Dave:
These are the best markets to buy rental properties right now in early 2026. If your local market is too expensive or you’re hunting for a new city with serious profit potential, deciding where to invest is arguably the single biggest choice to make as an investor. So today we’re breaking down exactly where smart real estate investors should be looking for new properties right now. We’ve crunched the numbers and in this episode, we’re going to unveil nine prime spots across the country where you should consider buying property today. What’s going on everyone? I’m Dave Meyer, head of real estate investing at BiggerPockets. On today’s episode, we’re giving you our list of best investing markets right now, and this is always one of our most popular episodes of the year. So we’re back in January of 2026 with an updated edition. The timing right now really couldn’t be better for refreshing our market recommendations because the real estate landscape shifting pretty fast right now and investing conditions are really diverging.
They’re wildly different in different regions of the country. So figuring out the right place to invest is more important than ever. So in today’s show, I’m going to highlight several markets that have caught my attention personally, but on the show we also have host of the Real Estate Rookie Show, Ashley Kare joining us. And of course, we also have Henry here as well to share his picks. Ashley, Henry, good to see you both.

Ashley:
Thank you so much for having me.

Henry:
Hey, glad to be here. Thank you.

Dave:
All right. Well, let’s just get straight into it. We’re each going to cover three different markets. I don’t know why this is just the format that we made up last year and it’s been very successful. So three is the magic number. And Henry, I’m going to pick on you. You got to go first. So name your first market. Which one caught your eye?

Henry:
I choose my markets based on that they have cashflow potential where you could potentially get a deal on the market. So I’m looking for a solid rent to price ratio and I’m looking for the median housing price to be in an air quotes affordable range. If I can get a solid rental price ratio and an affordable home price, that tells me there’s probably deal availability on the market should you choose to because I want most people to be able to have access to buy deals here. I don’t want to just pick markets where you got to go off market.

Dave:
Awesome. All right. So tell us what you found.

Henry:
First market I picked is Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

Dave:
I couldn’t tell you a single thing about it.

Henry:
That’s the response I

Dave:
Was

Henry:
Expecting.

Dave:
That’s what you want. Yeah.

Henry:
That’s what you want. But I choose this market. A, it’s a college town. B, it’s got a high rent to price ratio. It’s got relatively low vacancy for a smallish metropolitan area, and it’s a landlord-friendly state. So the median home price, who wants to take a guess at the median home price in Hattiesburg, Mississippi?

Ashley:
175.

Dave:
Yeah. All right. Ashley probably got it. 175.

Henry:
192,000 median price, but the median rent is guess what?

Ashley:
2,200.

Henry:
Whoa. 1,456.

Dave:
Okay. Yeah, there we go. Ashley’s just envisioning paradise. It’s like a rental paradise.

Henry:
But I mean, with those numbers, with the median home price at 192, that tells you on the market you can find homes listed for less than 192, but the median rent’s about 1,500. That’s cashflow on the market. You can probably find a deal listed that will make you some money as it sits. So that’s a rent to price ratio of about 0.76 with a vacancy rate at 6%. That’s really, really solid. So I like the fundamentals here. Yes, you can buy a deal on the market that probably makes sense, but if you’re going to look off market, you can probably find some really great deals and get great year one cashflow, which is hard to do in a lot of markets. You’ve got great jobs because the university and healthcare systems are the major employers in the area. Those are solid job options, as well as if you look at what’s coming to the area, there’s a company called Rouses Markets, which is expanding and entering the city through acquisitions.
So we’ve got more jobs coming in the food space. FedEx is opening a logistics facility in the area. I

Ashley:
Like that.

Henry:
And you’ve got ongoing reinvestment projects and logistics tied to those healthcare companies. So the city’s investing in the downtown. Companies are investing in the market to make sure that they’ve got amenities for their employees, and you’ve got new employers like FedEx and food companies like Rousers coming into the city. So you’ve got growth. And another reason I chose this is they don’t have a ton of new development going on. In other words, they’ve got about a 50% ratio in terms of new permits coming into the area. So it’s not going to be an area that is overbuilt going into the future. So it’s just a solid market. It’s what you’d call a baseit or a double market. You’ve got great jobs, you’ve got growth in the economy, you’ve got low vacancy, and you can buy properties at cashflow.

