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...it would certainly seem that Ivermectin works. This website lists 63 studies (42 of which are peer reviewed and 31 which were randomized controlled trials) with over 23,000 patients and the vast majority of these studies say Ivermectin works for Covid. No, it's not a cure, but a very effective treatment and prophylactic.  Pierre Kory's review of 18 randomized trials on Ivermectin also seems like what someone who "follows the science" would be interested in. Meta-analyses based on 18 randomized controlled treatment trials of ivermectin in COVID-19 have found large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance. Furthermore, results from numerous controlled prophylaxis trials report significantly reduced risks of contracting COVID-19 with the regular use of ivermectin. Again, I'm not a doctor but I am trying to "follow the science" so I can "trust the science." And the mechanism for why Ivermectin is effective is because it "inhibits the replication of SARS-Cov-2" as a study by Leon Caly et. al. in Antiviral Research concluded from studying Ivermectin's effects on Covid-19 in vitro. Ivermectin is an inhibitor of the COVID-19 causative virus (SARS-CoV-2) in vitro. Indeed, Ivermectin has been shown to be effective against several other viruses. The data from countries that have mandated or allowed Ivermectin use for treating Covid-19 is also quite compelling. Here's the Uttar Pradesh province in India before and after Ivermectin was added to the treatment protocol:  This was true of most provinces in India with the exception of Tamil Nadu, which as The Desert Review notes, Tamil Nadu announced they would reject Ivermectin and instead follow the dubious USA-style guidance of using Remdesivir. Knowing this, you might expect their numbers to be closer to the US, with more cases and more deaths. You would be correct. Tamil Nadu went on to lead India in COVID-19 cases. The daily cases and deaths in Uttar Pradesh (only 4.9 percent vaccinated) fell to 26 and three. In Tamil Nadu, it was 1997 and 33. Uttar Pradesh has a population about three times larger than Tamil Nadu as well. Peru is even more telling. Below is a chart of Coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths by state. Each one is blue except Lima which is red. Lima chose not to use Ivermectin, the others chose to use it. Here are the results:  At some point, you've got to call it. Ivermectin works. It's not a cure, but if you "follow the science" and "trust the science" it certainly appears to work (even if the FDA is making ridiculous ad hominems against it). Leave aside the fact that many lives could have been saved by using Ivermectin (and HCQ for that matter). But we're going to need it because it would certainly appear the vaccines efficacy is waning fast. The massive surge of COVID-19 infections in Israel, one of the most vaccinated countries on earth, is pointing to a complicated path ahead for America. This is pretty clearly starting to happen in the United States as well. So unless we're going to have a third booster and then a fourth and then a fifth ad infinitum, can we just simply start using Ivermectin? We can still do the vaccine thing (without the tyrannical mandates of course), but Ivermectin should be front in center in the treatment of Covid.
At least, it should be if you "follow the science" and "trust the science."
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For the 4th straight year, Stewardship Investments has once again made the Inc. 5000 List for the fastest growing private companies. Last year we just barely made the list at #4950. This year we made back some ground and came in at #4551 (#52 for Midwest companies with 58 percent growth over the last three years). Congrats to our entire team on a job well done! Let's make it five straight next year! 
Ron Paul trended on Twitter the other day after Afghanistan fell to the Taliban. So I went to YouTube to check out his speech on the subject and it brought me back to the days when I would binge watch his interviews prior to the 2008 election. His speech on the floor of the Congress is prescient to say the least.
It's amazing that this speech was given 10 full years ago. And furthermore that it was given 10 years after the war started. Already then, in what feels like forever ago, the whole country had war weariness for the Forever War. I recommend revisiting it. (And further recommend ignoring any nonsense coming from warmongering neocons next time they want to invade a country most Americans can't find on a map.) OK, so the name is a bit cheesy; Quack Alley (with its own website) but it is student housing around the University of Oregon (i.e. Ducks) so it makes sense I guess. But my dad and his team lead by Matt Perkins have just about completed a massive project a few blocks west of the Oregon Campus. The development is on land that sat behind two houses, one an eight bedroom home and the other a nine bedroom home with a two bed ADU. They then bought the duplex next door to increase the number of houses they could build. In all they were able to build six 6-bed, 6.5 bath houses and one 4-bed, 4.5 bath house on three lots that were subdivided off of the three aforementioned properties. Therefore, each of the new houses is technically a townhouse. The homes are perfectly designed for college students with a massive kitchen and living room equipped with five flat screen TVs perfect for game day. Above are two more stories, each with three bedrooms. Each bedroom has its own bathroom so the students don't have to share what will inevitably become a disgusting bathroom with anyone else. These houses rent for over $800/bedroom! Overall, there are seven new builds, 10 total properties, 12 units with 64 bedrooms that rent for just shy of $50,000/month. This project began several years ago and has cost a pretty penny so it's great to see it wrapping up and coming out so nicely!
