, fully

Mike Hambright (03:08)

Yeah.

Lex Levinrad (03:09)

invested in my rentals.

And so I started doing that and I started selling, and of course, the whole 2020 epidemic and the lowering of interest rates caused real estate to really go up a lot. So it was a great opportunity for me to take some money off the table. I mean, we had rentals in places like Fort Pierce we bought for fifteen, twenty thousand dollars and we sold for two and a quarter. places like Fort St. Lucie we bought for thirty-five thousand in two thousand and nine that

We sold for three twenty five, three fifty. So it was a great opportunity to take money off the table and kind of position ourselves for the next event, let’s say, which is where we’re at now.

Mike Hambright (03:45)

Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think what’s what’s interesting is when you have i and and I started in 2008, so maybe a few years after you, but we have been through a couple cycles, right? And I think the context of time is really important in this business. And quite frankly, most people that get into this business don’t stick around long enough to see that context of what I call playing the long game, right? It’s like there’s you we’re in a cycle. There’s really two things. One is when you’re new, you don’t really

know what’s possible or what’s happened in the past because you didn’t experience that. Once you’ve experienced it, that’s why you’ve got to get around, you know, guys like you to learn from like, I’ve seen this play before and it’s going to be a little bit different. But I, you know, I kinda I have the playbook kind of. I kind of know what to do, right? And and I think the other big realization when you’ve been in the business for a while is to understand that every time there is a down cycle or something bad happens, there is always a silver lining.

to that. There’s always an an opportunity, right? The question is, can you identify it? And you’re more likely to be able to identify it if you’ve seen that, if you’ve seen that show before, right?

Lex Levinrad (04:48)

Yeah, absolutely. Well I think you know

So for me what happened was, you know, going back to my background before I even got into real estate, you know, so I was a stockbroker and financial advisor and I got completely destroyed in the two thousand stock market crash with the Nasdaq meltdown. And then, you know, I decided, okay, I’m done with that, I’m gonna go to real estate and I moved to Florida, primarily because it was affordable to buy rental properties. and once I got into Florida, I, you know, just started buying rentals using the buyer repair rent refinance strategy and

it it it was great and it was booming 03, 04, 05, 06. And I never considered that the financial crisis could happen. And then when it happened, I looked at it and I said, wow, you know, like the stocks went down 2,000. Now here we are seven, eight years later and it’s going down again. And what do I do to recover from the situation? And the more I looked at it, the more I realized how we tend to move like as investors and as people we tend to

follow a herd instinct. So we look very, very short term. So like in nineteen ninety nine, we’re making all this money day trading in the stocks, but we don’t think, well, what if it stops? And so the same thing happened in seven, eight. So

With the financial crisis and with all the banks coming down, I remember it was around October two thousand eight, you know, so we’d seen Bear Stearns collapse and Lehman collapse and this whole situation. And I started looking at it and I was like, you know, it’s almost like people feel like real estate’s never gonna recover. But we live in the greatest country in the world, and the state that I live in, Florida, is the fastest growing state in the country. And the area where I live, this whole Fort Lauderdale, Miami area,

gets more visitors per year than Paris. I mean it’s like people want to come here. They to go to Disney World. They want to check out Miami. People are moving here constantly from the Caribbean, from South America, from Central America, from Europe. So there’s this tremendous amount of demand. So I said to myself, how can the area in the fastest growing state in the country everyone’s trying to move to, how can that not recover? I mean people need to live somewhere, they need to rent.

So then I started looking at these REOs and going, this is just ridiculous how how how how crazy

Mike Hambright (06:51)

I don’t know how

Lex Levinrad (06:52)

cheap it is. And it’s a two hundred and twenty five thousand dollar house going down to fifty grand on the MLS as a bank owned property.

