Every community has a distinct and unique environment. Their economy is their own, their job market is specific, and the real estate market is distinct.

As real estate investors, it’s dangerous to treat any real estate market exactly like another. You’re dealing with an entirely unique set of factors that can profoundly affect not only your buying potential, but your investment opportunities, growth potential, passive income, and future risk.

Nationwide, homebuyers and investors alike are taking note of a trend that has been affecting markets large and small for years: tight inventory. There are various reasons for this inventory squeeze, though they usually can boil down to two primary causes. Let us dive in a bit further to see how construction and home sales can affect the real estate investor market, and what you can do about it!

As real estate investors, it’s important to know your market. For passive real estate investors, you may not be involved in the day-to-day operations of your real estate investments—you might not even be all that involved in acquiring your properties! As busy people, you don’t want to have to sweat the small stuff. What you do want to know is that your investments are in good hands.

Can you believe we’re already in the home stretch of 2017? The year flew by for many of us. The world of real estate is a whirlwind. We’ve seen a lot in the past year—but where have we landed? As we head towards the holidays and a new year, it’s time to stop and assess where we are as real estate investors, a national real estate market, and where we want to be for the future.

Real estate investors are bombarded with an overwhelming amount of information each and every day.

Whether it’s news and blogs or data from property hunting, there’s just a lot to sift and sort through. And there’s never more information to deal with than when looking for new targets to add to your portfolio.

The seasons play a huge role in ebb and flow of the real estate market. It varies depending on where you are in the country, but it’s still true wherever you go: the seasons mean business.

For the most part, we see that spring and summer are the busiest times for the real estate market, with a flurry of activity as buyers buy and sellers sell.

That said, fall and winter are far from dead months, and come with their own pros. Winter sellers usually mean business: they’re usually motivated, and investors can take advantage of a lack of competition.

But we’re here to talk about summertime...

Well, we made it! Hello, 2017! We don’t know about you, but we thoroughly enjoyed the wild ride real estate gave us last year. 2016 was thrilling for our markets—Houston, Dallas, and Memphis. We’re even more excited about what this year will bring!

We’ve been taking a peek at what the experts have been saying for months now. What are the trends? What’s the outlook? What do we absolutely need to know?

Sure, every investor needs to take predictions with a grain of salt. The market can twist and turn in unexpected ways. But that doesn’t mean we need to be ignorant to what expert economists and analysts are saying.

Without further ado, let’s dive in and see what the buzz has been.

For those involved in real estate in any form or fashion, we’ve all noticed how home prices have shifted over the past few years. During the recession, home prices were at an all-time low. Real estate investors jumped on the opportunity to grab at cheap properties and make big profits.

It was honestly easy to invest and succeed.

But now, in markets across the country, prices have heated back up. The inventory of homes in foreclosure have decreased.

It’s not so easy to find those deals and make easy money.

Investing in real estate, ideally, is about opportunity. Opportunity to get involved in a myriad of markets, opportunity to earn passive income, to save for retirement, to find financial freedom. This idealized image of investing in real estate is alluring in a real American Dream kind of way, but the reality doesn’t always live up to the dream.

For a long time, investors felt the need to keep their eyes only on the hottest, trendiest markets. San Francisco. New York City. Chicago. DC. They have this glamorous appeal that few other places do, and it’s hard to break free from that particular allure.

But really, the greatest opportunities for most real estate investors aren’t in these markets. Slowly, the real estate investment landscape is shifting to favor secondary and even tertiary markets. They may not have the same glamorous appeal, but these diamonds on the rough offer more than their sparkling sister cities.

The economy is in recovery. We think we can say that fairly, especially in comparison to the state of things these past few years. That said, it hasn’t recovered. While we tend to zoom in on the real estate market, it’s conditions are closely tied to the overall economy — wages, job growth, and so on.

It’s true, jobs have been created. But one of the biggest issues facing working Americans — and those of us in real estate — is that of wage stagnation.

Even if we have more jobs, if those jobs aren’t paying enough or changing with inflation, it creates problems.