Dave:
There is a whole lot of anxiety around AI. Data shows Americans are seriously concerned about how AI will impact their jobs, their communities, the economy, and our entire society. Yet most economists say the sky isn’t falling. Much of the data shows a relatively stable job market. So who’s right here? Are Americans’ fears about AI disrupting the economy justified? Is there a lurking unemployment crisis hiding in the labor market data? How will AI’s broader impact affect real estate investors in the housing market? Today on On the Market, we’re finding out. Hey everyone, welcome to On the Market. I’m Dave Meyer, chief investment officer at BiggerPockets. Today on the show, we’re going to address what is probably the biggest question facing the economy and our society. Is AI going to take all of our jobs? Because if you’ve opened LinkedIn lately, you’ve probably seen the posts, someone’s been replaced by a chatbot, a coding team was cut in half, a call center got shut down.
And these stories are real, but at the same time, organizations like the World Economic Forum project AI is going to create jobs. World Economic Forum actually says they project AI will create 78 million more jobs than it destroys by 2030. So which is it? Is AI going to take all of our jobs? I know it’s kind of a blunt question, but be honest, you’ve probably been thinking about it. I’ve definitely been thinking about it. Everyone I know is thinking about it. So today in the show, we’re going to address it head on. And to do that, I’ve dug into everything I could possibly find on this topic. Talking about labor market data, CEO surveys, worker sentiment surveys and reporting. And I’m going to summarize all of it for you. And I’m not trying to monger any fear. I don’t want to speculate about what might happen in the future.
I’m trying to focus on giving you what we actually know about AI and the economy as it stands today. And of course at the end, I will give you some of my thoughts based on all the research I’ve done. So let’s get into it. To set the stage for our conversation about AI and its impact on jobs, let’s quickly just look at what’s going on in the labor market today and where it has been trending. We just got recent reports for June. I’m recording this in July of 2026. And what we’ve seen is a very low unemployment rate by historical standards. We are still at 4.2%, which is good if you look historically. Now, labor market data is not the best. I talk about that a lot on the show, but there’s a lot of different measures for how the labor market is performing. None of them are perfect, not even really close.
So what we need to do when we’re talking about the labor market and setting our stage for this conversation about AI is kind of look at the big picture. The unemployment rate does tell you something good.That paints a more positive picture and that’s great. We’ve added a lot of jobs over the last four months. In March, April and May, we had very strong job numbers with over a hundred thousand jobs created in a single month. For context, that is good. The last reading that we got for June was a little bit lower at 55,000. That was a disappointment and lower than economists were expecting, but still adding jobs in the economy. So when you’re looking at the employment picture, although there’s been a lot of high profile layoffs and that stuff makes the news, when you actually get down into the data, it doesn’t look as bad as I think a lot of people believe it does.
Now, if you look at other measures of the job market, it’s a little bit softer. It is not as good. And I think the most notable thing, and this is going to get a little wonky, but it is important, is that one of the main reasons why the unemployment rate has gone down or has stayed as low as it is because people are leaving the workforce. There’s a measure called labor force participation. That’s basically how many people are actively either working or looking for jobs. And that has gone down significantly. We’ve seen hundreds of thousands, actually millions of people leave the labor force. A lot of those are people who were looking for jobs previously and have sort of given up. And that is obviously not a good thing for the economy. It’s not a good thing for the people who are looking for jobs and can’t find them.
But it’s also one of the reasons you get a lower unemployment rate, right? Because the way they calculate the unemployment rate is the total number of people working by the total number of people of working and looking for jobs. And if the denominator goes down, the unemployment rate stays lower than it would have if those people continued to look for work. So that is just something to note. And when you look at the whole picture of the labor market, it is a litle bit confusing because you hear all this doom and gloom, I guess, depending on what sector you’re in, but if you work in any sort of white collar job or tech or finance or anything like that, a lot of doom and gloom about the labor market. But the data has been described by Jerome Powell, the previous chair of the Federal Reserve, as a low, higher, low fire environment.
