Podcast

Creating Wealth #11 – California Real Estate Forecast

Jason talks to Bruce Norris (The Norris Group) about how he predicted the California real estate boom in the late 90s and why he now he’s predicting the opposite trend. Bruce talks about the data that he analyzed to make his predictions.

Announcer: Welcome to Creating Wealth with Jason Hartman, President of Platinum Properties Investor Network in Costa Mesa, California.  During this program, Jason is going to tell you some really exciting things that you probably haven’t thought of before and a new slant on investing, fresh new approaches to America’s best investment that will enable you to create more wealth and happiness than you ever thought possible.

Jason is a genuine self-made multimillionaire, who not only talks the talk, but walks the walk.  He’s been a successful investor for 20 years and currently owns properties in 11 states and 17 cities.  This program will help you follow in Jason’s footsteps on the road to financial freedom.  You really can do it.  And now, here’s your host, Jason Hartman, with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Jason Hartman: Hello, Southern California, and welcome to another edition of Creating Wealth.  We have a very, very exciting show for you today and a terrific guest.  My guest, who I will introduce in just a moment, was the lone voice predicting the California real estate boom or comeback in the mid to late ’90s and now he’s predicting the opposite trend, and I’m a big fan of his work, although I’m not always happy to hear the forecast.  I do think it’s very valid.  There’s a lot of data here and I think you’ll really, really enjoy today’s show.  So listen up.  If you’re sitting down at a table and you can take notes, I think you’ll want to, as I welcome to the show Bruce Norris with The Norris Group.  Bruce, welcome.

Bruce Norris: Jason, thank you.

Jason Hartman: It’s great to have you on.

Bruce Norris: Thank you.

Jason Hartman: What led you to believe that prices were going up between 1997 and 2005?  I mean I know back then people thought you were a little bit out of your mind.  They were in the doldrums of the real estate market for seven years and people were not that optimistic.  But you were.  What was that all about?

Bruce Norris: Well, in ’95, I had an interesting experience.  In June, I bought a car for my son and the car cost me $15,700.00 and I bought a three-bedroom house for $13,300.00.

Jason Hartman: Wow.

Bruce Norris: That event scared me because the three-bedroom house was on a public list, a V.A. list.  It had a bid date and I was the only bidder.  And I really thought you know what?  If you cannot sell a house that can rent for $500.00 for more than $13,000.00, no one wants real estate.  And I didn’t understand why that had happened.

In the late ’80s, I had bought a lot of lots and we sold them and made money and I made the mistake of building some custom homes at the wrong time, right at the peak of the market because everything was supposed to be great for a long time for all the wrong reasons, and then I ended up taking quite a hit on those custom homes.

So in ’95, I’m buying a $13,000.00 house.  All of a sudden, I said you know what?  I’ve been an investor for 15 years already and I really have no idea why prices move.  So I decided to see if somebody had ever written in advance of a boom that it was coming.  I looked in articles from 1970 all the way to ’95.  No one had ever predicted a boom in advance and I decided to try and see if it was possible.

And so I started studying data and to make a long story short, I put together every category, a 25-year chart, if you will, of every category I thought might impact prices and then compared it with the price chart.  And it painted this clear picture and I could see that there was an initial event, and the initial event is the migration trend.

When migration comes into a state, you have more demand for real estate.  And in California, we had had a downtrend for a number of years that was reversing and I could see it was going to go positive in ’97, and yet no one felt very positive about real estate.

Jason Hartman: So that was all the out-migration from the defense industry layoffs and the end of the Cold War and that kind of thing?

Bruce Norris: Right.  There are multiple reasons and there usually is.  But the fact you were losing migration just lessened demand and made the downside even worse.  And so I could see migration was returning and historically, when I looked back, migration improving increased the demand for real estate and prices went the other way.  So that was the domino I looked for on an upswing.

Jason Hartman: Okay, so with that in mind, Bruce, what is happening now?  I mean it’s strange because I hear such conflicting information.  The population of California appears to be increasing, but maybe it’s the people from south of the border that can’t afford to buy or at least not yet.  Or is it declining?  I mean what’s going on?

Bruce Norris: Well, there’s two parts to population.  You have migration trends and you have natural birth.  So the total population of California is growing, but most of them are 1 day old and so they can’t buy for a long time.  So now you have to deal with migration trends and that’s made up of two pieces:  immigration and domestic migration.  We are losing in excess of 100,000 people per year now in domestic migration loss.