And that was when I got the idea of this whole, distressed real estate institute and talking about now’s the time to get involved. And so we started focusing on buying and bidding on these bank-owned properties and quickly realized we couldn’t possibly buy more of them because there were so many. At one point there were 7,000 of them sitting on our MLS. So that was when we saw that while

The local people were frozen and afraid to buy because they were so trapped in the negativity. Our phones were ringing with people calling from Europe, from China, from Israel, from everywhere, looking for deals. And that was when we got into wholesaling. And we just started tying up these properties. Originally, a lot of the bank owned properties on auction sites, like Hubzu and stuff, and then just flipping them and double-closing them. And we wrote a book, I wrote a book called Wholesaling Bank Owned Properties back in 2010 that spoke.

about that concept and then you know from there that evolved into seeing how much money the buyers from us were making on the fix and flips and we evolved from there you know so it’s been an interesting transition

Mike Hambright (07:58)

Yeah.

Lex Levinrad (08:00)

and I think you do learn a lot from the

history of being in it, but I think you learn a lot from your failures too, and not only your successes. And I think that’s what makes you cautious or more cautious as you go along. So that’s why for me, first time, you make a million dollars and then the stock market crashes. The second time you buy, 3.6 million dollars worth of real estate in like 1.8 months and then the the financial crisis happens. So the third time around you get a little smarter or maybe a little bit more conservative and you say, hey perhaps I should take some

money off the table. but being conservative can also, be a double edged sword because sometimes you can end up being too conservative. So, where we are

Mike Hambright (08:37)

sure, yeah.

Lex Levinrad (08:37)

right now is a very interesting place, you know?

Mike Hambright (09:28)

Well let’s talk about that real fast. And by the way, I I always say you learn way more from your failures than your successes. You don’t really learn much in a success because everybody thinks that they were like brilliant or it’s because I’m so smart or so good looking or whatever it is, right? It’s like, you got lucky. Usually you got lucky and you learn more way more in my experience with your failures. But just maybe real briefly, just talk about the status of the market right now. And then I want to compare it to the last downturn and and talk about maybe what’s different.

Lex Levinrad (09:56)

So you mentioned something before where you were talking about like you know crisis and opportunity and how when we have bad situations, a lot of times there’s an opportunity that comes from that. And when we first started our first real estate training seminar back in two thousand and nine, we had on our first PowerPoint screen we have the symbol, the Chinese character for opportunity, and it basically is made up of two characters, which is one is danger, crisis and opportunity. So basically in other words

out of every crisis comes opportunity. And you also mentioned about thinking in the long term. So one of my biggest things that I think after being in this for 23 years and even my prior 12 years of sitting in the stock market is that we tend to as individuals and investors we tend to focus very short term. We look through the review mirror but we only look back 12 or 18 or 24 months. We never really look in long-term cycles and see this whole 18 year long-term real estate cycle. And I think

That if we started looking, you know, like the Chinese and saying, you know, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago because that’s how long it’s going to take to bear fruit, then we have to look at this opportunity and say, you know what, if prices have pulled down substantially in some markets, as much as 30%, 35%, yes, they may pull down further, but at some point in time there’s going to be coming a fantastic buying opportunity. So if you look at it short term, you go, man, you know, I got into this wholesaling game and it’s tough and there’s no buyers, and short term.

you want to exit but if you look at it long term you realize like wow this could be like another 2008 nine opportunity and then we could be off to the races for another 11 12 years so I

think

Mike Hambright (11:34)

Mm-hmm.

Lex Levinrad (11:35)

that where we are now is very interesting because it’s very bifurcated. What I mean by that is like the hot markets like the Miami’s the Boca Raton’s they are pretty much everything’s selling there’s no pullback

A lot of people that are moving to Florida from the Northeast, moving from other places, California, etc. And you know, people who are wealthy, people who are cash buyers, they’re gonna go into those great neighbors and they’re gonna buy. I think the market that that’s not really the market that I specialize or focus on as far as investing. That that’s what I live in. But when it comes to investing, I focus more in middle America. I try and look at the demographic and population and growth trends of where people are going. And that’s what allowed me to identify Port St.