And I do think that’s a pretty good way to characterize what’s going on right now. We’re not having mass layoffs across the economy. Yes, big companies like Amazon and UPS and Oracle have been laying people off, that’s for sure. But most people in the United States are employed by small businesses. So we give outsized media attention to what’s going on with these big household name companies. But when you look at things like initial unemployment claims, which is when people file for unemployment benefits after they’ve been laid off, those have remained pretty low. When you look at continuing unemployment claims, which is basically people who have stayed on unemployment insurance for a long time, those have not really gone up that much, suggesting that big picture, the employment situation is doing okay. Now you could pick this apart all you want. You could say that pretty much all of the job growth has come in healthcare and social services.
That is true, but still people broad picture are actually working. And I’m not saying that this is a strong market when I say it’s like a low, high, low fire environment. The other picture is even though people aren’t getting laid off in mass, companies are hiring less. So there’s something called jolts. It’s the job openings list, and basically that’s a lot lower. I don’t really know anyone, maybe you tell me in the comments, but I don’t really know anyone who would characterize the current job market as strong. Just anecdotally, I know a lot of people having a hard time finding jobs. It seems pretty rough out there, especially in tech and those kind of white collar jobs. And there’s data to support this too. Back last year, 40% of white collar job seekers didn’t even secure a single interview. I think low hire, low fire, pretty good way to talk about it.
And this really frames our conversation around AI because the potential for AI displacement, it’s hitting a job market that isn’t terrible, but it’s a litle soft with low hiring rates and workers who are already struggling to find new roles if they get laid off or displaced. And that combination sort of amplifies the potential pain in the transition to AI, even if the big picture macro numbers look somewhat stable.
Despite the data not really reflecting any sort of emergency related to AI job displacement, people are generally very concerned about this. There’s been all sorts of data and polling about the labor market and it is grim. 40% of workers worldwide now fear AI will make their job obsolete. That’s up from 28% just two years ago. That’s a lot. Four out of 10 people think their jobs will not exist because of AI. That is pretty concerning. 89% of US workers report concerns about job security due to AI. So that might mean the first number was like their whole job function might not exist because AI will take it, but 89% of workers report concern about job security due to AI, meaning that maybe they’re worried their employer will downsize their team or there’ll be less hiring in their industry even if AI doesn’t completely replace their job function.
So people are genuinely worried and I get it. I mean, we hear about it every day. I totally understand the sentiment. It is kind of scary, but we need to go a little bit beyond sentiment. And let’s look at what the data actually tells us about displacement. Because as I said, the labor market’s a little bit of a mixed bag, but can we pinpoint whether or not some of the weakness in the labor market is due to AI or not? There is only so much data about this. So I just want to give you a heads-up. I’ve done my best to find what I can to report on this, but I think it’s pretty imperfect. So there is a firm called Challenger Grand Christmas. They tracked all AI attributed US job cuts through 2025. And the number they came up with shocked me because I think it’s completely wrong.
I’m just going to say this right now. They came up with 55,000 US jobs explicitly attributed to AI from 2023 through 2025. I’m going to be honest, I don’t really buy it. I don’t think that the way they’re collecting this data is accurate because what employer is going to be like, “Yeah, you know what? I laid off this team because I’m replacing them all with robots.” That is not good PR. That is not what anyone wants to hear. So you see a lot of companies that make even these high profile layoffs label it as restructuring. They’re not saying, “Oh, we replaced 10,000 humans with AI.” They’re saying, “We are restructuring or we are optimizing for productivity.” And that makes sense if you’re them, right? Because if you say you’re replacing people with AI, that invites a lot of scrutiny both politically and from consumers. And if you just say restructuring, it sounds kind of benign.
So again, the data is difficult to get here, but there are some independent analyses using some downstream labor market data. They track things like changes in job postings, unemployment rates in different sectors. And the estimate of true 2025 alone AI job losses is 200 to 300,000. Now that’s a big number. That’s two or three months of job growth in the United States, but remember that there are 150 million total jobs in the US. So even those independent analyses put it at a fraction of what you would think. So believe these numbers if you will. I think it’s pretty hard to track because no one’s giving honest information about it. I just don’t even know how you would go about tracking this because there’s no source of truth for why anyone was laid off or why maybe perhaps even more importantly, why companies are slowing down their hiring.