Jason Hartman: And I’ve heard this called the Smart Belt where people are leaving the State of California and moving out to the Sunbelt, not to the Rust Belt, but to the Smart Belt, which is this group of states that are attractive because people can live so nicely with the equity they have in their California properties.

Bruce Norris: I think if you were approaching retirement age and let’s put yourself in an Orange County home and it doesn’t even have to be a special city.  It can be just the regular cities of Stanton or Santa Ana.  Your house has exploded in value.

Jason Hartman: Sure.

Bruce Norris: And so you look at your $700,000.00, $800,000.00 house, and you get a $500,000.00 free taxable event for a couple and you contemplate can I retire here as comfortably as I can somewhere else?

Jason Hartman: The answer’s no way.

Bruce Norris: There is no way.  And I think that’s what happens is they look at some place where $200,000.00 buys a better home than they live in and they have an extra $500,000.00 for comfort.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, I agree with you.  Last year, Bruce, I bought my first out-of-state property ever.  I had never invested outside of Orange County.  I’ve been investing for 20 years.  And I bought it in Austin, Texas, which I know you’re a fan of Texas.  So am I.  I’ve got them in most of the major cities there.  And I paid $153,000.00 for this beautiful, brand new home, which is really, with a lot and all things considered, nicer than my home in Irvine, and my home in Irvine is a $1.3 million.  How much is the weather actually worth?  I was trying to monetize that.  So that’s a choice a lot of people face in this moving decision.

Bruce Norris: Yeah, when it’s that lopsided, when you really look at the difference, and you think, my gosh, we could do this and this and this if we just move?  It’s pretty powerful.

Jason Hartman: Yeah.  Absolutely.  Well, what are the initial events?  I mean maybe you address that and that’s really the in and out migration that caused the upswing or the downturn and do you want to expand on the out migration now?

Bruce Norris: Sure.  Well, migration, it can be driven out for a number of reasons, but one of the reasons it occurs is you reach a breaking point and that’s called affordability.  Affordability basically boils down to a state’s population to afford the monthly payment that results when they buy the median price home and have to borrow money at the going interest rate.  At some point, you get to such a high payment that you lose the ability to pass on the inventory quickly enough and when you get to the affordability lows, inevitably, you get builder cancellations going up, and you get the MLS burgeoning with inventory.

Jason Hartman: Which has absolutely been happening for several months now.

Bruce Norris: Right and so all of the stuff that we’ve heard about the supply is less than demand and that’s not going to change, that is not true.  How do you go in San Diego 800 percent higher in listings in a year and a half?  The demand was not real.  It wasn’t a person living in it.  It was a person that came here, wrote a check on speculation that it was going to go up, and so that has sort of disappeared completely.  Now you’re dealing with not only the builder didn’t know that was coming, so they kept building.  The investors that aren’t happy that their homes aren’t going up are also putting their stuff on the market.

Jason Hartman: And they stopped speculating now.

Bruce Norris: That’s right.  They quit the buy side and they increased the for sale list.

Jason Hartman: And there you have a whole bunch of new inventory.

Bruce Norris: Well, that competes against the builder and that’s a real problem.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, absolutely.  So set up the whole picture for us, if you will Bruce, of what you call the “perfect storm” that is upon us.

Bruce Norris: Well, when we look back in a few years because there’s going to be some damage done to our real estate equities, I think it will occur to us that it makes sense that we had the biggest real estate bubble in history, when we were the only game in town, i.e. Coastal real estate, and we combine that with a 40-year low interest rate.  So it makes sense that there was so much pressure on inventory and so much of what we thought was real demand coming in from other areas.  It’s interesting.  When Californians go to an Austin, Texas, and we shake the hand of a realtor and tell them we’re from Orange County, California, inside, there’s a big smile that happens.

Jason Hartman: Sure, because you take your California brain to a lower priced market.

Bruce Norris: That’s right.  When someone from Japan comes to California, the same thing happens.  When someone comes from England to Florida to buy a Miami high-rise condo, the same thing happens.  It doesn’t mean that it’s a smart decision.  It just means that it looks like demand and it looks like it’s going to continue.  But the second it no longer makes sense, it stops.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.  Very good point.  So what else is the “perfect storm,” other ingredients?