A war that began when I was just 17 years old and has lasted longer than any other US war, just shy of 20 years (more than half my lifetime) is finally over. Taliban insurgents entered the Afghanistan capital Kabul on Sunday, an interior ministry official said, as the United States evacuated diplomats from its embassy by helicopter... Our generation's Saigon I guess. I remember reading Michael Scheuer's Imperial Hubris back in 2007 or so, some six years after the US invaded Afghanistan and, what appears to be, 13 years before we are finally about to leave. It's been quite the mess before and since. Higher ups forcing troops to ignore Bacha Bazi or the locals who went about selling most of the world's illegal opium or the vast array of other problems that came out in "The Afghanistan Papers" The Washington Post published a few years back. The Taliban is awful, obviously, but it was clear as day back in 2007 (2001 really) that a Pashtun group would rule Afghanistan in the end and the United States would follow the Soviet Union's and Great Britain's example in the "Graveyard of Empires." Scheuer's book's title was certainly apt.
Hopefully we can finally learn that nation building simply doesn't work and is exorbitantly costly in both lives and treasure. And hopefully we can learn that without the Soviet-style collapse. (I should also note the war was fought to capture/kill Osama Bin Laden who the Taliban offered to turn over. In other words, even the invasion was unnecessary.)
I dare anyone to come up with a more useful and inspiring quote than the great one himself, Grant Cardone:
And, for what it's worth, try the hyper-inspirational quote from the legendary super entrepreneur and humble $3000/hour real estate coach, yours truly:
If you don't breath, you die.
Now go forth and reinvent your life peons!
My newest BiggerPockets article covers the same themes I went over in a blog post on this site a month ago, namely why principal paydown is such a powerful tool for real estate investors. Principal paydown (i.e. paying down the balance of your mortgage) is only one of the IDEAL acronym advantages to real estate, but it's quite powerful as this example shows. So for this example, we will use the following assumptions: Overall, I think the article makes an unassailable case for how beneficial JUST principal paydown can be. And so if you add in all the other advantages, real estate is really a no-brainer.
 If we ever needed a more obvious example of government incompetence, it's hard to think of one than this. (OK, it's not actually that difficult admittedly.) If we are facing an existential eviction crisis (which we are not, but that's another story), then you would think getting tenants who were behind money to pay their rent would be priority #1. And remember, the federal government has passed two stimulus bills both over a trillion dollars. $20 billion is peanuts.
And yet, despite being available for months and having more than twice as much money as is necessary to make delinquent tenants whole, only a fraction of the money has been distributed. Unbelievable.
Despite what the media has repeatedly said, there is not going to be an onslaught of evictions with millions of people thrown out on the streets now that the federal moratorium is over. Yeah, hysteria is good for business in the news media, but it's (rightfully) damaged their reputation. This is no different.
Yes, there is going to be an uptick in evictions (how could there not be?) but there will be no tsunami. The evidence just doesn't support it. In this video, Phillip and I pick up where my article on this topic left off and go through the data to show the "eviction tsunami" is just media hysteria and little more.
