This Area Has the BEST Cash Flow Potential in the Country

Dave:
There’s a sort of hidden under the radar region in the US that may be one of the more profitable ones for investors. Right now it’s not exactly the Midwest. You can’t really call it the Rust Belt anymore, but it’s the entire Great Lakes region today. That’s what we’re talking about. Hey everyone, it’s Dave and I’m joined from right off Lake Erie in Western New York by co-host of the Real Estate Rookie podcast, Ashley Kehr. Ashley, thanks for joining us.

Ashley:
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I have to say, when I first saw the show topic, I kind of laughed a little. I was like, you mean the Rust Belt? No, but

Dave:
I feel like that negative connotation keeps people away from what could be a great region to invest in right now.

Ashley:
Yeah, and I think there’s definitely promise in this region that we’re going to talk about today.

Dave:
All right, good. Well, we came up with this show topic. I’m glad to hear someone who’s actually there investing there right now thinks there’s promise. So the reason we actually came up with this show, if you all were listening a couple weeks ago, Henry Washington frequent contributor to this show, coined this term that I can’t stop thinking about. He called it Lake Effect Cashflow. And if you’ve ever lived in the Midwest or in the Great Lakes region, you’ve probably heard this concept of lake effect snow, where there’s just so much snow in this area, but the same area that experiences this lake effect snow also has some of the best cashflow potential in the country. Actually today I want to talk with you about the advantages for investors in the Great Lake region right now and any potential detractions or risks that you think are in the area. We’re also going to discuss a couple of specific markets like Chicago, Detroit, and a couple other smaller markets, and I’d love to get your opinion on them. So Ashley, lemme just ask you first, is this term that Henry made up like that cashflow true, is it actually easy to get cashflow in the Great Lakes region?

Ashley:
Well, at least in Buffalo, New York, I can say from experience, yes, this can happen is you can get cashflow. And when we did another episode about what markets to invest in and you had given us a list of, I don’t know, a thousand different markets, one of my top picks was actually Erie, Pennsylvania, which is another Great Lakes, and I didn’t even know I’d be able to use it for this show too.

Dave:
Yeah, we’re making it very efficient for you. You just have to research one market. I actually do invest in this region as well. I don’t live there like Ashley does and don’t have as much experience in the area. But for me, I’ve been able to find cashflow on MLS deals. It’s not like it was 10 years ago where you’re getting a 10% cash on cash return, but I at least have been able to find cashflow positive deals with some upside through a rehab in this region. And I assume that’s the same for you in Buffalo. And then I should ask as well, I know you invest in Buffalo, I think also in Erie, but is all of your investing experience in the Great Lakes region?

Ashley:
Everything is outside of Buffalo, New York. So there’s a couple deals I’ve done in the city and then the rest are in the suburbs and rural area of Buffalo. And then one random flip in Seattle, Washington and a couple passive. But other than that, most of my experience has been just in the Buffalo area.

Dave:
Alright, well we’ve now established you’re the perfect person for this episode. So tell us what are the advantages of investing in this area?

Ashley:
Yeah, so the first one is the affordability, especially for new investor, just getting started the low price point of purchases, but also not having to give up other kind of metrics such as low rental prices. There’s actually pretty great rent to price ratio in these areas. And New York you have to be careful because the 50% rule doesn’t work there because property taxes are so high. So there is some give and take, but in states like Ohio, the property taxes aren’t as high and there can be some more affordability in those areas.

Dave:
Can you explain to everyone what the 50% rule is?

Ashley:
Yeah, so the 50% rule is that 100% of your rent say it’s a thousand dollars. That means your monthly expenses should be 50% of that, such as your mortgage payment, your property taxes, your insurance. And in some states that can be easy to hit. And then in others that can be very difficult, especially if they have high property taxes or in somewhere where there’s a high insurance premium that you have to pay every year.

Dave:
That’s exactly right. And so why do you think the region has remained so affordable? I think you could say, oh, it’s affordable because no one wants to live there or that there’s no economic activity going on. Is that the case?

