Real estate cash flow is not dead.

Here is exactly where it's hiding. So people think real estate investing is broken. Like it doesn't work anymore. Like cash flow is dead. Well, they're right if you're looking where everybody else is looking. So this video, though, is about where cash flow actually lives. So my name is Brendan Turner. Hi, I'm the author of the book on rental property investing, Beardy Brandon on social media. And today I wanted to share with you how to find cash flow today in like 2026. And I want to share the four places that I see it today. So there's an old joke about a man like stumbling around under a street light. It's like two in the morning. And his neighbor walks out, here's the comm. He says, hey, what are you doing? And the guy says, I'm looking for my wedding ring. And the neighbor, you know, he's a nice guy. He gets down. He helps him search. 10 minutes go by, nothing. Finally, the neighbor asks, look, man, are you sure you dropped the ring around here? And the man shakes his head and said, no, I dropped it way up there, but it's too dark up there. The light's better here.

Now, that's exactly what's happening in real

estate investing right now. You see, like millions of investors are searching for cash flow in the same

lit up corner that they've always searched. The MLS, traditional long-term rentals, single-family houses with one tenant, one lease, and they're coming up empty. Or worse, they think they found something. They run the numbers like on the back of a napkin or on the back of their head, and they call it a deal, and then they just lose money for years without understanding why. Now, I know that because I've done that before. I bought rental properties, convinced I was going to make a bunch of money, hundreds of dollars a month, and then for year after year after year, I just lose money. I mean, things like HVAC go out, the water heater goes out, vacancy swallows all the profit. I wasn't just looking in the wrong city. Yeah, I wasn't making dumb decisions necessarily. I was just standing under the wrong street light. So cash flow is not

dead. You're just looking for it in the wrong place. Now, it doesn't work like it used to.

I mean, to be fair, the old spot used to have way better lighting. Like for most of the last two

decades, the math on traditional long-term rentals actually did work in a lot of markets.

Like, interest rates were so historically low, like shockingly low.

Like, I have a loan for like two and a half percent on a 30-year mortgage.

Like, you get that during the pandemic.

At those rates, the monthly payment on a $250,000 house, well, that was manageable relative

what the market would pay and rent.

Now, when you'd run the

numbers, which is something I'm sure I'll talk a little bit more about later, the numbers actually

made sense if you knew what you were doing. Now, investors who bought in that era, they built a lot

of wealth with a strategy that was, you know, frankly, pretty forgiving. But then rates went up,

fast and they stayed up six or seven percent. The monthly mortgage payment on

that same $250,000 property jumped by hundreds of dollars a month. But rents did not jump

proportionally because honestly, markets don't move that fast. And home prices, they actually

stayed elevated. So now we have higher prices and higher rates together, making the math on traditional buy

and hold genuinely just hard in most markets, if not impossible.

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