Welcome, prop.text readers!

In issue 27 we double down on news and shift some of the sections to align with what you need and want out of prop.text. Let us know what you think of prop.text (1.5.1)

publicly.traded → Is Toledo a gold mine? Data from Cotality
diversification → Market snapshot
the.pitch →

Toledo, We Hardly Know Ya

Wall Street has come for the Toledo housing market, at least according to the Wall Street Journal.

We’ve seen this story before, and it has the usual suspects: out-of-state buyers, including hedge funds and institutions, have found a city where deals can be had, pushing up prices and making it difficult for locals to buy a home. The list of cities where this has transpired is not a short one and reads like a who’s who of the “hottest” housing market(s) over that last several years: Atlanta, Charlotte, Jacksonville, Austin, Houston Phoenix, etc. 

The median listing price in Toledo nearly doubled from $119,900 in Feb. 2018 to $239,700 in April of 2025, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The median home price in the U.S. is around $400,000, so Toledo is an attractive market for investors.

And so they have come.

“This market is a little gold mine in America,” Jack Garayan, an investor from Fresno, Calif., told the Journal at the end of April. Garayn and two friends see their Toledo portfolio — two single-family rental homes and an eight-unit apartment complex — as part of their retirement portfolio.

On the other side are local advocates who lament the decline in affordability, and one of them is Erin McPartland, the executive director at Maumee Valley Habitat for Humanity, who posted this on LinkedIn: “The reality is our housing market is not that affordable, especially for people living in Toledo.” 

The average Toledan, she notes, who earns $65,000 cannot afford a Toledo home that lists for $200,000. 

We at proptext.co have written frequently about the problem of affordability and do not dismiss the issue. But we believe it’s a function of the supply-demand curve we all learned in Econ 101. Build more housing — the U.S. is some 4 million homes short of demand — and prices will moderate.

Investors, both smaller players like Jack Garayan and his friends and giants like Blackstone, will go where they can make money, and Toledo is now on their radar. (Those reading this who are looking for other cities like Toledo where deals pencil are advised to visit our own top ten market from January.)

What is mentioned in passing in the WSJ article about Toledo that we feel is often underreported is the impact of these trends on those who already own there — they have seen their equity grow and their net worth increase. Given that real estate offers a path to generational wealth, these folks are on their way.

Americans have seen their home equity hit some $35 trillion, according to data from the Federal Reserve, and a lot of that happened when home prices jumped during the pandemic housing boom. That’s a lot of money to borrow against if a homeowner needs a new roof, wants to build a patio, or eventually pass it on to their kids. Current Toledo homeowners are getting a piece of that $35 trillion.

So, why does the media focus on the downside of home price increases in places like Toledo? Because reporters need two sides to sell their story to editors, and out-of-state investors and faceless institutions make for good villains. One couple highlighted in the Journal story were outbid on 5 houses in Toledo before they were able to land a deal, months later than they planned. OMG! Imagine having to go to multiple open houses and compete to buy a home! (We personally know home buyers — ok, it’s us — who have looked at dozens of properties before making a deal.)

These stories oversimplify the dynamics of the real estate market, which is not always a zero-sum game. These narratives also play on the myth of the American dream, and how home ownership is essential to that.

We got news for you. There is no place in a market economy that says everybody is entitled to be a homeowner. Sure, lots of people get a leg up through family money, but a lot of people work hard to save and buy a home. Some of those people see real estate as a good investment, and buy more property to build wealth. Professional money managers often see real estate as a place to make money, and they buy homes. That’s the nature of the market.

If there is a lesson to be learned from the story of Toledo’s housing market, it’s not that investors are the villains, pushing up prices and crowding out local buyers. The lesson is that real estate is a sound investment, and the question is not if you should get in, but when.

Like we at proptext.co always say the best time to buy property was 20 years ago. The next best time is today.  

Industry Chatter

We don’t love the rebrand of Corelogic to Cotality, but we do love their data analysis and we consider Senior Economist Selma Hepp a friend of proptext since she spoke to us about the benefits of ADUs, including the one she built in her own Los Angeles backyard. Cotality’s US home price insights for April noted that demand remained weak and included a number of surprising findings:

• Price gains remained strong in the northeast

• Seven of the 10 hottest markets were in the northeast. The other three were in Ohio, Illinois and South Carolina

• Seven of the 10 coolest markets were in Florida, two were in Texas and the other was Oakland, CA

• The five markets with the highest risk of price declines were Carson City, NV; Tucson, AZ; Winter Haven, FL; Provo, UT; and Atlanta, GA

Lastly, Tennessee and South Carolina have become attractive retirement destinations, and home prices bumped up. Like we said, we don’t love the rebrand, but the data is solid.

Of Interest

SFR Analytics noted that Pretium Partners, one of the largest single-family rental (SFR) owners in the US with nearly 100,000 homes, is raising a fund to acquire single-family homes that qualify for the government's Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program. The company’s top 5 states for SFR ownership are Texas, Georgia, Arizona, Tennessee and Florida, places where tenant-friendly laws and regulations are in short supply, a strategy proptext outlined recently. 

The New York Times Magazine went deep, thousand and thousands of words deep, on housing development in Texas. We read most of it (paywalled) so you don’t have to. The takeaway: sprawl is good, in Texas anyway. 

Zillow pumped out some clickbait recently when it noted that some American 233 cities now have starter homes that cost at least $1 million. But about half of those cities are in California (113), and another quarter are in New York (32) and New Jersey (20). More than half the states do not have a city that makes the list.

Resiclub posted some intriguing stats (and a chart) on LinkedIn about the age of repeat homebuyers. In 2007, they were 46 years old and born around 1961. In 2024, the repeat homebuyer was 61 years old and born around 1963, so essentially the same age cohort.

Just Because …

Wood shop class students at San Marcos High School in San Diego are building tiny houses for homeless veterans. Mark Pilcher founded The Warrior Village project in 2019 and there are now three high schools in San Diego County where student builders are at work: San Marcos High School, Rancho Buena Vista High School and San Pasqual High School. The 169-square-foot structures are built on 8 x 20 trailers and contain two rooms: a living space with a bedroom and kitchen area, with windows over the sink and by the door, and a bathroom perched over the trailer hitch. Proptext did its own deep dive on tiny homes back in November.

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