Ashley:
I think that was the case and it’s taken time for that revitalization to happen. So in Buffalo for example, there’s a lot of waterfront along Lake Erie and for a long time it was just an old industrial building set sat there, and there’s been a lot of revitalization as far as Canal side where now there’s a whole concert venue, there’s events going on constantly. There’s an ice skating rink, there’s a kids play area, all this stuff going on that’s happening in there, but there’s still even room for more growth along the waterfront. And when I was researching some of the other cities, it seems to be the same that they’re constantly working on revitalizing that waterfront, but it’s not there yet. It’s not as great as it could be. And I think it’s taking time for people to realize that there really is this great natural beauty of the Great Lakes and it has this stigma still of being the Rust Belt.

Dave:
I think that’s sort of this pendulum that swings back and forth because people and businesses tend to look for affordability. And it seems that in the last let’s decade, a lot of people were moving to the Southeast. It was relatively affordable and businesses were moving there and people wanted to go live there. Still, there are places that are relatively affordable in the southeast, but a lot of places have gotten super expensive. And so when you look around the country where there is good affordability, it’s places in this region and you start to see investment in this region because it’s cheaper for businesses. I mean you probably know this in your area in Syracuse, micron is building a big chip manufacturing. We see another chip manufacturing plant going in Columbus. You see Detroit’s revitalization, you see a lot of investment in places like Milwaukee and in Wisconsin and that eventually brings jobs and brings revitalization. And it does seem like we’re still sort of in the beginning stages of that and we haven’t seen, certainly not the same level of business investment that you’ve see in places like Austin and Phoenix and Tampa, but I wonder if this is sort of the opportunity to get in before a lot of that pendulum swings back in the other direction.

Ashley:
And I think people are still living off that covid stimulus high where having to move into affordable areas wasn’t really what anybody was doing. They were moving to where they wanted to live because everybody was making so much money. And I think that now that that’s slowly going away where it’s not as great of a market now that people aren’t making as much money as they did right after Covid, that you will see people have to move to these areas because of the affordability where nobody wanted to move to that, they wanted to move to sunny Florida, they wanted to move into Arizona where it’s always nice and warm. So I think that over the next couple of years we could see more people moving into these areas because of the affordability where I think in the past couple of years people moved for lifestyle.

Dave:
Definitely. Yeah, that’s so true. And just for some data here, affordability in the housing market on a national basis is actually the lowest it’s been in about 40 years. But it’s super interesting because in the us, the US has some of the least affordable markets in the entire world like Seattle and Los Angeles, but we also actually also have the most affordable market in the entire world, which is Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania also in this region. So you can see that relative to income, there actually is quite a lot of value to be found in some of these markets. So let’s talk about some of those specific markets. I actually published some lists all the time on BiggerPockets and we put out our best cashflow markets earlier this year and three of the top 10 at least as measured by the rent to price ratio. Not a perfect measurement, but it is sort of a proxy for cashflow.

Dave:
Number one was Peoria, Illinois. It’s not right on the lake, but it is in the region. Also. Pittsburgh, as I said earlier, and Duluth, Minnesota, all made the list as some of the best cashflow markets. And when I made those lists, it’s not just rent to price ratio, I also only looked at markets that have solid fundamentals as well. So places that have good population growth have job growth. And so those are three markets that if you’re listening to this right now, you could confidently say there are strong fundamentals in and might have good cashflow provided that you obviously do your research and find right deals.

Ashley:
And with Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, instead of just rentals, even if you’re looking to flip, I found several articles that stated that was one of the highest ROI cities for actually doing flips too.

Dave:
Really, I wonder why that is.

Ashley:
The article said different things. I couldn’t find a concrete source, but it was pretty much rained from a hundred percent RO to up to 130% ROI.