Lucy back in two thousand and three. I was like, wow, here’s this town I’ve never heard of, and it’s the fastest growing town in America. It’s one of the fastest growing school systems, and the job market growth is tremendous, and I gotta go up there and check it out. It was only an hour from Boca Raton, and we started buying houses up there, you know, where there were sixty, seventy, eighty, a hundred thousand. They went all the way up to two and a quarter and then in the financial crisis dropped as low as fifty on the MLS for bank loans. So

I think when I look at Middle America, I see a completely different market to the luxury market. I see a market where prices have pulled back tremendously. Southwest Florida, places like Lakeland, places like south of Orlando, Brevard County. I see pullbacks of thirty, thirty-five percent. Neighborhoods where we were bidding on properties in the two hundreds and we’re now in the one hundreds. so substantial

Mike Hambright (13:07)

Okay.

Lex Levinrad (13:08)

differences, but at the same time substantial opportunity. For example,

We have a house our student

Mike Hambright (13:13)

I mean.

Lex Levinrad (13:13)

got under contract for 105. They flipped it to us at 110. We put it on the MLS and sold it at 145. The buyer at 145 just sold it at 265. So there still are buyers out there because there’s not a lot of inventory on the MLS. So yes, on the one hand, it’s challenging because interest rates are high and there’s a lot less buyers and buyers are more picky. But at the same time, in the select neighborhoods, inventory is moving. So I think as long as you’re buying right, whether it’s a

rental or anything else, you can do really well in this market moving forward.

Mike Hambright (13:45)

Yeah. Yeah. And and I would say, you know, maybe it’s maybe it’s pulled back a little bit since the COVID era, but Florida has become, you know, one of the most desirable states in in the country to live and has probably the one of the fastest growing populations, I’m sure, in the certainly in the top three or four, I’d say. you know, obviously all the kind of sunbelt states and people are moving away from some of the states that are, less affordable and things like that. And so I think

Yeah, maybe talk a little bit about what’s different this time, some of the key things from an investor’s perspective that are different in this market we find ourselves in now than in two thousand eight.

Lex Levinrad (14:20)

So the oldest saying, you know, like on Wall Street they always used to say, it’s different this time, like, it’s the internet. We didn’t have the internet before, so it’s not gonna be a bubble and then of course it was a bubble. So now we have like, it’s AI, it’s different this time. I don’t know if it’s ever really different. I think it’s always like follows patterns.

We tend as humans to get overly eager when things are good and we tend to get overly depressed when things are bad. And I think that if we follow Warren Buffett’s principle and be fearful when everyone’s greedy and be greedy when everyone’s fearful, then we can be in a good situation. I think the key thing for operators is to survive these downturns because what worked in our up market when we had the wind in our back doesn’t work now. So, you know, wholesalers

Who were used to flipping deals and making thirty or forty thousand dollars in a house and having tremendous volume, suddenly their bio pool has diminished. There’s something like there were ninety thousand wholesalers, and I think I heard from Carrot, now it’s down to nine thousand wholesalers. So a lot of people have exited the business because their bio pool was substantially diminished. And, the fix and flip guys are are buying less, right? So you have to operate cautiously, you have to survive a market like this, and you have to position yourself to be in the right

place to buy and take advantage of the bottom before the market turns. Once the market turns, it’s all different ball game because then everyone starts flooding back into the market, prices go up, and then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more prices go up, the more people want to come in. And you can see it if you look at even like real estate training seminars, you know, so in the peak of the market in 2022, I mean, everyone wanted to get into real estate education. Everybody wanted to

attend boot camps and learn how to get involved because they saw ten years of everyone around them making money. But then as soon as the you know word on the street became like, real estate’s not so hard anymore, then a lot of people disappeared and went on to something else. But the reality is is that the people that are getting trained up right now to learn how to buy bank owned properties and how to buy and you know pre foreclosures and how to put together a short sale package are those people who are going to really be benefiting and dominating

this next downturn if we have one.

