January RIA Roundup: 2024 Year in Review, Best Cash Flow Markets, & My 2024 Portfolio Results
Greetings, investors! Welcome to the January roundup.
In this one, we’ll take a look back at the main stories of 2024 in real estate investing and beyond, and preview what’s to come in 2025. I’ll also review the full financial results from my own portfolio in 2024. My final thoughts essay is a throwback to one I originally wrote two years ago, the last time there was a fight in Congress over the debt ceiling; alas, not much has changed.
Enjoy!
Lead Story: 2024 Year in Review
Well, 2024 is officially in the books. (And yes, I know it’s nearly February and this is by FAR the latest “2024 review” you’ll get in your inbox. But cut me some slack — I’ve been meaning to hire a team of staff writers down here at RIA Global Headquarters, but for now it’s just me…)
<— Live shot of me working on the Roundup.
Each month, I publish this newsletter with a look at the noteworthy stories in real estate (and outside real estate, since things tend to be more interconnected than we realize.) Reading back through those newsletters is a great way to remind myself what some of the key ideas have been in the last year.
In my 2024 Year in Review, I start with those key financial/investors stories, and then also review the bigger global & national context in which that all occurred. I’ll look at SEVEN areas altogether, and throughout, I’ll provide a look forward into the 2025 outlook in each area.
Also on the RIA blog this month:
Portfolio Reports: In addition to my annual results summarized below, I published my monthly numbers for December 2024.
Property Spotlights: I completed the Annual Updates on all of my individual properties, so you can see the chronological story and financial results for each one. (I still need to publish articles for Property #8 through Property #15, but I’ll complete that this year!)
Best Cash Flow Markets for 2025: I spent nearly a full day updating the data & recommendations in my Best Cash Flow Markets article. Two markets (Buffalo, NY and Allentown, PA) fell from “cash flow” to “balanced” based on higher home prices, while I added full profiles of two new cash flow markets: Omaha, NE and Lansing, MI:
My picks from around the web this month:
A new real estate search tool allows you to see the political leanings of your neighbors. I think I’d rather not know.
The tale of one North Carolina house and its three owners since 2011 is a case study in the rising cost of homeownerhip.
Zillow made its predictions about 2025’s hottest real estate markets. But like most such published content, it focuses on where home prices will increase the most, rather than where cash flow fundamentals are sound.
Rentometer published its annual rent report, which showed a marked slowdown in rent growth in 2024. Great data and insights here for rental property investors!
For the first time, I’m partaking in “Dry January” – no drinking for the entire month. With the popularity of Dry January growing, and the surgeon general talking publicly about the risks of drinking, booze companies are under increasing pressure.
Helpful tracker of President Trump’s flurry of executive orders since taking office.
And now this!
This month’s Roundup is sponsored by Stessa.
Stessa is the industry-leading financial app for rental property investors, and I recommend it to all my clients. Stessa makes it easy to track rent and expenses, run reports, and much more — it even connects directly to financial accounts and property management systems so you can import all your transactions seamlessly.
Especially as we head into tax season, a good accounting system is a must for rental property investors who want to claim all their deductions without all the paperwork.
Learn more about Stessa here.
My 2024 Portfolio Results
Once again, I pulled back the curtain all the way with my Annual Report for 2024, which dives into all the financial results and metrics for my 25-property portfolio last year. Here are some of the highlights:
My net cash flow was $101,419
Maintenance & repair costs were $68,569, above expectations and my most expensive year to date
Occupancy was 97.8%
Rents increased by 3.6% on average
I turned five properties, unfortunately including one eviction
Here’s a dashboard with some of those key results, and others. Be sure to check out all the details in the full article, as well as the updates to my individual properties in Property Spotlights.
In Other News…
Real Estate & Business, Domestic News
Wildfires engulf Los Angeles. The intense fires destroyed entire neighborhoods and billions of dollars in real estate, which will no doubt have further repercussions on a home insurance industry that is already reeling. (As you might recall, I wrote about what’s happening with home insurance earlier this year.)
Year-over-year home prices by market are published. Want to see how much your market appreciated vs. others? Of course you do.
Office vacancies now exceed 20%. This vacancy rate is, of course, very high — but the vacancy rate may be peaking, thanks to several factors including a return-to-office push by many companies.
President Jimmy Carter dies at 100. He was the country’s longest-living former president, and was known as much for his humanitarian work in the decades after his presidency as he was for his single presidential term.
International News, Science & Technology
NASA probe survives closest-ever encounter with Sun. The Parker Solar Probe raced by the sun at 430,000 mph, and flew within 3.8 million miles of the sun’s surface. (This is much closer than it sounds.)
Scientists drill down two miles for ancient ice. Working over four years, a team drilled through the Antarctic ice sheet to bedrock, reaching ice that’s at least 1.2 million years old. The ice core will provide insights into the changing composition of the atmosphere over nearly all of modern human history.
Arts & Culture, Sports, and All the Rest
“Murder hornets” eradicated. Thanks to swift and massive mobilization, the invasive species failed to gain a foothold in the US and has been eradicated (for now), according to officials. Great success story here, as the insect posed a threat to native species, including honeybees. Next up: lantern flies.