Dave:
Alright, that sounds good. I would love to do that. I’ve actually never been to Pittsburgh, but maybe we should go. All right, it’s time for a break and then Ashley and I are going to break down our favorite Great Lakes markets for investors stick around. Welcome back to bigger news. Let’s jump back in with Ashley Care. So in addition to some of those markets that have the best cashflow, Ashley mentioned that one of the advantages of this region is affordability and actually a lot of the top affordable markets are in this region. Just for example, on our list at BiggerPockets, number four was your hometown, Ashley Buffalo, New York. Number six was Indianapolis, which is growing like crazy Indianapolis. And then number seven is Cincinnati. Not exactly on the lake, but it’s it’s in Ohio, which I guess you would say is in the region.

Ashley:
So love to see Buffalo on there. Of course. I think one thing with these cities too is you really have to niche down by neighborhood and get to know what are the neighborhoods that you want to be into because the cities are so broad as far as what will actually produce good cashflow. And by good cashflow, I mean you’re not having to deal with a lot of crime, you’re getting quality tenants in place, things like that. So when you pick a market, whatever one you decide on, make sure that you go deep and you actually look into each neighborhood.

Dave:
Well said. And yeah, that’s going to apply for every market that we mentioned on this list. Obviously just talking about them on a super high level isn’t going to tell you exactly where you need to invest. We’re just talking about sort of high level potential here, but let’s move on. We talked about that there was three main advantages to this region. First one was affordability, which we just discussed. What’s the second one?

Ashley:
The second one is industry. So what industries are in these areas or moving to these areas? So a really big one is tech. There’s a lot of grant money and government funding going to tech across the country. But I’ve noticed that a large portion of it has gone into Ohio, New York. I think Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania was one too.

Dave:
Yeah, Pittsburgh, I mentioned this on the show recently, has a lot of the robotics industry in the US is based out of Pittsburgh. There’s a lot of universities there that focus on that. So I don’t know anything about robots, but I would imagine that that industry is getting a lot of attention and money right now.

Ashley:
Well, one of the things I found was that there’s a top 200 list for research universities in the world and 22 of those are located around the Great Lakes in the West Belt region. And they said that’s part of driving the tech industry into those areas because they work with the universities for research. I thought that was interesting.

Dave:
That’s really interesting. And we’re obviously in addition to that, seeing some government incentives play out. I think it was two or three years ago, there was the bipartisan chips act to bring a lot of technology on shore as sort of a national security measure. And a lot of the Great Lakes region is benefiting from some of the investments. They’re sort of like public private investments in the area as well.

Ashley:
And the last thing to add on that is water tech. Water tech is becoming a bigger and bigger industry and the Great Lakes are perfect because of the natural freshwater source there to actually develop water technology. So

Dave:
What is tech?

Ashley:
I had to Google it too when I was reading about this.

Dave:
Okay, good. I didn’t know that was common knowledge,

Ashley:
But basically it’s like a technology that water can be used as a source to run it. So you think of in Niagara Falls how water is used to source electric, but also as to fresh water is being eliminated. How can they study fresh water? How can they do different things? I don’t know. Don’t ask me. I’m the expert. That’s just what my Google search said.

Dave:
Wow, that’s super interesting. I am into it water tech and you also do see, it’s not where it used to be, but there has been a modest revival in American manufacturing and I think that we’ll see that reflected across this region. And depending on the outcome of the presidential election, there might be more investment into American manufacturing that this region might benefit from as

Ashley:
Well. And I think part of the hard part of revitalizing the manufacturing and then industrial that shut down in these areas was the environmental that needs to be done

Dave:
When

Ashley:
These buildings were built and when some of them are manufacturing, there wasn’t the laws and regulations there are today. So just the environmental cleanup can be so costly and expensive to make it worthwhile for a developer to come into these areas.

Dave:
I mean that’s sort of a theme across the United States. This is one of the main challenges to housing supply in the United States is a lot of this stuff, legacy pollution and stuff that needs to get cleaned up and trying to prevent it in the future adds significant time and expense to these types of projects. Alright, well that’s our second advantage so far. We have affordability and we’ve got industry, what’s our third advantage

Ashley:
Climate?