Previous Episodes
-How to Positively Resolve Tenant Disputes (Property Management) -How to Manage Collections and Delinquency- A Guide to Due Diligence for Buying Houses - How to Find Banks for Your Investment Properties - A Crash Course on Building a Buy and Hold Real Estate Business - Is the Economy on the Edge of a Cliff??? How Should Real Estate Investors Respond? - An Introduction Into Buying Portfolios -Why Buy and Hold is So Powerful - In-House or Outhouse Management - Moving to California? - Doing Maintenance Right - Should You Accept Pets in Your Rentals? - Grading Real Estate Calculations - Why Real Estate Depreciation Can Make You Money - All the Ways You Can Finance Buy and Hold - Inflation is Already Her - Why is Lumber so Expensive? - How to Invest Out-Of-State (if you must) - Cryptocurrencies Are Godawful (...at being currencies) - The Dollar is Not Going to Hyperinflate. But this will happen... - The Lockdowns Did Not Work. Stop Doing Them. - The One Trait that Separates the Wealthy and the Indebted - Regret is a Choice As you may have heard, the CDC's federal eviction moratorium is set to end July 31st. So I began researching this piece by Googling "eviction moratorium end" and wasn't particularly surprised by what I found. Here were the first results:
You get the idea. But I'm here to tell you that, fortunately, it is highly unlikely there will be any "eviction tsunami." "At risk of facing eviction" These warnings started at the beginning of the pandemic and have been going on pretty much ever since. Set your Google search results for between March and September of 2020 and you can see examples like the following:
Fortunately, this eviction crisis has yet to come. The problem with all of these estimates is that "facing eviction" or "risks eviction" are very nebulous terms. Unfortunately, many Americans live paycheck to paycheck and thus, are always going to be "close" to being evicted with such vague phrasings. Indeed, none of these studies or articles compare the number of people facing eviction to a baseline year. For example, how many households risked eviction in 2019? Even if a tenant is short on cash for the month, there are lots of ways to avoid eviction: make a deal to leave with the landlord, borrow money from a friend or family member, apply for charitable assistance or government assistance, etc. And offer assistance the government certainly did, most notably with the $2 trillion CARES Act, the $3 trillion HEROES ACT including the extra $600 a week in unemployment benefits. Indeed, it would seem that these 2020 analyses didn't fully appreciate how many people were able to get by with unemployment insurance or their own savings. A partial moratorium It should also be noted that as of this writing, 16 states still have eviction moratoriums of their own in addition to the CDC's moratorium. The reason some states still have moratoriums of their own is that there are limitations to the CDC's order. For example, to qualify a tenant must:
In addition, the tenant must meet some basic financial requirements (i.e. not make over $99,000 a year or $198,000 jointly) and fill out an Eviction Protection Declaration. If they don't meet the requirements or fill out the declaration, they can still be evicted even with the CDC moratorium in place. Evictions for other reasons, such as criminal activity, are also permitted. In other words, not all evictions have been banned by the federal government. As multiple articles have noted, "Renters are still being evicted despite the federal ban." Many evictions are still being filed even if the moratorium prevents most from being executed. But it does not appear that the rate of filing has not gone up. No uptick in filings Despite much searching, I have not been able to find any good information on how many evictions there have been total in 2020 or so far in 2021 throughout the country. The best source of information seems to be the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. Unfortunately, their national data ends in 2016. The Eviction Lab has still been tracking evictions in five states, however; Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Minnesota, and Missouri. Those states tell an interesting story. For one, there was a huge drop off in evictions following statewide moratoriums in Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, and Minnesota. In Minnesota and Connecticut, those moratoriums have stayed in effect, keeping eviction filings in Connecticut low, although Minnesota's have consistently risen.   Eviction Labs Connecticut has had 6,151 eviction filings between March 15, 2020, and June 13, 2021, while Minnesota had 1,960. In contrast, in 2016, Minnesota and Connecticut had 17,470 and 13,622 respectively. So if we were to return to "normal" levels, while there would be a notable increase, it would only look like a "tsunami" to those who forgot what things looked like pre-COVID-19. Missouri never had a state moratorium (although in Kansas City, a judge did order a freeze on evictions). Evictions fell right before the pandemic from about 500 weekly filings in March to about 100 in April and then rose to around 600 before stabilizing between 400 and 500 since the CDC moratorium was put in place.  Eviction Labs Missouri has had 25,394 eviction filings in the previous 15 months as compared to 35,106 in 2016. So even if it almost doubled, it would be at about its 2016 levels. Indiana and Delaware are both interesting because they had state-wide moratoriums that ended before the CDC moratorium was put in place. The Indiana state moratorium brought evictions close to zero. It ended only a few weeks before the CDC moratorium began and when it did end, there was a one-week spike before evictions came down to about the level they have been since the CDC moratorium was put in place.  Eviction Labs Indiana has had 46,185 filings since March 15th, 2020 as compared to 66,544 in all of 2016. Again, as unfortunate as evictions are, even a substantial increase would just be going back to 2016 levels, not some catastrophic anomaly. Delaware had almost two months between the end of its state moratorium and the beginning of the CDC moratorium. Again, the state moratorium brought evictions close to zero. Once it ended, they rose to about 150 per week which is where they have been almost every week since the CDC moratorium was imposed.  