Why do they need less total humans? There’s no good way to track that. So I actually think some of the better data that I’ve seen is coming from surveys from employees. And so 14% of workers report personally experiencing AI-driven displacement. That’s pretty wild. That’s the number that gets scary. 14% of workers reporting personally experiencing AI-driven displacement, 43% say they know someone who has lost a job to AI. Again, as an analyst, I feel compelled to tell you that this data is not very good and drawing inferences and conclusions from it comes with risk. But I was just going to give you my gut feeling, this sounds more right to me than 55,000 or 200 to 300,000. Now, 14%, obviously, if everyone, all of those people had lost their job and didn’t find a new one, we would see a much higher unemployment rate. So keep that in mind.
I’m not saying that the real unemployment rate’s actually 14% because some people will have found a new job. Maybe they’re working part-time. We don’t know. Probably not ideal situations. But to me, this just tracks more with at least my own anecdotal personal experience. So when we look at what’s actually happening in AI right now, I would say that layoffs in AI are happening because of AI are happening, but it’s not as bad as most people think. It is definitely pervasive and it causes a lot of fear, but I don’t think we are seeing broad, massive layoffs because of AI. I personally think the bigger thing is about fewer hires. Someone retires, someone goes to a new job and the company just doesn’t backfill that old role. So instead of hiring someone new, they say, “Oh, maybe we can get in. We used to have eight people on this team.
Eh, maybe we could get by with seven. Maybe they used to go out and hire a couple of college graduates. Not this year. Unemployment rate for college grads is really bad right now. So again, super hard to track, but I can imagine that happening. One area that we do have some data about is what industries are actually being hit the hardest. And most of the analysis I’ve found focused mostly on white collar jobs. And what it’s found is that AI is really disrupting white collar jobs. And white collar, I mean things like data analysts looking at this guy, customer service reps, computer programmers, product managers, financial analysts, that kind of stuff is being hit the hardest. Whereas industries like education or healthcare or a lot of the trades aren’t being impacted nearly at all. And the data here is actually pretty good. Even people are self-reporting this.
Microsoft recently said 30% of its computer code is now written by AI. 40% of Microsoft’s layoffs back last year were targeted around software engineers. So there’s clearly a correlation going on there. And it’s especially for entry level white collar jobs. We’re seeing, if you look at the data for just computer programs in general, the number of job posting for senior experienced engineers actually going up. But for entry level jobs, it is going down a lot. So that’s kind of what we’re seeing in that. McKinsey, the consulting company, estimates up to 70% of financial data processing tasks can now be automated. I can tell you this for sure. The work I do as an analyst is so much easier because of AI. It’s probably one of the things AI is best at is analyzing, interpreting, cleaning data. And I think this industry’s going to be hit really hard.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics is projecting a 5% decline in bookkeeping positions. There are seven and a half million data entry jobs that are at risk globally just by next year alone. Administrative hiring has gone down 13%. So we’re seeing office jobs are really getting hurt. And we’ll come back to this in a little bit, but this is not true of everyone, but generally speaking, these are a lot of high income jobs. And I think that’s going to matter a lot here. When we talk about the broader economy and consumer spending, when we talk about demand for homes and housing, if higher income folks are losing their job or even just worried about their job, it will impact the broader economy. It is not just white collar jobs though. We’re already seeing retail starting to get hit. Walmart just rolled out self-checkout and that could displace 8,000 positions at the biggest employer in the United States.
Sam’s Club owned by Walmart, they’re estimating they could lose 12,000 cashier roles. So this stuff is starting. It seems to me that right now, the way AI is working is that it’s not wholesale replacing jobs. We would see that in the data if we were just seeing jobs completely eliminated. It feels more like a trial period or like a walk before you run kind of situation where it’s replacing a lot of tasks, individual tasks that employees do. And when you add up all the tasks that are now being automated, it means that you need total less job. It means that you need less total jobs. So that might again, not manifest itself through layoffs, but it means hiring is probably going to be slower. That is my read of the situation. And I’ll get to that more in a little bit, but I personally think this is going to get worse, but we haven’t seen any data that suggests we’re going to go into some sort of AI emergency.