Bruce Norris: Well, there’s a domino effect and so it begins with affordability issues, which increases inventory.  Builders end up having a harder time selling inventory quickly, more cancellations, so what they do then is they start laying off people.  And you end up with just a scenario that starts playing out where people get laid off.  That’s already happened.  There’s a building frame contractor that’s one of the largest in the state.  They’ve laid off I think it was 1,000 of their foreman.

Jason Hartman: Wow.

Bruce Norris: And each of their foreman – I’m sorry; 100 of their foreman – each responsible for framing 500 houses a year.  So that’s basically an admission that they’re not going to be framing 50,000 houses this year that they thought they were going to.

Jason Hartman: So what do you say – I want to talk about that after the break here, but what do you say to the people that say everybody wants to live here in California and we’re running out of land.  I mean what do you say to them?

Bruce Norris: Well, if that was an original comment, I would probably be tending to agree with them, but it is a comment that’s been made in every end of a boom since we started booming.  And so in ’79, you can look in the L.A. times about somebody telling us we were about ready to run out of land.

Jason Hartman: In 1979, okay.

Bruce Norris: That’s correct, and 1980.  That was, we can’t have a downturn because of this.  And there’s multiple reasons that are repeated, but that’s certainly one of the favorites.  And if that’s true, let me ask you this.  Why would Centex have just walked away from a $30 million deposit on land in California?

Jason Hartman: Bruce, hang on just a moment.  We’ve got a break.  We’ll be right back.

Announcer: To attend a Platinum Properties Investor Network educational event, visit www.realtyinvestornetwork.com.  That’s www.realtyinvestornetwork.com.  Or call 949-640-0505.  That’s 949-640-0505.

Announcer 2: Are you winning the rat race?  Would you like to get off that treadmill and retire early with real wealth and some steady passive income?  Well, here’s Jason Hartman, President of Platinum Properties Investor Network.

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Announcer 2: Call Platinum Properties Investor Network now and attend one of their nearby educational events, 949-640-0505; that’s 949-640-0505.  Or visit www.realtyinvestornetwork.com.  That’s www.realtyinvestornetwork.com.

Jason Hartman: We’re talking to Bruce Norris and he’s saying some very interesting things about the California crash, and Bruce, why don’t you continue where we left off about Centex homes and their big deposit that they walked away from on a big development they were about to do.

Bruce Norris: Sure.  What ends up happening is builders are surprised by the downturn and the lack of closings that they have, and so, if you’re optimistic and you’re paying very high prices for land and it looks like you don’t have pricing power and you don’t have customers, then you’re going to try and exit.  And what ultimately happens is that builders do get surprised.  They really don’t have any choice, but to finish out the phases.  And so when they get done, if they have unsold inventory, which I think they’re going to have a lot of, they auction them off.  When they hold an auction, let’s just say that they get $.80 on the dollar for that property.  It means that everyone that bought a home in that tract just said goodbye to their 20 percent down payment, if, in fact, they put down that much.

That sets up the next phase where people who got those homes predominately got adjustable financing.  And the thought through their mind at the time was this is no big deal because real estate is always going to go up and when the payment adjusts, I’ll simply refinance it to the same loan program or sell my home and cash in.

Jason Hartman: That’s what we were talking about during the break is that America keeps using their home like an ATM machine, thinking that equity will always be available to them and maybe through decline in prices or just a pull back in the lending market where the institutions, the banks, get scared, that equity may not be there, right?

Bruce Norris: Oh, absolutely, and it’s not even – it goes deeper than that.  I think the government is now looking at the guidelines that have been used or haven’t been used and they’re basically going to put their foot down with new guidelines, saying that these zero down, proving nothing, stated income, stated asset loans will no longer be allowed.

Jason Hartman: Sure, the Liars Loan, we call them in the industry.

Bruce Norris: Yeah, and so you’ve got a real problem there because if, in fact, and the market really hasn’t gone up from August till now, May.  The figures just came out.  In August of ’05, median price for California was 568.  May of ’06, it’s 564.  In two more months, we will now be advertising, when they come out with their report, that we’ve had zero year-over-year gain when the August report comes out.  That will completely eliminate sales to investors and foreign country investors.