Madison Keys wins Australian Open. This American tennis star was long expected to win a Grand Slam. Now she has.
Disney achieved third $1B movie hit in 2024. “Moana 2” joins “Inside Out 2” and “Deadpool & Wolverine” as Disney breathed new life into the box office. (Well…maybe not NEW life – these are all sequels.)
Excel nerds take their turn in the spotlight. Yes, this is real: the annual Excel World Championships just took place in Las Vegas, tempting even serious journalists to throw a “freak in the sheets” joke into their pieces.
Final Thoughts: Debt (Again)
It seems there may be another fight brewing in Congress over raising the debt ceiling. It’s a deeply stupid fight, and obviously cynical — funds have already been approved and spent by Congress, so the debt ceiling (a concept that almost no other country bothers with at all) is little more than a pro forma confirmation that our government will, in fact, pay its debts.
In recent history, it has been Republicans who make this cynical play, threatening a default on our debt unless they get what they want. Will Democrats attempt to turn the tables this time, and use the debt ceiling as a negotiating ploy?
They certainly should not. Here’s what I wrote about it back in 2023, all of which still applies.
I learned to play golf at a young age, and my Grandpa was a big influence. He was an excellent golfer in his day, and had a roster of off-color golf jokes always at the ready. My father and brother rounded out our usual foursome, and we would sometimes play for very small amounts of money — the most that could be won or lost was two or three dollars. But Grandpa was a stickler for paying those debts promptly, no matter how small: “You gotta pay your debts.” It was an unequivocal statement, tautological, not up for debate.
The House of Representatives, led by newly-minted Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, appears to be winding up for yet another fight over raising the debt ceiling. Like most modern economies, the United States regularly runs an annual deficit, which means we spend more money than we take in from taxes. The accumulated deficits over the years, plus interest, are the national debt, and with each year of deficits, the total debt increases. Due to a quirk of our laws, Congress must actually vote to authorize the increase in the “debt ceiling”, even though those debt levels are guaranteed by the levels of spending and taxation dictated by other laws Congress has already passed. In other words, we’ve already spent the money on things like infrastructure and defense, and raising the debt ceiling is simply akin to paying the bills.
We’re once again getting uncomfortably close to that debt ceiling. The Treasury is already taking “extraordinary measures” to extend our financial rope as long as possible, but this will only buy us a few more months. If we refuse the pay the bills by not raising the debt ceiling, the United States will default on our debt obligations, which has never happened in our history. Everyone basically agrees that the results of this would be calamitous. A default would likely lead to an immediate downgrade in the country’s credit rating, higher interest rates for all Americans (including on mortgages), and a huge global financial shock and recession given how entangled U.S. debt is in the global economy. This would materially hurt every American, and would be particularly bad for real estate investors.
So why wouldn’t we just raise the debt ceiling, and avoid this self-inflicted disaster? Because Republicans in Congress want to use the threat of default to force policy concessions that they couldn’t otherwise achieve through ordinary legislative means. (If this whole thing sounds familiar, it should — they have tried this play before on several occasions over the last decade or so, and seem strangely undeterred by the fact that it has never gone well for them, politically or otherwise.)
But this is not a “negotiation”, whatever you may have heard. The proper word for this is extortion. This is economic hostage-taking, pure and simple, and the ones being held hostage are not Congressional Democrats — it’s US, you and me, ordinary Americans staring down the barrel of the gun.
We should be hostile to anyone willing to engage in this kind of brinksmanship to achieve their policy aims. There should be healthy debate in Congress about the proper role of government, the merits of deficits, and how to reduce deficits (if desired) through spending cuts, revenue increases, or both. But the time for that debate is BEFORE we’ve spent the money, not AFTERWARDS when the bill is due and the threat of default, with all its dire consequences, is looming.
Because my Grandpa had it right when he said “you gotta pay your debts”. So must our country.
Happy investing,
Eric
About the Author
Hi, I’m Eric! I used cash-flowing rental properties to leave my corporate career at age 39. I started Rental Income Advisors in 2020 to help other people achieve their own goals through real estate investing.
My blog focuses on learning & education for new investors, and I make numerous tools & resources available for free, including my industry-leading Rental Property Analyzer.
I also now serve as a coach to dozens of private clients starting their own journeys investing in rental properties, and have helped my clients buy millions of dollars (and counting) in real estate. To chat with me about coaching, schedule a free initial consultation.
Free Rental Property Analyzer
You probably know that a well-designed rental property calculator is the most important tool a real estate investor has. It allows you to quickly calculate key metrics and understand your cash returns on a target property. You can also answer questions like:
How much do your cash-on-cash returns improve if you use a mortgage vs. paying in cash?
What will your average monthly cash flow be?
How will your returns change in future years?
Those questions can be easily answered with side-by-side comparisons in the RIA Property Analyzer. I guarantee this is the best free rental property calculator out there today, and many of my readers have told me the same. It’s both powerful and very simple and intuitive to use. Check it out!