Now I have fears about that. I’ll just be honest, but it’s not data driven, my fear about that. We’re not actually seeing any evidence that that is happening. Yes, we are seeing evidence that hiring is slowing down. In certain segments, we are definitely seeing evidence of that. But this idea that we might hit 10 or 15% unemployment, although I admit to you, I just want to be honest, I worry about that stuff. I can’t find any data that suggests that’s happening right now. But again, we’re in the first inning here. We do not know what’s going to happen next.
I want to know what’s going to happen next. And so I tried to dig into a little bit more information about how AI is actually impacting productivity at businesses. And the information is pretty interesting here. McKinsey consulting firm reported that AI could theoretically automate 57% of US work tasks. And right now only 1% of companies report making a mature AI deployment. So despite all the headlines, adoption of AI is actually quite slow. And this might be one of the reasons we’re not seeing it come out in the labor market data is because most companies haven’t really even tried using AI yet. Now, some of them might just stay with that and never adopt AI. And maybe this whole thing about mass AI adoption is overblown or we might see them start to pick it up and then it will get reflected in the labor market down the road.
But I think maybe the most interesting thing I’ve found of this, and maybe this is just like Schaudenfreude where I feel a little bit nervous about AI taking jobs and disrupting say society. I admit that. I also use AI every single day. I’ll just admit that. I think it’s pretty incredible. I have a lot of fears about what it will do to the economy and society, but this one kind of made me feel a little bit better about this. So the National Bureau of Economic Research surveyed 6,000 CEOs and CFOs, so a lot. And 90% of them. So basically all of them said AI has had no measurable impact on productivity or employment at their firm. So again, they might just be saving face and saying that they’re not impacting employment, but I also sort of can imagine that. AI makes a lot of things easier, but is it changing businesses fundamentally right now?
Maybe if you’re a software company, maybe if you’re a financial services or financial analytics company, you do data analytics, that kind of stuff. But other stuff, I don’t really know if it’s totally changing. So take that for what you will, but I just kind of found it funny that all of this is being made and basically CEOs are like, “Eh, I could go without it. ” All this stuff everyone’s going crazy about. They’re like, “Nah, it doesn’t really work.” I think that will change again. We’re in the first inning. The technology is changing rapidly. I think people describe it as being exponential change. And so that might change very rapidly. But as of right now, these things jive. That’s why we’re not really seeing displacement in the labor force. That’s basically all I could find. I wish I had more conclusive data, but I think about this stuff a lot and I wanted to share with you what’s actually going on right now, that the labor market’s not doing that bad.
AI is probably leading to lower hiring, but CEOs are reporting not that much productivity out of it. It doesn’t feel very satisfying. So I tried to find more information about what’s likely to happen in the future. And again, this is speculation. So I don’t want anyone drawing major conclusions out of this, but I just wanted to gather everything I could find about this because it’s so important. The direction this takes is going to change everything, could change everything in our country, our society, the whole world. So it is important to stay on top of this. And I just want to share with you some of the stuff I uncovered. So one thing I think is interesting is that not all AI CEOs are saying that AI is going to eliminate jobs. And honestly, it kind of pisses me off. It’s crazy to me when you see these CEOs, it’s Sam Altman or Dario Imodi or whoever it is, these people who run these massive companies and they’re basically like, “Yo, no, all these jobs are going to be lost, but think of the productivity gains that we’re going to get and everything’s going to be controlled by AI.” I don’t know.
