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35 May 2025 May 2025 ยป C O V E R S T O R Y and that make sense for investors. This would be areas like Texas, Florida, and the Carolinas. Since there's also an affordability crisis, we try to focus on the average price point. A new construction house is $300,000 in our community. The average price point in the United States. is around $400,000. We try to be below that median house price point to offer affordable housing solutions and make smart investments that we know will have tenants long term. Q: What makes a rental property model attractive to investors, and what types of investors are most drawn to rentals? Lemaster: I don't think it's changed. There's a significant amount of people today who are interested in alternative asset investing outside of solely relying on their 401(k) to retire and who want to take some more control over their financial future, and that's what real estate provides. The average investor for us is some- one who fits multiple profiles or a com- bination of these: they're someone who is a busy professional, they like the idea of real estate investing, and they don't want to be busy in their day-to-day job. They don't want to buy themselves another job managing a property. Or maybe they've had experience with self-managing a rental that didn't go well. But it's some- one who is busy and doesn't want to buy themselves another job, but they like real estate as an asset class. We provide that opportunity where they can buy with us where they get the best returns, but our teams are managing everything for them, so they don't have to self-manage, especially from a distance. Some people live in expensive markets like the coastal areas, where the average house price may be a million dollars, and it's just inaccessible for them, so then they're forced to look at other locations that do make sense. We also have the newer investors that are getting started, whether this is their first investment property or their first investment property out of state, where they're just looking to get started, scale, and diversify their portfolio in an effi- cient manner where they're not making the mistakes and having the common pitfalls that so many people do. Q: How have recent interest rate fluctuations affected investor behavior and property acquisition strategies? Lemaster: We should separate interest rates from how that's affecting the retail market, which is all the information we see on the news and the public stats that are put out versus the investor market.