Mike Hambright (16:24)

Yeah. Talk a little bit about in your experience. like a lot of you know, a lot of the challenges that happen are there’s a lot of people that are in the make money space, right? I mean, you coach people, I’ve coached a lot of people, but there’s a lot of people that just come in and as soon as something seems hard, they’re like onto the next thing, onto the next thing, onto the next thing. The reality is back to kind of talking about what where you learn the most is from your failures and the fact that everything that’s worthwhile will get hard, right? Like you might

jump out of real estate and into crypto trading or something. It’s like it’s hot right now, or maybe it was at some point. but that too will get hard. Like everything gets hard after you’ve done it for some period of time. And if you just always jump to the next thing, you never get proficient or good at anything. You’re just constantly starting over, right? And so

Lex Levinrad (17:08)

Correct.

Mike Hambright (17:08)

I think that but you you understand and I understand that there’s a lot of value in just

riding the markets up and down, understanding how to play the long game, understanding that there’s there’s always opportunities even when times get tough. So just talk about that kind of phenomenon and your lessons from that and maybe your advice to people that it’s important to learn up and down because it just makes you a better operator to be able to play the long game over time.

Lex Levinrad (18:14)

Well, I think that, you know, so I

see this a lot with students that come into our training program and they want to learn how to wholesale so they get attracted to coming to like let’s say a wholesale boot camp or they wanna learn how to fix and flip. And then when they, see the reality of today’s market, they go, well, I can’t do this right now, or this is hard, or this doesn’t work. And I think they’re missing the bigger picture which you were talking about before, which is the fact that look, long term if you go and buy a you know, that house that that student of mine got for a hundred and five thousand, you buy a house like that and you fix it up and you throw a tenant in it

You put a 15 year mortgage on it, then 15 years from now it’s going to be free and clear. And 15 years from now, the rent on it’s going to have doubled. So if it’s a 200,000 ARV house that you picked up for 105, and let’s say you rented for 120, you picked up you know 60, 50, 60,000 worth of equity when you bought it. you can do a cost segregation and get a massive tax deduction right now. And then you sit and you have your tenant basically pay down your debt, and then after let’s say 15 years, maybe if you pre

Paying mortgage a little bit, let’s say your mortgage payments 900 and you send in 1100, you can pay that 15-year mortgage down in 11 or 12 years. And then you know, let’s say rents now doubled from $2,000 a month to $4,000 a month, and now the property’s doubled from $200 to $400. So now you’ve got a $400,000 asset giving you $4,000 a month. I think the biggest mistake investors make is they think, I’m getting into this for cash flow. So they buy this rental and it’s making them $2,000 a month, but their payments are $17.50 a month, and then that $250 gets wiped out.

first time an AC goes or a plumbing issue or whatever it is and they go, this is no good, I’m not making any money out of it. And I’m like, you don’t make the money from that, you make the money from sitting. You make the money from just being patient and waiting.

Mike Hambright (19:52)

I mean yeah.

Lex Levinrad (19:53)

So for me, buying rentals in 03 and 04 and 05 and then having the whole financial crisis happen, you know, and then just having to sit on those properties all the way up until

2019, 2020, when I felt like, okay, you know what, at this point in time, this house that I bought for 25 grand, I can sell for two and a quarter and I can put that money out at twelve percent on a hard money loan. So risk reward, I think I’m better at putting it on the hard money loan and getting my twelve percent on my cash as opposed to leaving it in that property. And so you really just have to look at the long term, and I think that I say to people like we we’re focusing right now in Brevard County, because I see it very much like the way Port Saint.

