This situation isn’t going to get better in a week.
It will spook the markets even worse.
Here’s an example of how fortunate real estate market timing can help with retirement security. Back in 2011, in the depths of the financial crisis, I purchased a distressed property for $32,500. Later I sold it and treated the sale as a 1031 tax deferred exchange, added $25,000, and traded into two houses.
Now I’m selling the houses and doing another 1031 exchange into newly constructed apartments. I’ll need to add another $50-60,000 to complete the transaction, but at the end of the day I’ll have 12 apartments spinning off monthly income with no mortgage.
One reason I like real estate is that you have direct control of your investments as opposed to the stock market where, it seems to me, you just go with a hunch and hope for the best.
But you do not have direct control over the market price or rental demand, right?
Besides, you are not evaluating the work you put it. you may have bought the property for $32,500 and material value $25,000 but left out what you did to make it all work. For an average person who has to hire a contractor to pull it off, it will be a quite different story.
It’s minimal. The rate may go down further. I will wait and see if FED cut it further next week.
Sweat equity certainly helps.
Demand is largely a function of your rents relative to the rest of your market. Price yourself a little under and you will never have a problem funding tenants.
And with no mortgage, you have a lot of flexibility.
The financial crisis allowed me to refi all my rentals into 15 year mortgages which are now almost all paid off. Dealing with tenants can be a pain, but in terms of ROI and income, RE is by far our best investment.
What is the market price if you had to turn over your rentals for someone else to manage? You probably still get pretty good ROI but not as much as you are doing it yourself.
Property managers in my area charge 8-10% of the monthly rent.
So yes it lowers your return by a bit. When you have no mortgage it’s feasible to take that hit, if you are heavily financed that might eat a huge chunk of your positive cash flow.
However, the market level for rents is not under your control.
Most real estate is leveraged or bought on margin, so gains are magnified. But losses are magnified as well, as people wiped out in 2008-2009 found out.
Yes you can’t control the market, but you can control what you invest in. If a property doesn’t spin off enough income to justify the price, it’s a bad investment. Don’t buy that one. 
We picked up most of our properties in the aftermath of 2008, when all those people with negative cash flow couldn’t make the mortgage, and couldn’t sell it for what they owed.
I didn’t do any work. I bought a parcel for $32,500, sold it, reinvested the proceeds (plus $25,000) into the purchase of 2 houses, collected rent on the houses, am now selling the houses, and will reinvest the proceeds plus $50-60k into 12 apartments.
The only “work” involved has been performing market research, negotiating purchase and sale contracts, the minimal “work” of collecting rent on two rental houses, and designing the apartments (which I enjoyed).
Once the apartments are completed, I’ll either manage them myself, hire a part time resident manager, or hire a management company.
Realistically, I’ll manage them myself. I’ll have the tenants set up direct deposit into my bank; I’ll pay the taxes, insurance, water, and trash bills myself; and since they’re brand spankin’ new, I expect maintenance to be minimal. I’ll hire out the lawn care and cleaning of vacant units, which just leaves showing the occasional vacancy.
These transactions involved no debt at all. By timing the markets well and identifying profitable opportunities I’m turning $32,500 + $25,000 + $60,000 into 12 apartments.
Once they’re up and running I could easily refinance and pull out my total cash invested and the rent from one apartment would more than cover the payment.
But I’m debt averse, so I won’t.
Were you involved in the development or construction of these apartments?
Use Venmo or one of the many rent collection services, do not hand out bank account numbers to your tenants.
Don’t you do that every time you write someone a check?
No. I designed the units as I wanted them and hired a draftsman to put my plans into Autocad, and then made a deal with a builder to build them on land he owns and sell me the finished product.
As @IxnayBob points out, bank account numbers are hardly secret. But you can take the further precaution of setting up a rent collection account and with a feature to regularly “sweep” the funds out of it into another “secret” account.
But your point is well taken. I’ll be careful.
Sending a check to someone you owe money to is one thing; giving an account number to someone who owes you money is a whole different thing. I would never give a tenant that kind of personal information.
Plus - some banks charge fees for these kinds of transfers, and some tenants just live outside of the banking world and don’t have checking accounts.
Venmo is free for everyone for single transactions under (I think) $2500, and all the kids these days use it. Many of the services are free for landlords, or very cheap (like less than $1 per tenant per month), and now that you can deposit checks through your phone getting actual checks isn’t that much of a burden any more either.
Some of the services allow the tenant to have their rent payments reported to Experian and the like, which can be a real carrot if they know skipping rent will mess up their credit rating.
Some of these services let tenants charge their rent on their credit card for a 3% fee or so. It’s crazy and almost irresponsible to do that, IMO, but if someone else wants to assume the risk, not my problem. 
The futures that I saw on the Bloomberg Europe TV show last night showed the S&P would be up 2% at the open. Closed up 9% today. And I nibbled on the right stocks.
And it’s green for tomorrow too! Yeah!
It didn’t occur to me when I first saw this question, but on further reflection I think I know why @notrichenough was asking. The rules for 1031 exchanges are fairly simple, but there are a lot of technical details one must be careful with. For example, you can’t transact as buyer or seller with a “related party” on either leg of the exchange, but you (or a related party) could act as lender to a counter-party to the exchange, including the builder of property you are acquiring.
So the answer is “no”, I wasn’t and couldn’t be involved in the development of these apartments, as that would jeopardize my exchange. I entered into an arms length transaction with an unrelated party.
@sherpa I wondered when you said you designed them what your level of involvement was, but it sounds like you are all over the rules.
I’ve only ever sold one property and it was too small to roll into something else without adding a lot more money, so I’ve never done a 1031 exchange.