By now, we’re used to hearing about how hot real estate is. While not every market is experiencing a real estate boom, many are.

While much of the news has been focused on the traditional real estate market, investors know that there is more happening in more niche areas of the market. Beyond buying and selling, the rental market is seeing its own upheaval. 

Buy-and-hold real estate investing is your best strategy in the middle of a nationwide real estate boom. The state of the housing market has been called “insane” for its intense bidding wars and hyper-expensive prices.

The trajectory of the real estate market has been a subject of debate over the past year. Investors, realtors, and other experts are always trying to predict what’s next; however, the new realities introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic make predicting that much more challenging. 

Since the end of the Great Recession, the U.S. housing market has been on the rebound.

It should come as no surprise that the U.S. has long suffered from a housing shortage. This has been a trend for over a decade as the Great Recession effectively slashed construction activity in half. In the 2010s, the residential construction industry lost over 260,000 jobs. Firms closed or consolidated. New construction lagged, continued to lag, and could not compete with America’s pent-up housing demand.

While the 2020 real estate market defied all expectations and pulled record-breaking performance among secondary and tertiary markets across the nation, it was an economic anomaly. 

As real estate investors, we know just how much location matters. Different markets provide a variety of benefits and added risks, from their climate to their local tax rates. Investing in real estate isn’t just about the individual properties themselves. Your real estate market matters. 

History has demonstrated time and time again the valuable role real estate plays in the economy at-large. Unfortunately for us, the most recent example of real estate’s power in the economy was an anomaly — The Great Recession, as we know, was a devastating economic crash that was directly tied to the subprime mortgage crisis. It took decades for the economy and housing markets to recover in the aftermath.

Over the past year, we’ve been fascinated and occasionally anxious as we’ve watched the real estate market. When the Coronavirus pandemic hit the United States last March and we saw the first wave of shut-downs, there was no telling what would happen in the real estate world.