Doesn’t it seem a little bit self-serving that the people who own these companies are like, “Yeah, it’s inevitable that every job gets replaced by me and my company and all the money in the world is going to go through me and my company. Some part of me feels like these executives are saying this because they want it to become true, but we don’t actually know it’s going to come true. There are the people like Anthropic CEO, Daria A. Modi, he goes out and says these things like AI could eliminate half of all entry level white collar jobs within five years. Could happen. But then you have someone like Jensen Wong, who’s the CEO of Nvidia, one of the most valuable companies in the world. And he thinks AI is not going to augment workers at all. It’s just going to create new role categories and not displace jobs at the scale that a lot of pessimists predict.
So I think we have to take these things at a grain of salt. At least that’s where I come out is because the people saying these things have an interest, a very strong interest in these things coming true. And so while I do have a lot of fear, sometimes I have to just check myself and remember that, that they want this to happen and that’s why they’re saying it. And it might not actually work out the way they want. Now, I did try and track down some numbers on the optimist side. Jensen Wong or the World Economic Forum, they are saying that new roles, new types of jobs are going to be created because of AI. And I try to find out if that is true and I really can’t find it. What I found is that basically every major institution in the world, whether it’s a bank, a consulting firm, the World Economic Forum, they’re all projecting net job growth.
The debate that most of them are having is the transition time and pain. What I think most experts, and I don’t even know, can you be an expert in this? It’s so brand new, but whatever. What most experts say is that there will be job loss in the short run, but over time as the economy japs and there are new roles related to AI, that it’ll be net job growth. So maybe there are experts because if you look back at other sort of transformative technologies, whether it was the telephone or electricity or the steam engine, whatever it was, there was a lot of fear in all those hysterical periods about how the labor market would be disrupted. But the pattern was there was disruption for a period of time, but then people got trained or changed jobs or whatever it was. And I think that is hopefully true.
I think that’s kind of like the optimist case. Even though the labor market data’s fine, I find a hard time imagining that the type of jobs that are done today are going to be the type of jobs that we need five or 10 years from now. Again, the World Economic Forum, they estimate that 40% of existing job skills will be outdated and basically obsolete by 2030. So to me, this is where the real pain is going to be. Is no one going to have a job? I hope not. Obviously that’s still a chance. I’m not an expert on AI, but I hope that doesn’t happen. But if you look historically at these patterns, the transition period is painful, but I think this might be a particularly painful one. If 40% of existing jobs, particularly at the high end of the income bracket are becoming obsolete, that’s going to reverberate throughout the economy.
And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that someone who gets paid a lot losing their job is worse than someone who gets an average salary losing their job. I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is that consumer spending is the engine of our economy. It makes up 70% of GDP and we have a K-shaped economy and that is not good either. But what’s keeping the economy going right now is high income people spending. That’s not good. I don’t like that. I’m just saying that is true. That is what’s going on. And so if you see disruption there, it’s like the last part of the economy that is really doing well right now starts to weaken. That could evolve into a bigger recession. We are not there yet. I’m just trying to speculate here about the way I see things going. And I think it could take years because even if these new jobs are being created, there is this time period, this adjustment period where people have to be retrained or re-skilled.
They need different education. They might need to move somewhere else to get a job in this new AI world that we don’t really understand what’s going on. You might need to move to a new place to get a new job. We just really don’t know. I’ve done this research, again, imperfect data, but I’m trying to come up with a hypothesis. That is kind of my job as an analyst on this show. And just for my own peace of mind, for my own investing, I feel like I need to have a hypothesis about what’s going on here. And I’ll come out with this. Feel free to disagree. I would love for you to tell me what you think in the comments, because unlike the housing market, this is not something I claim to fully understand, but I do think I have researched all the data that I can find.
I’ve done I think about as good of an analysis as you can based on the data that’s available. And my conclusion here is that the labor market is going to get worse. It is not bad yet because adoption of AI is relatively slow. The technology is still in its infancy and is going to get better. And as people learn about how to use AI, while the tools get better, I do think job displacement is going to increase. I mean, I look at what my jobs were as an entry level or young data analyst and that job doesn’t need to exist anymore. So much of the stuff that I spent my time doing can be automated in a couple of seconds. In fact, there’s something at BiggerPockets, someone sent me this chart the other day that he generated in like, I don’t know, an hour. And I have a very distinct memory of generating a similar chart being a goal of mine that my boss gave me at the time for a whole quarter.