Dave:
I mean,

Henry:
It’s just solid numbers. They’re not the most amazing numbers for our market, but it’s affordable and it has good numbers.

Dave:
All right. I like this one, Henry. Very good. Ashley, what’s your first one? Is this the one we’re going to hate?

Ashley:
It is because I think it was the last episode we recorded where we all screamed out the state we would never invest in and you guys both said Florida.

Dave:
Okay. All right. I already hate it.

Ashley:
So this one is Ocala, Florida. It is located in between Tampa and Orlando, and it is home of the World Equestrian Center.

Dave:
Ooh, okay. All

Ashley:
Right. One reason I chose it is because it’s dead center and hopefully we can get better insurance because it’s not on the coast of better weather. But the big part of picking this one was because of the affordability, the rent prices you can get, but also that there’s so much new development going on there. 263 acres of sport complex is being put up. Since 2020, the city population has grew about 10%. It’s considered one of the fastest growing metros in the US right now for Marion County, which it’s located in. The average home value is about 267,000.

Dave:
Okay, that’s pretty good for Florida.

Ashley:
Yeah. And then rent varies. I found two different sources. One said the average rent is around 1,300 per month. Another source on Zillow said 1,700 per month.

Dave:
Oh, wow. Okay. That’s pretty good. I actually think there are great markets in Florida, and this happens to be one of them. Ashley, can you say a little bit more about it being in the center of the state? Because I’ve been reading a lot about that and why that’s so valuable.

Ashley:
Well, first of all, you’re more protected from hurricanes coming through being in the center than you are on the coast. Insurance, you’re going to get better insurance because you’re not in a flood zone. And then also you’re located in between two major airports of Florida for easy access. And I did read something too where they’re trying to get approval to actually build their own airport in there because of just the equestrian world deal that’s going on there.

Dave:
All right. I like that. Actually, I was reading some article, I think it was at Redfin, and they were talking about how there’s been all these predictions about how there’s going to be climate migration because of hurricanes or whatever. And what they actually found is that most of the migration due to extreme weather is within the same state, that people aren’t saying like, “Oh, I’m going to leave Florida. I’m going to move to Minnesota.” What they’re doing is moving from Cape Coral or Tampa to Ocala? How do you say it? I think Ocala. We’ll find out in the comment. Orlando. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone in the comments will tell me Orlando. So I do think that is a really interesting trend to be able to capitalize. And obviously, even though Florida’s a little bit volatile for my liking, obviously there’s a lot of good economic population demographic things going on in Florida.
They’ve been talking about getting rid of property tax. I’m skeptical that that’s actually going to happen, but if that actually does happen, that would be pretty crazy. It would probably help the housing market recover there. So I don’t truly hate this. I just pretend hate it for the show.

Ashley:
They do have a good … It’s a 3.3 ratio for every one person that leaves Ocala, 3.3 people come into it.

Henry:
Wow. That’s pretty crazy. So growth is nuts.

Ashley:
And then also 50% of the people rent there too. All

Dave:
Right. You might be winning so far, Ashley. That’s a lot of good stuff right there. I mean,

Henry:
In between two major metros is awesome.

Dave:
Speaking of two major metros, my first one is also between two major metros and it’s a pretty solid market in itself. I set out today to try and find some contrarian ones. I wanted to find some in the Northeast because people say you can’t find cashflow there. I’ve tried to find some in the West and just completely failed. I couldn’t find anything good, but I did find one in the Northeast. It is Hartford, Connecticut. And as Henry said, being between two major metros is great. Hartford, Connecticut is kind of sandwiched right between New York City and Boston, two of the biggest economic engines in the entire country. And it is way, way, way more affordable. So New York and Boston price is easily a million dollars to buy something in one of those cities. But if you look at Hartford, Connecticut, the median sale price, 320,000.
So for the Northeast, that is pretty good. And you’re still, you’re getting rents at about 2,000. So you might be able to get some right off the back cash flow. I’m guessing you’re probably going to have to do some value add, which is totally fine. I mean, for me, at that price point, you hopefully have a little bit of money to be able to invest in that. And it has a really good solid economy. It’s one of the insurance capitals of the entire country. A lot of businesses that have satellite offices from New York or Boston do it there. A lot of people who potentially have hybrid work situations and only have to go once or two days a week into Boston, New York can live in Connecticut. That’s what Connecticut is booming right now. And so it’s great. It’s a pretty recession proof economy.
The Northeast typically is a pretty stable economy because there’s so many big companies there and it’s affordable. So I really like it. It has some of the highest appreciation rates in the country right now. And it’s just totally underbuilt like a lot of the Northeast. There’s just not a lot of development going on. And so you probably have some legs behind you on that. So I really like everything that I’m seeing in Hartford, Connecticut right now.