Was back in 2003. I mean, you’ve got SpaceX just had the IPO, you’ve got Blue Origin there, you’ve got Elon Musk there, you’ve got Cape Canaveral, you’ve got NASA, you’ve got Lockheed Martin, all the defense industry, all of this seems to be like really booming right now with the what we got going on politically, and it doesn’t look like it’s slowing down anytime soon. So I see 10,000 jobs that are going to be manufactured in this area, and I see where, you know,

Houses are selling on the MLS for one hundred and eighty, two hundred, two hundred and twenty thousand.

that can be picked up from a pay-per-click campaign or a postcard for 110 or 120. We’ve got multiple students that have bought houses at ninety-four thousand, a hundred and five, a hundred and seven, a hundred and fifteen, and these are all hundred and eighty, two hundred thousand dollar houses. So I just say to myself, if you’re a short term operator and you just say, I’m gonna buy that and fix it up and flip it and make thirty grand, you could do that and that’s fine. You made your thirty grand, but you’ll pay taxes and you’ll probably spend that money while you’re looking for your next deal. But if you can be a little bit more of a long term operator

And you can buy that house and just say, I’m not doing anything with this for 15 years, and I’m gonna do the hard work. In other words, I’m gonna do the landlording and the evictions, and you know, the tenant trashed my place, and I gotta spend eight grand cleaning it up for the next tenant, and it’s not easy, right? That’s why we call it the PETA factor, the pain in you know factor, right? So that’s what scares a lot of people away. They’re like, I can’t deal with this landlording stuff. And I always say, Don’t look at that. That’s the small stuff. Look at it like the way you’d send $500 a month to an index.

Fund every month. Just look at it like that, every time you have a repair. It’s tax deductible and your property’s going up over time. And if you look at it like that, you’re going to make a ton of money. Now, there does become an opportunity to wholesale and fix and flip when you get good at marketing. Because if you’re really good at generating leads and you decided you want to pick up one or two rentals a month as an example, well, what are you going to do if you’ve got you know eight, ten motivated seller appointments and there’s four houses to buy? So you cherry pick this one as a rental, you say maybe I’ll fix and flip this one.

But what do you do with the other four or five houses? And that’s where being able to network with other investors who have masterminds like yours, being able to, flip that house and not being greedy, not trying to jam 40 grand down someone’s throat, but just saying, you know what, this lead cost me $200. I’m fine making 10 grand profit on it. I’m gonna sell it to my buddy over there. I met at a REIA meeting.

And he’s gonna make some money in it. He’s gonna come back to me and be a repeat buyer. So I think, the marketing component is such a huge component. Like if I look back on my twenty-three years in this business, I wish I’d understood that better when I started out, how important that marketing is and it’s really definitely changed over the years.

Mike Hambright (23:08)

Yeah. In my experience, I mean this is how I’ve always operated. I have a rental portfolio. I but I you know, I if I look back, I kept only unfortunately about ten percent of the houses that I bought of you know, hundreds of houses I only kept ten percent. I’m in hindsight, I’ve got multiple figures of equity and and it’s like, I wish I’d kept way more, right? That is hindsight, and that’s what you gotta learn from guys like you and me. But I think I’ve always let the marketing drive I’ve always let the deal drive what I do with it. So I know if I cast a wide net with marketing.

That not every property is a great rental. Like the higher end stuff, and not really high end, but median or maybe 1.5 times median price point. Like I’m gonna fix and flip that. If it’s a little bit below the median, that might make a better rental. If it’s way below the median in the hood, like I’m just gonna wholesale that thing and not deal with it. Everybody has their own buy boxes, but I think that’s probably one of the lessons that I think you and I would share with people is don’t be so specific and saying I only do one thing. I’m only a wholesaler, I’m only

a landlord is is to let the opportunities come in and sort them out. Would would you agree with that?

Lex Levinrad (24:08)

Yes, a hundred percent. I mean look, I’ve seen over the years, you know, I got a good friend who’s a great wholesaler doing, thirty deals a month. And he stacked up a lot of cash. He was frugal and he was able to buy, a nice million dollar property free and clear and another property. And so I mean you can do that if you don’t want to be a landowner and stuff, but the thing that I view is is that I say to myself, like, look, I just sold a property last week for two hundred and eighty thousand dollars. That property was picked up from a wholesaler for a hundred and fifteen thousand.