Jason Hartman: So they just won’t be interested in the market anymore here.

Bruce Norris: No, it won’t cash flow on its own.  Interest rates are going up.  I mean there would be no reason to buy that.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, I agree.

Bruce Norris: Okay, so you loose all of those people and all of a sudden, when their adjustable mortgage payments change to what no longer is working and completely buries them in debt, the exit plan is, okay, let’s sell, and all of a sudden, you’ve got inventory going up by 100’s of percent a year.  Eventually, they’re going to go into foreclosure.  Well, you’ve got a few choices in foreclosure.  You lose it to the trustee sale or there will be something called a short sale that will get very popular.

A short sale is where the bank participates in the loss during the time that the people are behind, so the foreclosure never gets consummated.  The lender gets called, and let’s say a broker has a listing.  You’ve got a $700,000.00 listing and there’s an $800,000.00 loan on the property, and $700,000.00 is all it’s worth now, and they get a $700,000.00 offer and the bank agrees to cooperate by losing money during the process.

Jason Hartman: So they won’t lose more.  That’s the bank’s incentive.

Bruce Norris: They won’t lose more and they don’t need any more inventory because maybe it’s coming back in droves now.  Well, that’s all well and good, except for the way the rules are, refinanced money has recourse.  And so when that $100,000.00 debt is forgiven, the IRS gets notified by the lender by law – it’s not optional.

Jason Hartman: Right.

Bruce Norris: And the people that got the forgiveness of debt get a 1099 for the $100,000.00.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, it’s just like winning money on a game show.  Debt relief is like a prize and so you have to pay taxes on it.

Bruce Norris: That’s right.  Now, it doesn’t matter actually if you’ve refinanced and pulled that money out and you qualify for that $500,000.00 free gain again.  It’s a separate issue.  So you could only have made, let’s say, $200,000.00 by refi’ing, but the fact is, the lender didn’t get back all their money and therefore, you’re going to declare that as taxable gain.

Jason Hartman: Okay, so there are a lot of things going on here.  There’s sort of this vicious circle of market decline, payment adjustments, no longer have interest in the market from foreign buyers.  Then you have changes in mortgage guidelines, which make it harder for people to access equity, if it’s there at all.  Anything else in that circle?

Bruce Norris: Well, when you get all those simultaneously, what would be your attitude toward real estate?

Jason Hartman: Not too positive.

Bruce Norris: Right, and see, that’s the coup de grace is that when you have these tremendous gains that we’ve had where you get 15 and 20 percent a year as if that’s normal, and all of a sudden, that stops and let’s say now go ahead two or three years into a downturn, where now we’re talking 2007.  And in 2007, it’s going to be a pretty painful year because there’s a trillion dollars nationally of these adjustable mortgages that have their first adjustment.

Jason Hartman: Okay, so I’ve got a question for you on that.  The adjustable rate – there’s another prognosticator out there who says there just aren’t really that many adjustable rate mortgages, and my thinking on this, although I’d like you to verify it if you can, is that in these sort of high end, yuppie-ish areas, there are a lot more use of exotic loans, adjustable rate loans, because people are in this sort of live-for-today mentality more than they are in the Midwest, where they’re more conservative.  They get fixed-rate loans more often.  True?

Bruce Norris: Oh, absolutely true.

Jason Hartman: Okay, so that’s the double whammy then for California.

Bruce Norris: Yes, and without naming names, I’m familiar with the idea that there’s just not that many adjustable loans.  The report that stated – there are three amounts that were used in the report, something under 100,000 – I’m sorry; something under 84, I think it was $84 billion, then $300 billion, then $1 trillion.  That’s sequentially over from ’05, ’06, and ’07.  In ’07, a trillion dollars of mortgage money has its adjustment.  The person that refers to “there’s not that much mortgage money that has adjustment” was only quoting the 2005 amount.  It left alone the $1.3 trillion that started in January of ’06 until the end of ’07.

Jason Hartman: That’s a big number to leave out.

Bruce Norris: That’s a big number because if you think we only have about $8 trillion of debt total, it represents about 16 percent of all mortgage money adjusting.

Jason Hartman: Which is subject to a large payment shock when the person gets the notice in the mail that says, hey, your payment went up a huge percentage and that can really hurt them.  And what do they do?  They look for a way to get out.  They say, “I can’t afford this,” so they either stop paying and go into foreclosure, or they put their house on the market, right?

