You aren’t doing the rest of the math. That duplex has maintenance, taxes and lost occupancy during rental transition. Once you factor in all the shit you missed you end up with either a break even or more likely cash flow negative position. At that’ point all you are just gambling on continued appreciation of the property, and hoping you can make up the 10% in transaction costs. In the past that’s been a decent bet but who knows. Current interest rates and demographic are working against you at some point affordability might come to bite. Or it might not and more people will just have to cram into tighter spaces. If you were to just rent that 2200$ unit you would save 2-3k a month and you could invest that instead. Overall the risk of investing the savings in diversified equities is lower than that of buying into a single housing asset, but of course there are no guarantees.
You're right, I'm not - because unlike you, I've actually been a landlord. "Lost occupancy" is a month every two or three years around here. "Maintenance" is a thousand a year tops. If you're going to get that stupid about it you're smart if you give a rental agency first's month's on every new tenant for the eviction protection alone. Doesn't change the fact that the equation goes from "700sqft condo for $3400/mo" to "1100sqft in a mult-tenant for $2600/mo" through the liberal application of downpayments. But here's the basic problem - you listened to a podcast. I had tenants for ten years. Am I happy I didn't have tenants during COVID? Yer damn skippy. But none of your podcasts brought that up either. "Affordability might come to bite" is Suze Orman-speak for "I'm the one giving the advice here" - we're talking Seattle, where the population has increased by 50% in 20 years, the only metropolitan area with not one trillion-dollar company but TWO, the place where the hoi polloi whiplashed from "why are you building so much parking around light rail" to "why didn't you build more parking around light rail" in exactly one weekend. The neighbors across the street sold. A REIT bought their place and immediately listed it as a rental for the monthly mortgage rate. The rental agent told me they had 130 applications; made sense because the neighborhood was impassable for an entire goddamn weekend. This in the zip code that had 70% of new senior housing NATIONWIDE in 2018 and who moved in? retirees. What "affordability" are we talking about here? Because I have employees commuting from Marysville. I have employees commuting from Lake Stevens. I have employees commuting from Tulalip. These are things I know, which you're dismissing because of things you've heard. "Things you've heard" is how Zillow ate shit - as discussed above. No need to know anything in particular when you can just learn things in general! If you were to rent the duplex for $2200 vs buy it and rent half of it for a net of $2600 you're right - you've got an extra $400 a month to go play the ponies with. That's a whopping $4800/yr! Of course you aren't getting $15k off your taxes in mortgage interest deduction - it's the biggest white-family sop in the entire tax code and while it doesn't always apply, it's not nuthin'. But more importantly, when you muck about in "diversified equities" these are the guys on the other side of the trade: We're in one of those stupid markets where everyone is making money so everyone thinks they're smart. They're not - they're making less money than the monsters because unless you've got a server colocated with NYSE in a dark pool you're just order flow. It's all you've ever been, it's all you'll ever be. Sure - pick stuff correctly and you'll come out ahead but you will never come out as ahead as Goldman. And for Goldman to come out more ahead you have to come out behind and they will absolutely make that happen. And yet. You persist in presuming I'm the guy who doesn't know what he's talking about. Why is that?You aren’t doing the rest of the math.
If you were to just rent that 2200$ unit you would save 2-3k a month and you could invest that instead.