Henry:
I mean, I’m going to use my official/unofficial powers in this episode to go ahead and deem you the round one winner because Connecticut is such a sleeper market. Right? So many New Yorkers live in Connecticut and commute. What I like about Connecticut is the density of small multifamily. I just love small multifamily in general. And those 20 units and under, there’s a ton of them, tons of them. And you can get great deals on them. Rents are amazing. It’s just a sleeper market in turn. If you like small multifamily, man, you can do great out there. And I just really like it.

Ashley:
How are the tenant landlord laws in Connecticut?

Henry:
It is not as landlord friendly as the South, but is not as tenant friendly as New York by any stretch. So I’d say it’s somewhere in the middle in terms of that. Which I’m okay with. I’m okay with

Ashley:
Middle. If I can make it work in New York, Connecticut. Right.

Dave:
For sure. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You’re only going up, Ashley, from where you are. All right. Well, let’s take a quick break, but when we come back, we’ll do round two with our best markets to invest in 2026. Running your real estate business doesn’t have to feel like juggling five different tools. With ReSimply, you can pull motivated seller lists, skip trace them instantly for free, and reach out with calls or texts all from one streamlined platform. And the real magic, AI agents that answer inbound calls, follow up with prospects, and even grade your conversations so you know where you stand. That means less time on busy work and more time closing deals. Start your free trial and lock in 50% off your first month at resimply.com/biggerpockets. That’s R-A-S-I-M-P-L-I.com/biggerpockets. Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. We’re going through our favorite markets to invest in 2026. Henry, you went first last time, so I’m going to go back to picking on Ashley.
Ashley, what’s your round two pick?

Ashley:
So this one, I went for a short-term rental market, and I ended up picking Fredericksburg, Texas. So the reason I chose this one is because it’s close to Austin in San Antonio, and it just has a lot going on. A lot of festivals, wineries, culinary tourism. Oh,

Dave:
It’s got a cool downtown. I’m looking at it right now.

Ashley:
It is a little bit more expensive than the usual markets I pick. So the median home value is 514,000.

Dave:
Ooh, okay.

Ashley:
The long-term rent isn’t that great, but for short-term rent, the average nightly rate was $254 per night, 48% occupancy, and the annual revenue per listing averaged around 45 to 50,000 a year.

Dave:
Wow.

Ashley:
So a big part of this one was really just the draw to it. As an investor, I don’t want to invest in a short-term rental in a big city where there’s a lot of major hotels, things like this. In Fredericksburg, there’s just starting to be development of bigger hotels. The Waldorf Astoria is starting to develop a hotel there. So kind of like doing the Starbucks model of following where they’re going.

Dave:
Nice. I mean, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, that’s a really good idea. It looks very cool. I’m just looking at some pictures right now. It just looks like a fun place to go. So is this the kind of town though where you could rent this out and make money long-term if you needed to, or are you sort of going all in on short-term rentals here?

Ashley:
Yeah. Long-term rentals, you’re only seeing like $1,200 a month. Oh, wow. Yeah. So very well.

Henry:
Wow. So you got to be an experienced operator in this because this sounds risky to me. I mean, I’m not going

Ashley:
To lie. This would be for a short-term rental, this would work. Long-term rental, no.

Dave:
So this is a play where you’re really going to make a high quality short-term rental experience. You’re kind of like making a destination property.

Ashley:
Yes. Yes.

Dave:
All right. Well, I don’t know. Ashley, this one’s a little risky for me to be honest, but I’m not a short-term rental expert, so I might not know. But I would go visit Fredericksburg. It looks pretty fun.

Ashley:
We’ll have to ask Garrett on bigger stays for his opinion.

Dave:
Yeah, we’ll have to ask Gary about this one.

Ashley:
Because he’s from Texas too.