Bruce Norris: With everybody else trying to find the same person.  But now that person is reading the paper, looking with doubt, going you know, I’m not really going to be aggressively going after it.  This looks like a buyer’s market and we’ll be patient.

Jason Hartman: Okay, so I want to hear – you have a prediction as to the foreclosure numbers in the State of California.  What is that, Bruce?

Bruce Norris: The foreclosure numbers, I think, will exceed 15 times or 1500 percent where they are currently.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, that’s a scary number and will that number exceed what happened in sort of the downturn that we had from ’90 to ’97?

Bruce Norris: Yes.

Jason Hartman: It’ll be worse this time.

Bruce Norris: And there’s a very good reason for that.  As a matter of fact, the downturn between ’90 and ’97 was exactly the same percentage of foreclosure increase from ’80 to ’84, 981 percent increase, or nearly a 10-times multiple.

Jason Hartman: Wow.

Bruce Norris: The difference, though, is that both of those cycles that had the 981 percent increase had interest rates decline during that cycle.  This time, for us to only have that 981 percent increase, I think we would have to mimic those conditions and have interest rates decline.  I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, because this time, it seems like rates can only go up –

Bruce Norris: That’s right.

Jason Hartman: – because we’ve got to fight and stave off inflation.

Bruce Norris: Well, now, just think about what happened to the adjustable loan people in the other cycle because we had a pretty good share of adjustable loans there, too.  But their payment got cheaper if they just sat there for the whole cycle.

Jason Hartman: Right, they just waited it out and everything got better for them.  This time will be the opposite.

Bruce Norris: That’s exactly right.  This time when people wait it out, it will get worse and worse.

Jason Hartman: Okay, talk to me.  We’ve just got a moment here.  Talk to me about oil cost, the energy impact on the real estate market.  What’s going on there?

Bruce Norris: Well, basically, what occurs is that it is a gauge for inflation.  When oil went up in the ’70s, it went up in kind of like two booster shots.  It went from $3.00 to $10.00 and then $10.00 to $30.00.  And what I did in the report was look at the history of the charts and I looked at gold and silver, and those exploded with oil and basically, with two booster-price adjustments as well.  I think gold and silver are not what I call initial events.  They react to something.

And so I keep on going back until I see what causes it and oil causes it.  Here’s the problem.  If the Fed is forced to fight inflation and at the same time, where we have a bad economy, that’s called stagflation and history tells us that they will fight inflation rather than save the real estate market.  So you can expect that they would go aggressively with interest rates up.

Jason Hartman: Okay.

Bruce Norris: What I think is actually sort of insignificant is whether we stop at 5.25 or 5.5 percent because I think this is Phase 1.  Phase 2 will be when someone in the Middle East does something aggressive and causes an oil embargo and you could be months away, years away, or days away from that event.  But anything that causes that problem between now and 2010 will cause oil to go past that $100.00 barrel like a rocket.

Jason Hartman: Absolutely.  Bruce Norris, it’s been great having you on the show.  I’d love to have you back.  You can hear about Bruce on our website.  We’ll link to yours.  Or visit www.thenorrisgroup.com and everybody reposition your equity into safer markets.  That’s our advice.  Thank you for joining us, Bruce.

Bruce Norris: Thank you very much, Jason.

Jason Hartman: Attention agents, brokers, and mortgage people.  Do you know that we cooperate?  Do you know that our network is an open system that you can refer clients and outsource your investor clients to us and receive passive income?  It’s a really great opportunity.  All you have to do is register your clients at www.jasonhartman.com and tell them to attend one of our live events, our live educational seminars.  Listen to our podcast, go to the website, and request our free CD at www.jasonhartman.com.

And if they invest with us per the terms listed on the website, you will get a referral fee.  We have lots of agents, brokers, and mortgage people that receive surprise referral fees that they weren’t even expecting.  They get a check in the mail and they are just happily, happily surprised.  It’s a nice extra supplement to your income.  So be sure to take advantage of our broker cooperation.  Agents are welcome.  We cooperate with outside people and we’d love to help you with your investor clients.