Eviction Labs Delaware has had 7,257 fillings since March 15th, 2020 as compared to 17,370 in 2016. Similar trends can be seen in the 29 cities the Eviction Lab follow as well. It would seem the CDC moratorium has had a fairly limited effect, at least with regards to filings, especially in comparison to the state moratoriums. And most of the state moratoriums have already ended and did so without or with only a very brief spike in evictions outside of what had been the average before. Thereby, we should not expect to see a surge in evictions much above pre-COVID-19 levels once the moratorium is lifted. Most tenants are paying rent The main reason there will not be an eviction crisis is simply because most tenants are paying rent. Anecdotally, our own delinquency is about the same as what it was in 2019 and I have heard the same from many other landlords. It would seem to be the most common sentiment in the BiggerPockets forums as well. But I have more than my gut and anecdotes to back this assertion. The National Multifamily Housing Council does a monthly survey of the owners of between 11.1 million and 11.7 million apartment units and has found no major uptick in delinquency. In May of 2019, 96.6% of rental payments were collected. In May of 2020, it fell a bit to 95.1%. In May of 2021, it stayed about the same, only slipping half a percentage point to 94.6%.  National Multifamily Housing Council In addition, while a bit old, Apartment List's survey of tenants in September of last year found that while those paying their rent in the first week had declined from the beginning of the pandemic, those paying all their rent by the end of the month had slightly improved from 89% in April to 90% in September.  Apartment List Finally, a Realty Income report found that rent collection had stabilized in March of 2021 for commercial tenants.
And much of those late rents are the accumulation of tenants that are behind and cannot be evicted because of various moratoriums. Thus, it's possible this slight downward trend is simply because delinquent tenants are not being turned over as fast as before and there is no uptick in delinquency at all. Regardless, a 94.6% collection rate is not going to lead to a surge in evictions. After all, Americans are getting back to work. The unemployment rate peaked in April of 2020 at 14.7% but has fallen back to 5.5% in May of 2021. Of course, this was accomplished, in part, by printing enormous amounts of money which we're starting to see the effects of as inflation ticks up. And while inflation will hurt consumers and may push people on the edge into eviction, that will not be happening en masse any time soon. Most tenants who lost their jobs during the pandemic have found new ones. And if they can't catch up on rent, many will at least move on to another place without forcing the landlord to evict to avoid having an eviction on their record. This is a key point regarding evictions. For example, in Missouri in 2016, there were 35,106 eviction filings but only 20,651 evictions. The reason for this is many tenants either caught up after the eviction was filed or left willingly before the eviction was executed, often with a "cash for keys" arrangement. I further suspect (although can not prove) that the ratio of eviction filings to executed evictions will increase substantially after June 30. I suspect that many tenants who fell behind on rent before getting a new job but still can't pay the back rent will avoid eviction by saving the landlord by moving out before the eviction filing is executed. Indeed, the courts can't operate any faster than they did before the moratoriums so any backlog will be slow to unwind instead of a "tsunami." This will spread out the evictions and give even more time for cash for keys deals and other arrangements between tenants and landlords. In our own experience this has worked quite well. We had a few tenants who were not paying at the beginning of this year and then made a concerted effort to get them to leave with cash for keys. All but two did so. I suspect there will be a lot of similar offers for people who have been holding on because they could and come June 30, they will finally decide to leave versus getting an eviction on their record. Resources for tenants are not going away Furthermore, there are still resources available for tenants who need help. For example, California has a program that "Landlords can choose to accept 80% of any unpaid rent owed from April 1, 2020, through March 31, 2021. If a landlord accepts this funding, the landlord agrees to forgive the remaining unpaid rent for that covered period." Missouri, likewise, set aside $324 million for a similar program. Other states have programs like this as well. Indeed, several states such as New York and New Jersey will maintain eviction moratoriums past June 30 as well. There are also many non-profits such as that aid struggling tenants and will likely increase their efforts as evictions tick up. Finally, if I am sorely mistaken and there really is a surge of evictions well beyond historical averages, the federal government will surely step in with additional funds to prevent an enormous crisis and the instability it would bring. They certainly haven't shown any reluctance over the past two years to spend massive amounts of money. Yes, this will cause even more inflation, but again, that won't be felt until further down the line. Conclusion Evictions will certainly tick up as the CDC's eviction moratorium ends. Delinquency rates are slightly higher than they have been in years past and there is a backlog of eviction filings that will need to be processed (although there's no reason to expect they will be processed quickly). But I doubt there will be an episode of mass evictions. There will likely be a short spike before evictions return to historical averages and that's about it. |
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