Putting a new spin on Horace Greeley’s famous quote, “Go west, young man,” as an income property investor if you are looking for the strongest job markets to support your investments, “Go south, young man.”
To find the best job markets in America, you need to head south. “Nashville, Tennessee, topped the list of 2022’s hottest job markets, followed by Austin, Texas and Jacksonville, Florida.” (WSJ 4/3/2023)
Did I mention we just happen to have different DST properties, multi-family, senior living, hospitality, storage, in all these markets? The early bird catches the worm.
These sunbelt cities are continuing to benefit from strong growth in the services industry (restaurants, hotels, music venues, etc.) which have been driving the economy in recent months. As we’ve already discussed in previous blogs, housing also remains affordable in these areas.
This is in sharp contrast to the pandemic ‘boom towns’ of the Rocky Mountain West such as Salt Lake City, Denver, Phoenix and Boise. All of which cooled off precipitously last year.
These same communities also suffer from their high-tech centric nature. Whatsoever the Fed giveth, the Fed taketh away.
More than a decade of near zero interest rates and a pandemic inspired surge in on-line business fueled an unprecedented hiring boom in high tech. Having hugely overshot the market in terms of continued demand, these same businesses are now laying off tens of thousands of workers.
And this pain is not equally distributed around the nation. It is highly concentrated in those western cities which have historically been the nexus of technology development and manufacturing.
In light of this, lower cost areas in the southeast and southwest continue to hold the ingredients to attaining and attracting workers.
Due to lower living costs, these areas are attracting an increasingly large critical mass of young, educated people. The affordability component is also appealing to already formed family units who may be priced out of more expensive markets.
This should be of particular relevance to income property owners, up and down the West Coast, home of some of the most expensive housing markets in the nation.
This may not present an intolerable burden to empty nesters such as ourselves who have a lifetime of assets and work to fall back on. However, our ranks are steadily being thinned by father time.
Best to follow the jobs to places like Nashville, Jacksonville, Orlando, Dallas, Charlotte, etc.
Speaking of jobs, the $400 billion in clean energy incentives being rolled out by the Biden Administration may be another blessing in disguise for the red states he and other liberals loathe.
This is due to its disproportionate impact on the auto industry in promoting production of electric vehicles.
Subsidies available to auto companies via the ‘Inflation Reduction ACT” requires these vehicles be made mostly in the US and exclude materials from certain countries such as China. BMW, Ford, Hyundai, Honda, Mercedes, VW, Tesla and Toyota are all on board having announced plans to develop new industrial plants to this end.
Southern states, red states, right to work, non-union states such as Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee have already landed some of the more significant planned EV investments.
This is where DST really shines. You don’t need to be the expert. Through this ownership platform, you can quite literally ‘follow the money’ by leveraging up on the expertise of some of the nation’s largest and oldest buyers and managers of income producing real estate.
Tens of billions in apartments, self-storage, medical office, manufactured housing, grocery centers and senior housing is now managed for individual investors via DST.
You can break the chains that bind you to local markets and personal management and no longer struggle under the heel of expropriatory West Coast governments.