I’m here with a previous guest, Randy, and we are excited today to announce a new joint venture, a new seminar that we are offering for pre-retirees and retirees, entitled, “Fatten Your Golden Goose.”  Now, I kinda think we should call that the Platinum Goose, but we’re going to call it “Fatten Your Golden Goose – Real Estate Strategies for Seniors and Pre-retirees.”  Randy, tell us more about this exciting new seminar.

Randy: Jason, thank you.  Yeah, we’re very excited about this opportunity to talk to people that are about to retire.  They’re in that area, maybe five or ten years at the most away from retirement, or they just entered retirement, and they’re looking at all of these opportunities, or I should say stresses, in their life of what to do in terms of making sure that they’re minimizing their taxes, that they have enough money to last their retirement.  They’re looking at things like the IRAs and the 401ks that they put together over these years and they’re wondering, what’s really the best way to plan and use that money effectively as they go into retirement.

So what better to do is utilize real estate strategies to help these people minimize the taxes, increase their safety and liquidity, and help them to increase their income that they’ll have when they get into retirement?

Jason Hartman: Excellent and this is on May 27.  It’s a Tuesday evening here at our office in Costa Mesa and it’s from 5:30 – 9:00 p.m.  What else can you tell us about this event?

Randy: Well, aside from the ideas that we just mentioned, I think a big thing that people need to understand is that 2010 is going to be a very special year.  In that, it’s going to be an opportunity for people to convert their regular IRAs or 401ks into Roth IRAs.  And you know the benefit of a Roth IRA is that the money can continue to grow income tax deferred.  But now, because it’s in a Roth, you can pull that income tax-free.  The challenge is how do you move it from your traditional IRA or your rollover IRA to the Roth IRA without paying a bunch of taxes, and we’re going to give the people that attend this seminar some strategies to help them potentially eliminate 100 percent of that tax.

Jason Hartman: And you know, Randy, that is a great strategy and folks listening, this is a big deal, a very unique strategy Randy has come up with and I think you’ll really like hearing more about it.  So be sure to join us on May 27.  We will look forward to seeing you there.  Go to www.jasonhartman.com to get registered.  Thanks, Randy.

Randy: All right, Jason.

Jason Hartman: I’m here with Nancy and wanted to talk to you about two of our fantastic markets.  One is our tried and true market that we’ll talk about in a moment that is strengthening and has gotten better.  And one is a newer market.  Nancy, welcome.

Nancy: Thank you.

Jason Hartman: Tell us about Gulfport/Biloxi area and Long Beach area.  That’s Long Beach, Mississippi, not California.  We were there a few weeks ago.  What’s the scoop?

Nancy: Yeah, we had a great trip.  Jason always talks about out of a disaster comes an opportunity and I really believe that’s what’s happening in Biloxi.  The economy there via the casinos and the major boom on the ocean, they are now allowed to build on land.  Biloxi is now the third largest gaming revenue area in the country, behind Atlantic City and Las Vegas.

Jason Hartman: So what you’re saying is that before, the casinos had to be built on barges.

Nancy: That’s right.

Jason Hartman: And when Katrina came along and wiped them out, the city said, hey, let’s let them build on land.  Let’s change the law.  And that made the casinos so much more substantial.  They’re huge now.  They’re like 50 – 60 percent the size of a big glamorous Vegas casino.

Nancy: Right and there are 11 casinos currently up and running and they’re employing about 17,000 people.  That’s about 2,000 more than all the casinos that were open pre-Katrina.

Jason Hartman: Tell us some of the big corporate names in the gaming business who are in Biloxi.  I mean it’s amazing.

Nancy: Yeah, Harrah’s is there right now with the Grand Casino in Biloxi and they’re also building a $700 million resort with Jimmy Buffet, the new Margaritaville Casino that will be open in 2010.  MGM Mirage is there with the Beau Rivage, which is the sister casino to the Bellagio in Las Vegas.

Jason Hartman: These are all big corporate names and those casinos, we were there on that trip, and they are unbelievable how swanky and glamorous they are.

Nancy: The Hard Rock is there.  Interesting tidbit about the Hard Rock:  it was there before Katrina.  The whole casino got destroyed.  The guitar remained standing.  It was the only thing on the beach that remained standing.

Jason Hartman: Long live rock and roll.

Nancy: And they are – they have rebuilt the Hard Rock and it’s just amazing inside there.