Dave:
Oh, he is. Yeah. We’ll have to ask them about it. All right. I’ll go second on this one. And mine, now I’m going down to the southeast with both of you as well. I’m going to Knoxville, Tennessee. I really do. I like this market a lot. Great market. So we’re seeing prices about 300 grand, which is pretty good, pretty affordable compared to everywhere else. Rent’s pretty solid at about 1,800 bucks. So I mean, you’re not getting amazing cash flow right away, but you probably still can. But there’s just so much to like about the economy. And I actually did a little bit of extra research here because I just wanted to give people an example. When you just look up the rent to price ratio of an average city, this one comes in at 0.6. Not terrible. There’s like value add, you can make that work, probably not going to work for everything.
But I specifically started digging into it because I was curious per Henry’s comment about like, are there small multis? That’s what I like to buy in Knoxville because I don’t even know what kind of housing stock there is. And there are. And when you actually look at the rent to price ratio for small multifamilies, it goes up to 0.75, which doesn’t sound like a huge difference, but that’s a big difference. That’s the difference between probably getting year one cashflow and not getting year one cash flow. So I really like to see that. It has really strong population growth at 1.1%. You have the University of Tennessee as their largest employer. Other largest employer, top five, Dollywood, which I’ve never been to, but I want to go to. So that was exciting. Unemployment rate at 3.1%. Rent is still good. And fun fact, it’s the birthplace of Mountain Dew, which I also enjoy.

Henry:
So there you go. What I like about this market is you can do a little bit of everything. I think you can find deals that work if you’re willing to put in the work in a market like this. It’s a college town, which means there’s going to be growth and jobs. It is not far from Asheville, North Carolina, which is a good real estate market in itself. It’s not far from Pigeon Forge, which is a great short-term rental market if you wanted to get into short-term rentals. I just think it’s got variety of entry points, which is solid.

Dave:
It’s just a great solid market. I think it has a lot of upside too. It’s solid today and might become a growth market in the future. And so to me, that’s kind of the perfect experience. Very low risk, high upside, affordable entry point. I’m like in Knoxville. Henry, you got to go. What’s your second round pick?

Henry:
Look, man, I’m telling you, I like old boring real estate, so I didn’t pick exciting markets. I just picked markets with solid numbers. Second pick, Morgantown, West Virginia.

Ashley:
I just saw West Virginia on a list of top 10 states of where people are leaving.

Dave:
Yeah, it’s a sad situation there. Their economy is really rough.

Henry:
Here’s why I picked it. Median home price, 237,000, median rent, about 1552. So that’s a 0.65% rent to price ratio. It’s got 6% vacancy. Unemployment’s at 4.4%, but one year job growth, around 2%, five-year job growth around 2%. Okay.

Dave:
Oh,

Henry:
That’s

Dave:
Good. So

Henry:
Growth in jobs, small growth, and I know you said people are leaving, but I believe there’s a one or 2% growth in population. But I think this is because it is a college town. It’s the University of West Virginia, which is a Big 12 school. This is a big school, big basketball school. So lots of people end up coming to this metropolitan era. Now, do they stay here after they leave college? That’s a different thing.

Dave:
I want to just say, I think people look at state level population a little too much. I invest in Michigan. It’s a state that has very bad population numbers, but there are very good population numbers in certain cities and I don’t really care what’s going on in the state as a whole because a lot of people might be just moving from within the state to the one or two cities that have good job growth and good economic prospects. And so I just think population is really much more important on a local level.

Ashley:
A lot of the numbers are.

Dave:
Yeah. I mean, yeah, that’s true. Pretty much everyone.

Henry:
But look at the employers. That’s why I like it. So the University of West Virginia, about 7,000, 6,500 employees, that’s big. West Virginia Medical, about 7,000 people employed there. And then Monday Health, which is about 3,000 people. So heavily invested in healthcare, but typically a lot of college towns who have medical schools, that’s what they have in that area. And then Kroger is another big employer in the food space there. So solid jobs, solid schools, solid healthcare, downtown revitalization projects going on. I always like to look at, is the city itself spending money making the place better? Because if the city’s not doing that, then it’s probably not a place where people want to live. But the city itself is spending money there developing a rail transit system to connect people outside of downtown to the downtown area. And then the University of West Virginia is putting a lot of money into expanding its facilities in that area.
So the businesses that are there are spending money and staying there and the city is spending money trying to make the area better. It’s a big school, big 12 school, and you’ve got solid numbers at 237,000 with $1,500 of rent. So you can find deals maybe on the market that makes sense, but if you’re willing to put in a little work, you can probably find really great deals. So just a boring fundamental market. Is West Virginia the sexiest state in the world? No, but we’re not looking to invest in sexy places. We’re looking to invest in places and make money.