Dave:
I knew you were going to say this.

Ashley:
You know what? And Dave, I notice we’re both bundled up to talk about our northern cities here today. Exactly. But yeah, so you wouldn’t think of when I say climate, everyone’s probably thinking, what are you talking about?

Dave:
Oh, Buffalo is known as the premier climate in the United States,

Ashley:
But I will say first of all, you get four seasons, which is really nice. So you get to experience the different seasons, so lots of different activities based on that. But as far as climate, we’re talking more about climate resilient cities and then also the fact of natural disasters, which I mean with Hurricane Milton we’re seeing a lot of damage in certain areas from these natural disasters, which can be devastating and I just can’t imagine owning a whole portfolio and somewhere and having my portfolio wiped out in a day and having to restart, rebuild. So natural disasters have always been something I am very cautious of and think about a lot. I went and looked at this article that was done by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and they did a chart of the US and they put in as to how risky is this as a city. And they took 182 cities and they labeled them one to 182 on a scale of the Great Lakes. They were all up high as to very, very low risk up into the one 70 ish range as far as not being at risk for a natural disaster. So that was hailstorms causing damage, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and wildfires.

Dave:
One

Ashley:
Thing that they did not account for was snowstorms, but a snowstorm doesn’t usually take out a city or take out neighborhoods. You have roofs collapsing, people’s stranded, things like that, which can be detrimental. But as far as really bad natural disasters, you don’t see a ton in these regions.

Dave:
Yeah, I think that has become really relevant, at least in my own thinking about investing recently. It’s obviously terrible when these things like Hurricane Milton or wildfires impact these communities and I don’t want to belittle the human cost of it, but it is also an economic issue, especially with investing because I at least I’ve experienced this in Colorado, I have some property that’s in wildfire range and people had to evacuate from those properties and it’s super scary, one to lose your home and your income from that. So I’ve obviously gotten business interruption insurance since then, but it’s really difficult to get properly insured in these types of areas. And I’m just starting to read about some of the fallout of Hurricane Milton. And a lot of folks unfortunately weren’t able to get proper insurance and they’re going to be coming out of pocket for a lot of this.

Dave:
So from an investor, obviously the more you can minimize disruption from natural disasters and lower your costs from the risk of that through insurance or through taxes, the better. And I’ll mention the tax thing. I actually was interviewing someone on the market about this and he was talking about how it’s not just insurance costs that go up because of natural disasters, but also cities start to be more proactive about preparing for them and they start building infrastructure and sea walls and building out the fire department, whatever in Colorado and California and that costs money. And so they wind up raising property taxes or income taxes in those areas to help mitigate the risk of natural disaster. So I think there’s a lot of reasons why you should be thinking about this in your portfolio and another reason why as we’ve been talking about the Great Lakes region has some promise here. Alright, so outside of Buffalo, do you have any cities that you really like in the Great Lakes region or think have a lot of promise?

Ashley:
Yeah, so just a couple things on Buffalo to start is I do think that it’s great for cashflow, it’s affordable, but the thing is also New York State isn’t landlord friendly, so that’s just something to be cautious of. Also, closings take a really long time because you have to use an attorney for closing too, so don’t just rely on some source of data, look at all of the metrics and what’s the give and take on that? Erie, Pennsylvania, I just had to mention that again because of the affordability, the rental to price ratio, but also too for a short-term rental, we really didn’t talk about the Great Lakes for short-term rental investments at all. And there’s a lot of opportunity in Michigan, Wisconsin for owning short-term rentals on the lake. But then in Pres, Kyle too has almost the same amount of visitors as Yellowstone everywhere.

Dave:
Yeah, you told me that. Which is insane. I can’t believe that. That’s wild.

