MB509: Market Outlook - Investing in 2024-25 vs. 2026 (Different Risk Profile) - With Michael Blank
Financial Freedom with Real Estate Investing
Michael Blank
4.7 • 577 Ratings
🗓️ 2 February 2026
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this solo episode, Michael Blank breaks down what really happened in multifamily during 2025 and what investors should expect in 2026. He unpacks supply and demand trends, rent growth, interest rate expectations, and the affordability crisis shaping renter behavior. While the last few years have been challenging, Michael explains why 2026 is likely a year of stability that sets the stage for long-term growth—and why today’s risk-adjusted returns may be better than they’ve been in years.
Key Takeaways
- 2025 was a year of absorption, not growth — record demand was offset by an unprecedented wave of new supply, keeping rents flat to down.
- New construction is falling sharply, with permits dropping and high interest rates making most projects uneconomical.
- Affordability favors renting, as buying a home now costs significantly more than renting, supporting long-term rental demand.
- 2026 consensus outlook is stability with modest rent growth, likely around 2%, setting up normalized growth in 2027 and beyond.
- Interest rates are expected to be flat to slightly down, a meaningful shift from the uncertainty of the past three years.
- Lower leverage and better pricing improve risk-adjusted returns, making today’s environment healthier than the frothy market of 2021–2022
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Resources
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Get the Book, Financial Freedom with Real Estate Investing by Michael Blank
For full episode show notes visit: https://themichaelblank.com/podcasts/session509/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, dealmakers, welcome to the show where it's all about financial freedom with real estate. |
| 0:04.2 | Let's do this. |
| 0:12.1 | Hey, welcome everyone to my 2026 multifamily outlook. |
| 0:16.2 | My name is Michael Blanc, and what I want to do here is to go exactly. |
| 0:19.6 | I want to kind of review what |
| 0:21.1 | has transpired last year in 2025 and kind of what I see my crystal ball for 2026. And if we haven't met |
| 0:28.5 | before, my name is Michael Blank. I'm the host of the podcast, the financial freedom with |
| 0:34.5 | real estate investing podcast where we cover really everything around financial freedom with real estate investing either where we cover really everything around financial |
| 0:37.8 | freedom with real estate investing either passively or actively as well. |
| 0:42.0 | And I'm also the author of the book by the same name. |
| 0:44.4 | It's available on Amazon, over 1,600 reviews on Amazon. |
| 0:47.2 | It's really a good introduction to becoming an active investor and syndications and general partner as well. |
| 0:53.2 | Though as a passive, you can get a lot of |
| 0:54.7 | information around what a syndication might look like. And on the investing side, our investing |
| 1:00.4 | companies called Nighthawk Equity, about $300 million of real estate in that here. So that's a little |
| 1:05.9 | bit about me here. Let's look back first before we look forward, just so we better understand where |
| 1:11.1 | we've come from, so we can better understand where we're going. I was looking at my, |
| 1:14.4 | my predictions for, you know, for 2025. And I didn't get it wrong, okay? But the, the predictions |
| 1:21.7 | have been delayed. It basically was, 2025 was basically a, predicted to to be more of a year of stability. |
| 1:31.0 | And while compared to 2024, that was that was the case. |
| 1:34.7 | We actually had some declines in both prices and in rents as well. |
| 1:39.6 | So 2025 headlines is that we had strong demand that is true. |
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