Jason Hartman: I mean that Hard Rock Casino is gigantic, five, six levels of parking outside.  I remember going through that parking garage.  It was packed.  I mean it’s just huge inside.  It’s amazing how much money they have dumped into this area.

Nancy: Right.  They have actually inked about $1.3 billion in casino revenues last year.  Prior to Katrina, the gaming revenues were about $800 million.  So they’ve just almost doubled the revenues in just a couple years.  They’re also, because of the casinos and the tourism, they do $100 million in golf each year.  There’s 20 golf courses there.  This industry is just spurring all kinds of job growth, not just from the casino workers, but also construction workers to build these places.  There is a major military installation there with Keesler Air Force Base, the CB naval base, a couple Army and Navy National Guard installations and also the Stennis Space Center, which is NASA’s backup space shuttle installation.  So there’s just a ton of activity there that we really think is going to make this one of our booming higher appreciation areas, and we’re very excited about that.

Jason Hartman: And a shortage of housing because we had to look around a lot for that, Nancy.  That’s excellent.  Tell us real quickly about one of our tried and true markets, the market where I own and the market where many, many of our clients have invested, and it’s actually improving in terms of the rental market being very, very strong.  Stronger than before, and this has just been a real dependable market.  What’s the name of it?  Everybody’s wondering.

Nancy: This is Kansas City, Missouri, and Kansas City is the 13th largest metro in the U.S.  The statistics in Kansas City are just excellent.  This is a strong, stable rental market.  We talk a lot about our rent-to-value ratios and it’s .7 percent being ideal.  All of the properties that we have in Kansas City, we get at least a .8 percent RV ratio.

Jason Hartman: On my property, my four-plex in Kansas City, I’m getting about a .82 percent RV ratio, so it’s phenomenal.  It’s just a great property.

Nancy: There are some positive cash flow opportunities in Kansas City, which we haven’t seen for a few years.  So if you’re looking for a market with some positive cash each month and a .8 rent-to-value ratio, Kansas City is your market.

Jason Hartman: Excellent.  Thank you, Nancy.

Hey, I just wanted to announce a couple of quick things for you.  If you are able to come to one of our live events, we would love to see you and meet you in person.  We’ve had people fly in from all over the U.S. for them.  So hopefully you can join us for some of those events.

I wanted to mention to you that we have a new offering, a free CD, a free audio CD, that you will really, really like.  We’ve had so many people that have given us really good comments about them, and you can go to our website at www.jasonhartman.com and just fill out a little quick web form and you can either download it or you can have the physical CD mailed to you in the postal mail.  But get the free CD, especially if you are a new listener.  You need this.  And if you are a regular listener and you’ve listened to all the other old shows, you don’t need the CD so much, but it will be a nice review for you either way.  But if you’re a new listener, you definitely want to go to www.jasonhartman.com and request the free CD.

Remember that Platinum Properties Investor Network has moved.  We are in our beautiful new office in Costa Mesa, California, 555 Anton, Suite 150, in Costa Mesa, California, 92626, and we’re right by world-famous South Coast Plaza.  So come in for a visit and a little shopping.

Also, we just uploaded another video podcast and I’d highly recommend that you subscribe to that.  There’s some stuff that just lends itself better to video than audio.  If you want to see what’s on that, subscribe to it, you can go to www.jasonhartman.com.  If you use iTunes or an iPod and you’re an Apple person, then you can go to the iTunes Store, type in Jason Hartman, and two podcasts will come up, the video podcast and the audio podcast.  And you’re probably already, if you’re listening, a subscriber to the audio podcast, so make sure you get yourself a free subscription to the video podcast as well.

And this particular one that we just loaded in the video podcast is about Naked Short Sales and what goes on with this short sale and manipulation of the stock market.  It’s a very interesting report from Bloomberg News and I think you’ll really learn a lot from that.  So be sure to tune in and watch that.

Be sure to see appropriate disclaimers and disclosures on our website at www.jasonhartman.com.  Remember that we are not tax or legal advisors.

Anyway, we’ll talk to you next week.  Thanks for listening.

This material is the copyrighted creative work of either Jason Hartman, the Hartman Media Company, Platinum Properties Investor Network, Incorporated or the J. Hartman Company, all rights reserved.

[End of Audio]

Duration:  36 minutes

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