Ashley:
So it’s like if it was a national park, it would be number five or number six as to most visited park across the us And then some new markets that I’d never looked at before are decorator. I don’t even know if I’m saying that right. And Springfield, Illinois. Springfield is in central Illinois and decorator is right next to it, but they had pretty similar metrics in the last year. They had 9% increase in home prices and 9% increase in rent. And decorator actually hits the 1% rule too, but they’re known for the really low cost of living, not only in Illinois but also across the US And in decorator the medium home price is 112,000,

Dave:
Which is

Ashley:
Pretty low. And the rents for that was like 1200, 1100. So it hit the 1% rule.

Dave:
I feel like there’s this thing going on across the country where rents are all kind of peaking at the same range. If I look at a rental property in Seattle and I look at it in Chicago, which are two totally different home price points, the rents aren’t that different, but the entry point is so different, which

Ashley:
Obviously

Dave:
Improves the rent to price ratio. But I also wanted to just shout out that the examples you just gave I think really counter the narrative that, oh, these markets have cashflow but they don’t have appreciation. And that was true for a long time, but I’m just looking at the data we use to prepare for this episode. You look at Syracuse, it grew 11% last year and 62% over the last five years. And obviously Covid is crazy, but it’s still continuing in a lot of these places. Like Springfield, Ohio is at 9%. You see Rochester, New York at 9%. Erie, Pennsylvania, you just called it out 8% Green Bay, Wisconsin, 8%, those are well above the national average. So we can’t say for sure that will continue, but obviously if you invested there in the last few years, you did get cashflow and you got a lot of appreciation.

Ashley:
One last thing to add to Illinois too is it’s a landlord friendly state. Majority mean, and then Ohio too, as far as being in the lake effect cashflow region. Ohio is a landlord friendly state too.

Dave:
And I invest in Michigan also, and that’s kind of like middle of the road. I don’t think it’s particularly in one direction or the other, but pretty average in terms of tenant landlord laws. It’s time for a break, but we’ll be right back on bigger news. Alright, we’re back. Here’s the rest of my conversation with Ashley Care. Ashley, what do you think about some of the bigger cities? Talked a lot about smaller areas, but there are big cities, some more polarizing than others. So I’m just curious about your thoughts. What do you think about Chicago? It’s huge and it is, to me it’s like the most by far the most affordable big city in the United States and that’s intriguing.

Ashley:
Yeah, I did look into Chicago a little bit. I tend to definitely stay away from big cities and it’s just because I’ve had such great success in the suburbs and rural areas of the city or outskirts of the city, like South Buffalo, things like that. But in a smaller city of course. So I didn’t look into this a ton, but I looked at Chicago and then also Detroit because Detroit just intrigues me as to what is going on as far as it just has such a bad stigma. But when I looked into Detroit, I found actually there’s so much going into Detroit to make it better and when people actually come, they’re actually shocked as to what’s happening there. And I think it definitely needs to go a lot more, but there’s a lot of money being put into the redevelopment and revitalization. And four or five years ago, Ashley Hamilton was on as a guest on the BiggerPockets show. She was a Detroit investor and I actually just saw her at BP Con and her business is still thriving in Detroit, doing burrs and having her rentals there and doing some flips. So she has seen great success in Detroit. So I’m not super familiar with Chicago. Did you have some information on that one?

Dave:
No, I think it’s sort of the same thing you were saying before. I find Chicago interesting because there’s just so much economic activity there, but people are leaving the city, or at least the population has been declining. So that’s what super, that worries me. But there are pockets of Illinois and the suburbs that are growing. So you hear these stats where it’s like people are leaving Chicago and some of them are leaving the state, but actually if you dig into the data, most of the time when you hear, oh, people are leaving Chicago, they’re actually just moving to the suburbs. And so that means a lot of the areas around it are growing. And so I’m particularly interested in that. I also just personally, I have family in Chicago, so I’m there frequently and I like the idea of investing places like that, but I sort of echo your feelings about big cities.

