Year-in-review issues are a good way to look back at what was accomplished and to surface some stories that may not have gotten the love they deserved the first time around. It’s also a way to avoid some work, and we at proptext are no exception. Hey, it’s the holidays and we’ve been busy.

Here’s what you may have missed:

Ghost towns might not be a great investment, but they are fun to read about. Brent Underwood bought Cerro Gordo five years ago, an old silver mining town at the edge of Death Valley, and has done a pretty good job of publicizing his project — articles in Business Insider, a Youtube series (Ghost Town Living), a web site offering tours and swag, and Instagram account, etc. — but it’s unclear how successful he’s been monetizing his $1.45 million purchase. There are hundreds of ghost towns across the U.S., and a retired professor has written two books about them in Texas alone. But Jake Rasmuson, a real estate agent in Bishop, Calif., who has sold several properties that fall into the ghost town category, told proptext that “it’s going to be a passion project” since it’s pretty tough to make it work as a traditional real estate investment. “There’s no ghost town flipping going on.”

Campgrounds that cater to recreational vehicles, or RV parks, make up a real estate sector that appears ready to pop given that 10,000 to 11,000 Baby Boomers are aging into retirement daily. When proptext took a look at this industry, prices had already risen post-Covid and cap rates were compressed. Mia Caetano Johnson, owner of Northeast Campground Brokers, told us in November of 2024 that “buying activity has been off the charts, exponentially higher since Covid.” In the 15 years she has been in the industry, sales growth has been steady, 7-8% year over year. (During the pandemic, she said prices were jumping 20-40 percent.) Rob Brady, who bought a 45-site park in New Hampshire, Brady said he liked the scalability of an RV park — buying one park means owning dozens or a hundred or so sites in one fell swoop. “When you own 100 doors, you are putting a lot more money in your pocket,” Brady said. “Over 4-5 years that adds up.”

We took a look at cities that had programs to lure digital nomads and found that these incentives are a sound investment. Tulsa Remote, which started in November of 2018 and pays selected workers $10,000 to move there and stay for at least a year, generates $4 in benefits to current residents for each dollar spent, according to Tim Bartik, a senior economist at the Upjohn Institute. These programs — MakeMyMove offers a complete list — can be drivers of housing demand as well. In Tulsa, median home prices have risen 50 percent from 2019-2024, which also reflects the increase in home prices across the country. But while other markets have moderated, Tulsa’s market has shown strong gains (up 4.4% year over year) through 2025.

Parking lots aren’t sexy, but they can be profitable. And Wall Street has taken notice. So did proptext and some other media outlets, including a newspaper called The New York Times and the Marketplace radio broadcast. A Times reporter appeared on the radio show to talk about this an asset class “has been described as a beautiful ugly duckling.” The boom is partly driven by data center construction to feed the demand created by AI, where parking space is needed for the staging of the equipment and materials that go into the center’s construction. Another driver is that the supply is limited and few municipalities or cities are in favor of building more since neighbors object — they are indeed ugly.

Imagine this. You open your phone to an alert. It says, “you spent $236,000,000 more this month than you did last month.”

If you were the top bidder at Sotheby’s fall auctions, it could be reality.

Sounds crazy, right? But when the ultra-wealthy spend staggering amounts on blue-chip art, it’s not just for decoration.

The scarcity of these treasured artworks has helped drive their prices, in exceptional cases, to thin-air heights, without moving in lockstep with other asset classes.

The contemporary and post war segments have even outpaced the S&P 500 overall since 1995.*

Now, over 70,000 people have invested $1.2 billion+ across 500 iconic artworks featuring Banksy, Basquiat, Picasso, and more.

How? You don’t need Medici money to invest in multimillion dollar artworks with Masterworks.

Thousands of members have gotten annualized net returns like 14.6%, 17.6%, and 17.8% from 26 sales to date.

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_{*Based on Masterworks data. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. Important Reg A disclosures: masterworks.com/cd}

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