Dave:
I don’t know much about West Virginia personally, but I think it goes along with some of my beliefs about the Midwest that affordability is going to drive performance for a lot of places. You see some negative things about the West Virginia economy, so that would be my major thing. But if job growth is happening in Morgantown in particular, that would alleviate-

Henry:
Jomp growth and population growth.

Dave:
Yeah. I mean, that’s true. If you have both of those things, then maybe Morgantown is one of the areas in West Virginia that has grown. So I like it. It’s very affordable. Good place to get into the market, probably going to get good renters. So I like it. All right, let’s take a quick break, but when we come back, we will do around three of our best places to invest in 2026 discussion. We’ll be right back. Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. I’m here with Ashley Kier and Henry Washington talking about our favorite places to invest in 2026. And I am going with a place that I have actually long thought about investing in. I’ve been looking at deals here for like four or five years and have never pulled the trigger. It is Kansas City, Missouri.

Henry:
Oh, man. I

Dave:
Like Kansas City a lot because it is … If you look at the geographic center of the country, it’s like plop in the middle and it’s like the major intersection of highways and railroads, which makes it one of the logistics capitals of the country just for infrastructure and logistics, which is a really recession proof thing. And I really just like those kinds of solid, blue collar kind of jobs that get a lot of investment from the government, that get a lot of investment from the states. You get a lot of colleges there. There’s just all sorts of stuff going on in Kansas City, but it’s still super cheap. The median home price is 280, rents around 1,500. So cashflow is possible, but the things that I really like about it is just the straight up affordability. The home price to income ratio is 2.3, which is really low.
The country as a whole is about 4.4. So just you can buy a lot of house with your income there. And I think that bodes well for housing demand. It’s also one of the few cities in the country still that is not rent burdened. If you haven’t heard that term, economists, budgeting, personal finance experts say that if you spend more than 30% of your income on rent, you are rent burdened. And like most cities in the country, like the average person is rent burdened, not in Kansas City, which makes me feel like I would be able to find tenants who can pay. I’m not going to have problems collecting rent. And it means that there is potential for rent to grow in the future. Both are good things. There are a lot of investments going in the area. Panasonic just put in a battery plant.
Garmin is expanding in the area and perhaps more important than everything. Kansas City has more barbecue restaurants per capital than any other city in the world. This is true. It’s fast. And I’m going to get a lot of hate for this. I like Kansas City Barbecue. I’m a big fan of Kansas City style barbecue and I want to go eat there. And Henry, you and I talked about this all the time. I like to invest places I like to go eat. And so Kansas City is very high on that list.

Henry:
Kansas City Barbecue is delicious. Kansas City is kind of a conundrum. It’s interesting because a lot of the development on the Kansas side is fairly new.That’s where I think they have a NASCAR track that’s on the Kansas side. I believe the MLS team, the soccer team has a big stadium that’s on the Kansas side and like lots of new stores and infrastructure. So lots of restaurants, outlet malls, the casino I believe is on the Kansas side. So investor heavy market, so lots of competition.

Dave:
Yeah, that’s true. I think that is a good point.

Henry:
But again, lots of small multifamily. It’s a market where you can get lots of small money, but also lots of older buildings, older homes. So you got to deal with the problems that come with those things. But I like the market. Yeah.

Ashley:
Do you guys have a preference as far as which side of the city you’d rather invest in?

Henry:
Most people invest in the Missouri side because that’s where most of the housing is. There’s not a ton of housing on the Kansas side. Yeah.

Dave:
Okay. All right. So that’s my first one. Henry, what’s your round three pick?

Henry:
Round three. My round three prick is one that I didn’t really know going into this, but it is Peoria, Illinois.

Dave:
Oh yeah. This is like on the top of every list right now.