Dave:
As an out of state investor, I find it a little overwhelming to go to these big cities and try and understand them. If I lived in Chicago, I feel like I could figure out the right neighborhoods to make it work. But for me, I find it easier to go to a city that is like a hundred or 200,000. There’s fewer neighborhoods, there’s fewer pockets of economic activity, it’s just easier to wrap your head around. So I’ve just sort of gravitated to those types of markets as an outstate investor. But I think there are really good opportunities in these less expensive markets, if specifically where to buy.

Ashley:
And the data is more specific when it is a smaller market. If you’re looking at Chicago as a whole and you’re looking at these numbers, they can be so construed as to where exactly like, okay, this one area has brought it down so low, but it’s just such a tiny spot. Like say unemployment, let’s use that as an example. It could just be this one area. The unemployment rate is really low, but the rest kind of average is high. But that one spot really skews the spectrum of it, I guess. So that’s why analyzing any type of big city, you have to go in by neighborhood and look at the data by neighborhood because like Dave said, it could be people moving out to the suburbs too. So I think just be cautious with the big cities as to just because you see the state on that, make sure you’re knowing what actual neighborhoods to invest in.

Dave:
Totally.

Ashley:
So I just did a property in the west side of Buffalo, so I knew nothing about it and I had to lean on my real estate agent and I literally walked around the streets, I went, drove the streets. I looked at like, okay, what’s the retail, what’s the restaurant? What has opened closed in this area? And I had to do a lot of research because I invested in South Buffalo, which I’ve had phenomenal success, but let me tell you, when I listed that property, the tenant pool was very different. There was different expectations of what needed to be in the property, just the whole experience. Even though these were 15 minutes apart, not even, and in the same city, it was completely different process for me.

Dave:
That’s a great point. And you really need to go walk these places. We’re talking about this at a high level. If you’re considering investing in any of these places, please go visit. It really makes a huge difference.

Ashley:
It’s worth the plane ticket.

Dave:
Oh,

Ashley:
Totally. In the one night hotel,

Dave:
I was actually, I think I told you this story, but I was looking at a couple different markets I liked on paper in this region, I was in Chicago with family, I just rented a car and just drove around and I wound up not liking a lot of the cities I liked on paper and investing in ones that I didn’t think I was going to. Just the vibe was right. And it was easier to sort of understand the path of progress and what kind of tenants you were going to get in certain cities. So want to echo that and do also want to just say the data about cities can be confusing. Just so you know, a lot of data collected by the government or wherever is the MSA. It stands for Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is both the city and the suburbs. And so I was looking at this list we’re referencing here, Ashley, and said that median home price in Milwaukee is $350,000.

Dave:
And I was like, that’s just not right. I’ve looked at deals in Milwaukee, they’re like $150,000, but the suburbs around Milwaukee, there are some very nice ones that are $600,000. And so you’re getting this broad average from a lot of different types of neighborhoods. And so pick these markets based on some of the fundamentals, but then as Ashley said, you really got to drill down into them. Alright, last thing before we get out of here, Ashley, I got to talk to you about Western New York and if you haven’t heard of this area, I think I grew up near New York City and we are called everything upstate.

Ashley:
I was going to say I’m very proud of you, Dave, for acknowledging Western New York

Dave:
If you get more than an hour north of New York City. It was upstate for when I was growing up, but then I went to school in Rochester, which is in western New York. And this is kind of the area I think, what would you say? It’s like Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse kind of is the main big cities and this area is just booming housing market wise over the last couple of years. Why do you think that

Ashley:
Is? Well, I think that it’s probably the most affordable area in New York where you’re still by major cities. I would say you go far upstate, you’re in the Adirondacks where there’s Watertown maybe, which still isn’t that huge of a city, and then you do have Albany. Honestly, I don’t think Albany is as nice as Buffalo because I went to school there. I can say that. And then when you’re in Central, you have the Finger Lakes, which is beautiful, but also there’s not a huge city like Syracuse would be the closest for that or Rochester. So I would say probably that is to your getting towards a major city like Buffalo Airport is probably, besides in New York City, Buffalo would probably be the next largest airport in New York. Yeah,