Back in 2018. I did nothing to that property. I had the same tenants in the property. I didn’t even go inside the property. And the only time I got to go inside the property was when the tenant moved out. So what effort did I really make to make all that money? You know, that 115 to the 280. And the way I look at it is very, very little effort. Now you could say the same about a you know a fix and flip that you sell and you make 40, 50 grand on. But the thing is, is if you look at the tax situation after taxes, you know.

you’ve made like twenty five thousand on it and you still had to drive up there and you had to meet the crew and you’ve got a project manager there there’s effort there. it’s not three hundred thousand, it’s thirty thousand. So I think if you really f for anyone who’s looking at getting into real estate, I think a lot of them get attracted to wholesaling. our our most popular product is our wholesaling boot camp. you know, flip houses with no cash, no credit. People love that, right? Because if they don’t have cash, they don’t have credit it’s very appealing.

It’s a great way to make money to be a bird dog and learn how to scout deals. I always recommend to people like look, before you take your hard-earned money, before you take your parents’ hard-earned money, why don’t you go and learn what a good deal is and learn how to find a good deal and sell it to a real investor like me and learn how to get paid, five, ten, fifteen, twenty grand a deal. Once you can do that four or five times, you can know how to identify deals, then you can learn how to take a deal down and fix it up and flip it or fix it and keep it as a rental. But it all goes back to finding the deal.

And I find too many wholesalers are just kinda like offering the most they can to get the seller to agree. And then they’re coming to real buyers and they’re going, Hey, I’ve got this deal and here’s the ARV and I’m like, they’re a virtual wholesaler from another state and they don’t even know the market, you know. So I I think there’s something to be said about long term.

Mike Hambright (26:15)

Yep, for sure. one last question I want to ask you is how do in Florida specifically, how do people take advantage of the opportunity that exists right now?

Lex Levinrad (26:24)

well you are you you mean with me or just in general?

Mike Hambright (26:27)

Well, for for other folks that are listening to this, it right now it seems like if you look at the media, it says, Hey, I literally just saw something yesterday that was talking about how, one in seven houses in America that’s for sale right now is in Florida or something like that, right? and the headline makes it sound like Florida is struggling. And then of course, a lot of people see that and they think, it’s it’s really bad here or like I’m not gonna go to Florida or whatever.

The other side of that is like, hey, there’s an opportunity there as well, right? And so just with what’s going on right now, where do you see the opportunities in the Florida markets?

Lex Levinrad (27:00)

So I

see the opportunity, the a lot of similarities with what we had in the prior financial crisis. It’s coming from a completely different perspective ’cause back then they were just giving loans to anyone pretty much. And I think this time around the banks have been pretty good with that. But I think that this is coming from somewhere else, which is being driven completely by the, interest rates going from two point six five percent to they went to as much as seven before they pulled back to the sixes. but either way I think that

Real estate’s a relatively simple thing, you know. You you’ve got a house and it commands X amount in rent, and if you’re putting a mortgage on it and it doesn’t cash flow for you, then clearly you cannot own that in any kind of scale long term because you’ll just be massively negative. so with regards to rental properties, you’ve got to buy them at a price point that makes sense. So I think the media does a great job of portraying exactly the opposite of what you should do, you know.

And so they would be case in point, two thousand and nine, right? I’m telling people great opportunities to buy REOs in Port St. Lucie at fifty grand. And people saying to me, you know, how do you know it’s not going to go down more? And then that day I went to Starbucks and I’m looking at the Miami Herald and I’m looking at the Broward County newspaper, and one of them has a headline that says, Is the American Dream Dead? And then the other one has it on the front page, and the other one has a headline saying

Will real estate ever recover? And I’m looking at this and I’m thinking to myself, you know, if there was ever like a contrary indicator of now’s the time to buy, looking at these two major newspapers with that friend, that

Mike Hambright (28:27)

Yeah.

