Your real estate investment strategy impacts which markets you should target. Where buy-and-hold investing is concerned, your market choice is paramount.

The real estate market has been feeling crowded.

Some would say that the best thing to do is to step out of the frenzy and wait for things to calm down. While that’s a valid strategy, you may miss out on opportunities that will take your investment portfolio to the next level.

Even though we’re not even halfway through 2021, experts in the real estate industry are already looking ahead to 2022. More precisely, they’re looking ahead to a post-COVID world.

What makes a market worthy of an investor’s attention? While numerous factors are involved in determining a worthwhile investment market, one of the tell-tale signs can be found by browsing the headlines.

Over the past eight months, the nation has been turned upside down and shaken to its core. While in many respects we hope that these changes are temporary provisions to manage the COVID-19 pandemic, we have to be realistic: some changes aren’t going anywhere.

We’ll just say it: this has been a weird year.

Even that doesn’t seem to touch the reality we’ve all been dealing with for the past nine months. The year began with predictions of a housing market crash and, as we’ve seen, despite the economic impact of the coronavirus, the real estate market has been surprisingly tenacious where single-family housing is concerned.

If you look at any of the headlines about the real estate market, you will encounter a wide variety of predictions and evaluations. Right now, we’re seeing many remarks on the unexpected tenacity and strength of U.S. real estate in the face of a global pandemic. And it’s true — in many cases, the real estate market has not only weathered the economic fallout, but it has seen increased demand and growing equity.

Back in March, most of us probably expected pandemic fears to wane after a few weeks. At the most, we thought the summer would bring an end to things and we’d return to business-as-usual. Unfortunately, we have not seen this to be true. Talk of a “new normal” seems more and more like reality. It’s likely that COVID-19 will forever change how society functions!

If you’re like most people in the world right now, you’re likely fatigued by an overwhelming amount of negative news, doomsaying, constant stress, and fear. As we move through the pandemic — for many of us, the third month of stay-at-home orders and social distancing — it’s important to analyze the market as it is versus worrying about what it will become.

Real estate experts far and wide seem yet to have come to a real consensus about what we can expect from the real estate market as we start a new decade in 2020. It’s true, there are several conflicting factors that could see the real estate market go either way. It’s a mixed bag on whether we’ll see a boom or a bust, if 2020 will be more of the same or if we’ll see some radical shifts in the market.