A whole quarter. So when I think about these things in the industries I understand tech, finance, analytics, this kind of stuff, the jobs are going to go away. I have a really hard time imagining how this is going to be a smooth transition. I don’t want to be pessimistic though. I don’t want to be doom and gloom and say that we’re all going to be on universal basic income and that jobs aren’t coming. History shows that every time there’s a transformative technology, the jobs come back in a different form. But the big variable here is how long that takes and how bad it gets. And For me, that question is really unanswered. I don’t feel qualified to say how bad unemployment is going to get, but I would imagine at the best we’re going to have a weak labor market for the next several years.
That’s kind of my best case scenario. Worst case scenario, I think we see unemployment hit 10, 12%. I don’t know where we’re going to fall, but when I’m trying to plan for my own investing, when I plan for my own life and my own decisions, I need to have a hypothesis. I don’t like just being like, eh, I don’t know. I make a hypothesis. If I’m wrong, so be it, but I need some framework to make decisions off of. And for me, that’s what I’m thinking is that I don’t think we’re going to have a booming economy anytime soon. Maybe we’ll have a high GDP growth because these AI companies make all this money and make infrastructure investments, but I don’t see the labor market. I don’t see real wage growth. I don’t see the financial health of the average American worker getting better anytime soon.
That’s not saying it’s never going to get better, but that is what I’m going to base my investing decisions off of and most of my decisions. I know that sounds scary and it’s not great, but that is what I’m personally going to prepare for. Now, I don’t know if it’s going to get worse in the next two months, two years. I don’t know. But the main thing I came out of this research thinking is what’s the catalyst for the job market to get better? I don’t have an answer. Anyone? I don’t see it. What’s going to happen where all of a sudden hiring is going to tick up a lot? It’s not going to be lower interest rates. What can it be? I think it’s going to be a little while until we have an answer to that question. And so I’m going to plan my portfolio accordingly.
And with that, let’s transition to the last part of the show here today, which is what are the implications for real estate investors? Hat does all this mean for your portfolio? Well, first and foremost, if you want to make a bet, bet on AI places. Look at the housing market in San Francisco right now. It’s going crazy. There are other markets that are probably going to have high concentrations of AI jobs, which could be really high paying. These are places like New York City, Toronto, Washington DC. Where I live in Seattle, it’s supposed to be, but we have kind of a weak housing market right now. But those markets, if you wanted to make a bet and think about places that might grow even if the rest of the economy is kind of meh for a while, good places to make a bet. But I think overall, if you look at the whole national housing market, it’s one of the main reasons I think we’re in the great stall.
We lack a catalyst for home prices to go up again. Maybe if they start printing money and doing quantitative easing or they somehow get mortgage rates down really low, which I think is very unlikely that will happen. But demand in the housing market is going to stay low with the low levels of affordability that we have today and with people worried about their jobs. Even if all of the stuff I said about unemployment going up, it doesn’t come true. Just the fear of that happening is enough to suppres demand in the housing market. The thing I want people to remember is it’s not just going to suppress demand for new homes. It will probably also suppress demand for rentals. Now, of course, people need a place to live. I’m not saying people are not going to live anywhere, but I do think this is going to temper rent growth too.
I am personally expecting very low rent growth for the next few years. Two years ago, I think in 2024, I said I thought maybe in 2026, 27, rent growth would pick back up. I’ve said this a few times already, but I have changed that expectation. I thought then that once we worked our way through the glut of multifamily supply that we have, that rents would go back up. I don’t see that happening anymore. Maybe in certain markets it certainly will, but I think on a national scale, rent is still relatively unaffordable. And if you look at the strongest, biggest cohort of renters, it’s people who are like 20 to 35. That is the exact market where we are actually seeing unemployment go up. So we’re seeing a lot of labor market weakness specifically in the biggest renter group. So just keep that in mind. That is probably going to mean more people are going to live at home.