Lex Levinrad (28:28)

was when that was the day I got the idea to open up the Distress Real Estate Institute. And clearly, I told people now’s the time to buy and May two thousand and nine we picked up houses for thirty five, thirty six thousand dollars, they went to three hundred and sixty thousand dollars. So I I think

If you were to actually come and visit Florida or live in Florida, you would see that all the media talk is is not true. You have a bifurcated market. On the one hand, you have these markets like Miami and Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton, where people are moving to and they’re thriving. It’s very hard to get a deal. It’s very hard to find a house. There’s not much inventory for sale. On the other hand, you have these like boom and bust kind of places where like

Mike Hambright (29:06)

It’s yeah.

Lex Levinrad (29:07)

Southwest Florida, where traditionally in the previous financial crisis,

They were building like crazy in places like Cape Coral, but then when the market inverted, and you saw this in the movie, the the big short, he sent people out there and there was no one living in these houses. So, you know, you go out. We we had one of the guys from our office go out to Ocala, Florida. He spent three days there and he came back and said, Well, what do you see? He says, I just see new homes that were built and there’s no one buying them, and there’s no one in them. Florida’s interesting because if you look at the bottom of Florida, like Miami-Fort Lauderdale.

It’s a very thin strip of land and you’ve got wealthy people on the right and you’ve got alligators on the left. So you don’t have much room to for real estate. But as you go up, it gets wider and wider and wider. And so developers have gone into these wider areas and just built, you know, land that they banked on for years, all the DR Hortons, etc., of the world, and they just built and built and built and built. And the struggle that you have right now is that

There’s opportunities to buy new construction homes that are way better opportunities than existing construction homes. In fact, for the first time ever in history, new construction homes are selling for less than existing homes. So you could buy today in a place like Palm Bay. We’ve got students of ours that bought a four-bedroom, two-bathrouse, 1800 square feet, built in 2025 for 350,000, no money down, with 4.99% buyback on their mortgage.

And 25,000 in flex credits from the builder. So I find like that’s like a slam dunk for somebody who wanted to move to Florida who was thinking long term.

Mike Hambright (30:38)

Yeah.

Lex Levinrad (30:38)

so so I think that there’s two different markets going on. The one market you’ve got the builders have built you know thousands of homes, they can’t sell them. It’s affected the surrounding market. And then in other markets like Miami, you know, you just every day you read headlines of another company moved here, Jeff Bezos just bought a house here, you know, Elon Musk just bought a house here.

It’s booming, so anyone on the ground is gonna be like, I don’t know what they’re talking about, because if you come here to Miami, it’s like thirty dollars to buy a drink in a in a restaurant and the place is just booming. But is it booming as much as twelve or twenty-four months ago? The answer is no.

Mike Hambright (31:09)

Yeah. Yeah. Well, Lex, we gotta run, but tell me if folks wanna connect with you in any way, I know you’ve got a lot of great stuff going on, where where do they go?

Lex Levinrad (31:16)

Well you can go to my website, LexLevinrad.com. We have all of our boot camps up there on the boot camp tab. So that’s a great place to start. And we also have a podcast, Investing in Real Estate, with Lex Levinrad Podcast. so I would recommend those.

Mike Hambright (31:28)

We’ll put links down below for for both of those. So thanks for joining us today. Thanks for sharing your insights on the Florida markets. Good to see you, my friend.

Lex Levinrad (31:34)

Good to see you and thank you for having me, Mike.

Mike Hambright (31:37)

Yeah, great to see you. It’s been it’s been too long. So everybody there’s there’s opportunity all around us, despite what the media is saying. There’s always opportunity on the other side of adversity, if you will. So appreciate you joining us today. We’ll see you next time.

Lex Levinrad (31:49)

Thanks for having me.