Henry:
So I picked Peoria, Illinois because again, the pricing and fundamentals are ridiculous. What do you think the median house price is in Peoria, Illinois? 220?

Ashley:
180.

Henry:
167.

Ashley:
Whoa. Okay.

Henry:
Wow. 167 with a median rent of about 1260, so just under 1300 for median rent. So again, 0.75 rent to price ratio. Vacancy’s high though. 12% vacancy. So that means people have options. So you got to make sure your rental’s on par. One year job growth, 1%, five-year job growth, about 2%. But the reason I added this to my list was I wanted something that had a little bit bigger of a metropolitan area compared to my other two. Population of about 400,000, so 398,000. Wow. The city of Peoria itself is 110,000, but the metropolitan area puts you at about 400,000, which for that price point is pretty unusual to be able to have a … Because that lets you know that there’s people. People are living there. Population is average population growth, average job growth, which is solid.

Dave:
Yeah. Wow.

Henry:
The top employers in the area, again, healthcare, OSF healthcare, 14,000 regional employees. Healthcare’s massive there. Then Caterpillar, the heavy equipment brand, 12,000 employees

Dave:
There. Oh, okay.That’s big.

Henry:
So you’ve got jobs in heavy machinery, you’ve got jobs in healthcare, you’ve got them spending money again on revitalizing the downtown area. I mean, Illinois, as we showed on the Cashflow Roadshow, is just a great market where you can buy cashflow, and this is no exception to that. If you don’t want to be in the hustle and bustle of Chicago, then you can still find great numbers in a place where you’ve still got a decent sized metropolitan area. You’ve got lots of small multifamily options there. I mean, at those numbers, you can absolutely buy something on the market that makes sense. And so if a big city like Chicago scares you, even though it cashflows, then you can go out to a less industrial city and you can still find great numbers. So there’s markets all over the country in these little pockets where if you look at the fundamentals, the fundamentals make sense.
Are they the sexiest places in the world? No, they’re not the sexiest places in the world, but some of these numbers are pretty sexy.

Dave:
Honestly, there’s so many times we have people come on the show and they’re operating in their hometown. And maybe if you live in a big city or you’ve never been to these towns, they seem kind of random, but there’s absolutely great fundamentals and they’re easy to get to know and there’s less competition to Henry’s point earlier. There’s a lot to really like. I hear these people just investing in their hometown, cities of 50,000, 100,000, 200,000, people doing great, doing fantastic. Sometimes I’m just jealous. I’m like, man, that’s just a manageable market with low competition. You could probably do really, really well there. And so I like these kind of markets, especially if you just commit to it and just like, I’m going to learn this market, like the back of my hand, you’re probably going to do very well.

Henry:
Yeah. I mean, and that’s what you have to do. I see all the comments on posts like, “Oh, you could buy cheap houses, but nobody wants to live there.” Look guys, you’re not going to find a major metro with super cheap houses that nobody’s ever heard of, that you’re going to be able to buy a house and make a ton of cash flow. You’ve got to look at some of these ancillary markets that are closer to some of these big cities, which you’ve got some examples of in this show. This is what you want to do. Yes, there are sub $200,000 homes in America, and there are markets where those homes exist and you can make money. So what we’re trying to do is show you where you can go and find some of these amazing fundamentals. Like I said, they’re not going to be the sexiest places in the world, but we don’t need the place to be sexy.
We just need the cash flow to be sexy.

Dave:
All right. Well, I like it. It’s another good choice. Ashley, round us off. What’s your third round

Ashley:
Pick? My last one is Winston-Salem North Carolina.

Dave:
I almost did this one. It’s a good market.

Ashley:
This metro population, 684,000. The median home value, 250K to 280. The typical rent for a single family home is around 1,600 per month. The vacancy rate is 9%, 2% employment growth. This stood out to me here in the last five years, there’s been 2.6 billion in investment in the area, making 6,600 new jobs. And right now in the pipeline, there’s 11 billion in planned development that would lead to 18,000 potential jobs. So the major kind of industries, the employers here are … Wake Forest has a big healthcare system, Atrium Health, Wake Forest Baptist. Of course, the university, there’s a 330 acre innovation quarter and then a lot of corporate and manufacturing. The Haynes brand is there. And then some government services in there too.