Dave:
That’s right. Yeah, and there’s a lot going on up there actually. You see these investments that you’re talking about, there are a lot of big companies, at least where I went to school in Rochester, like Xerox and Bausch and Loam. I think Paychex, the payroll company, Kodak, all based out of Rochester. There’s a lot of big companies. I was reading this article the other day, I think this actually applies to the whole Great Lakes region, is this idea of surplus infrastructure is what it was called. It was basically as the country grows, the population’s growing. There are a lot of places people are moving to Texas and Florida, there’s a lot to like there, but they don’t have the highways and the airports in the same way that a lot of these Great Lakes places do. A lot of that is because people left those areas for lack of economic activity. But what’s promising is that it can support growth. Like you were talking about. There are good highways in place, there are good airports in place. There’s all this infrastructure that would support a bigger and growing population that obviously jobs have to come first, but if those jobs come first, these areas are really well positioned to ingest new people and sustain long-term growth.

Ashley:
I think another thing to add is the sports teams too in Buffalo is

Dave:
Oh yeah, the Bills mafia.

Ashley:
The Bills are the only NFL team that’s actually in New York state because the Jets and the Giants don’t play in New York. That

Dave:
Is a very good point, and how we go school up there, bills fans are absolutely insane in the best way. You’re a Bills fan, right?

Ashley:
Yeah.

Dave:
Do you go to games?

Ashley:
Yeah, I take my son. Well, I got a Cowboys fan. An Eagles fan and fan. Oh my

Dave:
God. I’ll love it.

Ashley:
I’ll be going to Dallas in a couple of weeks to go to a Dallas Eagles game.

Dave:
Oh my God. That’ll be very fun.

Ashley:
Yeah.

Dave:
Nice. Alright, well, Ashley, that’s all we got. Anything else you want to add about the Great Lakes region before we get out of here?

Ashley:
Yeah, just a couple other advantages to investing. There are the amount of grants available to trying to revitalize that you can tap into. So my dad, small business owner has a small property, he has his business in. He’s getting ready to retire, and we just filled out a grant for $1.6 million to revitalize his shop. So it’s not like you have to be some huge developer to get access to these grants. They’re available in these towns surrounding the Great Lakes that you can get. So I think looking at that, talking to your local officials, they can really help you finding what grants are available because that’s what we did with his building. They’ll pay up to 75% of the cost of doing renovation on the property. Yeah.

Dave:
Wow. Okay. That’s a really good tip.

Ashley:
That’s huge. Yeah, so hopefully we get it.

Dave:
Wow. Yeah. How long does it take? Is it super bureaucratic?

Ashley:
I don’t know. It starts at the local level and then it’s a state grant, so then it goes to the state level, and then I just think the waterfront is a huge attraction. I mean, people pay a lot of money for lake houses, but having these huge lakes, the waterfront opportunity that’s still available there and just the fresh water.

Dave:
Yeah, I went to a wedding and the lakes area of Michigan, it was so, I had no idea how beautiful it was there. It’s incredible, the beaches that they had there.

Ashley:
Yeah, I’ve seen on Lake Michigan particularly, I’ve seen a lot of Instagram reels of people who are investing there or vacationing there and just how they’re like, don’t tell anyone about this because we want to keep it to ourselves.

Dave:
Don’t tell them we’re posting this on Instagram, but don’t tell anyone.

Ashley:
By the way, I’m a real estate agent. Contact me to my house. It’s a

Dave:
Secret. Oh God. Now we’re just making it even worse by talking about on this podcast.

Ashley:
Yeah.

Dave:
All right. Well thank you so much, Ashley. Appreciate your time. Of course, if you want to hear more from Ashley, you can hear more from her on the Real Estate Rookie Show, and if you want to hear more of this podcast, we’ll of course be back next week with more episodes of the BiggerPockets podcast.