Maybe there’s going to be more people who choose to live with roommates that keeps household formation lower, could go negative, household formation. That’s more important than population growth, by the way. Household formation, most important thing when we look at apreciation rates, both in rents and home prices. And so if we have lower household formation or no household formation because people are living together or living at home, that’s going to suppress rents. That’s going to increase vacancies. And I personally think that is likely to stick around. Again, not in every single market, but if the trends we’re seeing with the younger cohorts not being able to find great work, not saying we’re going to have mass vacancies, but it’s going to suppress rent growth. People are not going to splurge for a higher apartment. You’re not going to be able to raise rents in the same way you might be used to.
And that’s going to impact your cashflow. So that is something I am personally thinking about and planning on and something I think that you should plan for as well. And hopefully I’m wrong. We get rent growth and everything goes great, but I personally, again, talk about this a lot, but I look at every piece of data in the economy and what I see is a struggling American consumer and the AI labor market just feeds into that. It’s just another thing that’s probably going to drag out for years that’s going to weig on American consumers. Now, as always, there’s a flip side to these things.
If this is the situation, there’s probably going to be more motivated sellers. There’s probably going to be the landlords who say, “You know what? I can’t raise rents. Inflation’s bad. I’m going to give up.” Maybe you can go out and buy those properties at a steal, at a great price. I’m not trying to say don’t invest in real estate. I am going to continue to invest in real estate. But the way I’m going to do it is very, very conservatively. It’s what I always say, but I’m not counting on appreciation and rent growth for the next couple of years. And that will make deals harder to pencil. You’re going to have to raise your standards of what a good deal is for the next few years because anything that’s marginal or thin, there’s too much risk out there, at least for me. I’m sort of a conservative investor in the first place, but for me, when I look at the upside, the potential that we’re going to get great rent growth and appreciation, it just feels low.
I haven’t heard a single good argument about why home prices or rents are going to go up right now. Yeah, the multifamily supply thing for rents, that is good logic. But with home prices, I mean, unless they start printing money, I have a hard time imagining that. Whereas no one knows what’s going to happen with AI, but it’s much easier for me to imagine a downside scenario right now. And I’m not always like this. I’m not like a perma bear. There have been times I’ve been very bullish on the housing market. I’ve put my money where my mouth is in that regard. But right now I think there’s… Brian Burke has said this. There’s a time to be aggressive. There’s a time to take risk and right now to me, it’s a conservative time. That’s the way I view this whole AI thing. It’s just too big a variable.
We’re starting to get some signal about what’s happening, but it’s just this big black box that we don’t understand. I would rather hold onto my cash than buy a thin deal right now. I’m still going to buy good deals. I would rather wait and see what happens than buy something where I need everything to go right. That’s the main thing. I talk about this a lot on the show, but I like to buy deals where if everything goes wrong, it still works. And that’s what I’m going to keep doing right now. Sure, in 2020, 2021, I get a little loose. When the government’s playing with money printing like that, it’s okay to get a little bit loose. But right now I think it’s kind of the opposite scenario. So hopefully this has been helpful to you. I know this isn’t the kind of firm analytical research that I hope to bring you every week when we talk about the housing market, but the data’s just not that good.
But the importance of understanding this I think is paramount. It’s going to touch every part of the economy, every investment you make, every part of our society. If some of the more dramatic predictions about AI come true, man, everything’s going to change. And so this is something I am personally going to keep a very close eye on. As I get better data, as I get more information about what’s going on, I will be sure to share it with you. But for now, we’re left interpreting decent data, not even decent. It’s like kind of weak information and we’re trying to extrapolate and make conclusions and that’s hard. So I’ve given you my take on it that I think we’re going to be in for a rough labor market, not necessarily awful, but at best a weak labor market for the next few years. But I would love to know your interpretation.
Based on what you’ve heard here today, what do you think is likely to happen? Please let me know in the comments. I would love to hear what the on the market community thinks of all this. That’s our show for today. Thank you so much for watching. I’m Dave Meyer and I’ll see you next time.