Dave:
I really like Winston-Salem. I almost picked this city as well. I like everything going on in North Carolina, to be honest. I just think it’s a really solid state. There’s so much to like about the economy, population growth, just everything going on

Ashley:
There. Low property taxes, land friendly.

Dave:
Low corporate taxes, so a lot of businesses are moving there. There’s just a lot to like in North Carolina. And Winston-Salem is still relatively affordable compared to Raleigh, Durham, which has exploded over the last couple of years. Charlotte’s gotten is still relatively expensive for how big of an economy it is. But Winston-Salem, Greensboro, which is close, they’re both a little bit more affordable. So I’m all in on this place. I love this one actually.

Henry:
Well, that’s what I was going to say is you’ve got that sister city of Greensboro, which is about a similar size to Winston-Salem and only about 30 minutes away, which in the grand scheme of driving is like the same city. So you really get a two for one with this market.

Dave:
All right. Well, very good one. I’m not going to argue with this. I don’t know. Are we picking winners? Ashley, you win this round.

Ashley:
I’m just going to keep doing the same strategy. Piggyback off of another great one. We did another time.

Dave:
I like it. Well, I don’t think we awarded anyone a winner for the second one. So Henry, we’ll award you that winner. So we each win one and we all feel good about ourselves. And we’ll come back to do this again later this year when we do it because I’m joking, but I really think this is valuable because one, these are good markets. If you want to consider for yourself, if you’re investing out of state or you’re just trying to learn how to research markets, hopefully you see the thought process here. There’s a lot of things that Ashley, Henry and I are talking about, whether it’s economic growth, population growth, but ultimately it really comes down to your own strategy. Ashley picked a place in Florida that I wouldn’t choose, but is great for certain people. Henry picked Morganstown, West Virginia. I probably wouldn’t invest there.
It probably works really well for certain people. Whereas I’m sure Ashley and Henry probably wouldn’t invest in some of the markets that I picked. And so the key thing here is to learn the variables and the data that you should be thinking about because then going out to get it is pretty easy. You can look this stuff up on Zillow or Redfin or ChatGPT. It’s just learning the process of thinking about which markets to invest in. That’s why we do these episodes, not because we want you to pick one of these nine markets in particular, but just so you can see how to think through these questions.

Henry:
We’re not trying to tell you where to invest, but Dave, come on, the people want to know. If we had to pick one of these nine- Ooh, that’s a fun one. What’s the one we would pick? What’s the grand winner that we would choose to invest in? I’d hands down know which one I would choose.

Dave:
All right, go.

Henry:
I’d choose Connecticut.

Ashley:
I think I’m going with Illinois.

Dave:
Henry’s going with Hartford. Ashley’s going with Illinois. It’s funny, we’re all picking up. Actually, I think I’d go with Knoxville, Tennessee, I think is the one I would pick.

Henry:
Why Knoxville for you?

Dave:
I think I said it earlier. I just like that it’s solid right now, but I think it is long-term upside. There’s a lot of markets in Tennessee that have gotten too expensive and overgrown, and I think Knoxville has some potential to run still. I like that it’s a state with no income tax. I like that there’s a big university there. So I think there’s just a lot to like there.

Henry:
I like Connecticut for the density. There’s always going to be growth. People are always going to live in this area because of the pricing of New York City, because of the pricing of Boston, and because those markets are so amazing, there’s always going to be jobs in those markets. So a market like this is always going to see people living there. They’re always going to have jobs and you can get great small multifamilies. So I would be looking for that four to 10 unit property in this market that doesn’t need a ton of work that can make some cash flow now, but be a cashflow monster in the future.

Dave:
Well, let us know in the comments which of the nine that you would pick, or if you think that there’s something way better and we missed the obvious one, let us know in the comments as well. And we will be back with another one of these episodes in a couple of months because we love doing this one. It’s a lot of fun, even though it takes a lot of work and research for each of us. Hopefully you enjoyed this episode. Ashley, thank you for letting us borrow you from the Real Estate Rookie Show. We appreciate you being here.

Ashley:
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I always love a good homework assignment.

Dave:
And thank you, Henry, for joining us as well.

Henry:
Thank you, sir.

Dave:
And that’s what we got for you today on the BiggerPockets Podcast. We’ll see you next time.