The Trump Tariffs Are Here, Are You Ready?
The 2025 Real Estate Market will be remembered for Tariffs, Rate Wars (Fed Vs Donald Trump), Increased Material costs, Increased labor costs (immigrants are leaving voluntarily or being forced out by ICE) and rising inflation. All of this makes for a messy 2025 but there are still profits to be had. Here are my top 3 ways you can position yourself to make money as a real estate investor in 2025. 1. BUY RIGHT! - Margins for flippers can be razor thin if you’re competing for deals. The easiest way to eliminate the competition is to self perform on finding your own deals. When I say self perform, I mean, going directly to the source using a probate list, pre-foreclosure list, tired landlord list, back tax list, code violation list, high equity list, divorce list in any other list you can think of where people are likely to sell their home. Obviously, you can leverage strategies that involve going through wholesalers, investor friendly realtors, probate attorneys and others, but those deals are likely to be more competitive, and if you want to really make sure you’re getting the best deal possible, you want to go directly to the source. The other option you have if you source deals directly, you can easily wholesale them to other investors for a nice profit. Because deals are scarce and inventory is low, there are more investors willing to pay the premium because they can’t find deals on their own and they want to keep their crews busy. 2. SELF PERFORM YOUR FIX AND FLIPS - Another easy way you can save a significant amount of money on the labor cost for a project is to self perform the project meaning you GC (manager) the job yourself and you sub everything out. This does require that you have the time to show up everyday, but will save you thousands of dollars and allow you to earn a significant profit while learning a tremendous amount about construction and real estate development. This option is not for everyone, but for those of you who are brave enough to attempt this or if you’re already a GC then you have an advantage over the competition because you’re able to skip paying a middleman if you’re struggling to make the numbers work. Full disclosure, I am a licensed GC, but I still hire a GC to manage my projects in order to scale my business and work efficiently. 3. PRE-ORDER MATERIALS - They say nobody plans to fail, but many fail to plan! When it comes to your fix and flips and development projects in 2025 make sure you plan your project from start to finish by getting your material list together as early as possible. Once you have your list ready, price the materials with multiple supply houses and Home Depot, and look to lock in your pricing early or ask your lender if they’ll allow you to pre-order as many of your materials as possible and cover the costs (I will cover it as your lender). This will allow you to predict the cost of your project and not be at the mercy of tariffs, inflation, and rising cost that you didn’t account for or could not predict. You can also get wholesale pricing at Home Depot by placing orders of greater than $1,500 and asking them to be replaced in the bidroom. One of my friends orders, truckloads, and trailers of materials from overseas and is positioned well for these changes but most of us do not have that luxury and that is why we need to get ahead of it by pricing out all of our materials and ordering them early. This is especially true for purchasing appliances.