Learn more about our Music Business Management MA. In this video, course leader Sareata Ginda introduces the course content, research and industry opportunities, and the career pathways available to graduates.
For more information, please visit:
The clock is ticking on AI to deliver on its promises of transformed workplace and economic productivity, and if lags in returns on investment continue, the markets are in for a rude awakening, according to one top economist.
Torsten Slok, the influential chief economist for Apollo Global Management, argued in a recent blog post that there’s a growing gap around AI-enhanced productivity. Basically, you can only see it at tech companies, not most of the Fortune 500.
While some sectors like software and tech can easily integrate AI into their operations, Slok argued that deploying this technology is slow-going for the vast majority of the economy. It takes time and effort due to regulatory hurdles, data protection, and workflow integration, meaning structural productivity gains are slow, and returns of investment have yet to be seen. Slok said he thinks it may happen—eventually. And by that point, the stock bubble may have burst, because the market has priced in returns sooner rather than later.
“The key issue is the length of the ROI runway outside the tech sector,” Slok said. “The bottom line is that a mismatch between current earnings expectations and the actual time firms need to generate ROI on AI investments could have significant implications for many AI company valuations today.”
Slok cites Bloomberg and Macrobond data indicating that despite profit margins for the Magnificent Seven increasing from around 15% to 25% between the first quarters of 2023 and 2026, profit margins for the rest of the S&P 493 have hovered around 10%. The Bloomberg 500 Index follows the same pattern as the S&P, remaining at a steady 12% profit margin over the same period of time.
Most concerning to Slok is what happens if this gap grows as AI deployment and productivity gains continue to sputter. A seminal and controversial MIT study published last year found only 5% of companies saw a meaningful return in investment from generative AI pilot projects. The Apollo economist warned that as expected earnings, or current market pricing, continue to outpace actual earnings, markets will face a “painful repricing” that threatens to decelerate the AI boom.
“Put differently, companies will slow their AI spending if they don’t see ROI quickly,” he said.
U.S. industry giants are already reckoning with hiccups to their mass automation efforts. In a visible sign of the human expertise needed to really leverage AI productivity gains, Ford hired 350 “gray beard” engineers—veterans in the industry, including former employees—to train junior staff and reprogram ineffective AI tools. The automaker has continued to deploy AI vision systems across 33 global plants, with more than 1,000 cameras performing millions of assembly line inspections, but recognized the technology was not as effective without human oversight.
“Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it’s only as good as the information you use to train it,” Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, told reporters last month. “Over prior years, we didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers that have been with us through many product cycles.”
Ford follows the lead of companies like IBM, which slashed thousands of jobs last year amid increased spending on cloud services. In March, the company announced it would triple entry-level hiring in the U.S. across all business units, arguing more jobs are necessary in AI-first workplaces.
As it stands today, this human labor is far cheaper than the automation tools companies are pouring investments into, further calling into question AI’s productivity benefits in the workplace. Nvidia’s vice president of applied deep learning, Bryan Catanzaro, said earlier this year that the cost of AI still far exceeds that of human labor, an admission that coincided with an era of tokenmaxxing, where tech companies like Meta incentivized AI use through internal employee leaderboards, which led to workers using the tech just for the sake of it, all the while driving up costs.
According to Slok, the race to most effectively use tokens is more of an indication of companies struggling to get their money’s worth from AI and failing to produce real workplace gains from it.
“Companies will slow their AI spending if they don’t see ROI quickly,” Slok said. “And the current focus on token optimization is an early warning that AI implementation could be a bumpier, slower road than expected.” (Slok has separately argued that AI will create more jobs, not less, as he’s become Wall Street’s main exponent of the relevance of Jevons paradox; he also thinks it will lead to a boom in small business entrepreneurship.)
Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, was early to spot the issue Slok highlighted, leading a case study on Ricoh, a digital services company, that was published in the Harvard Business Review. In short, he found that people are greatly underestimating “just how much work is involved in” realizing productivity and ROI gains, as he told Fortune earlier this year.
“If you’re listening to the people who make the technology,” Cappelli said about the AI class, “they’re telling you what’s possible, and they’re not thinking about what is practical.”
The gap between the possible and practical uses of AI is driven by “AI shame,” or the pressure for these emerging technologies to be effective, particularly amid rising pressure from investors. It’s a phenomenon observed in tokenmaxxing tech companies, where leadership has mandated increased AI use, but has failed to articulate tangible use cases or goals associated with AI use.
Boston Consulting Group found in a recent study that deploying AI just for the sake of it may actually stymie the technology’s productivity gains. The consultancy’s 2026 Global AI at Work report, which surveyed about 12,000 frontline employees, found that when 42% of respondents reported eight hours of saved time per week as a result of regular AI use, most said they received little to no guidance on how to use the time they saved, and half said they weren’t using that freed up time to complete more strategic work.
“This whole tokenmaxxing thing has probably run its course, and now it’s hitting their cost base in a pretty big way,” David Martin, Global leader of BCG’s People & Organization practice, told Fortune. “A lot of companies just gave AI to everyone, regardless of position, and I think now they’ll say, ‘Well, let’s be more thoughtful about who has access, and what is the business case? And are we delivering on it, ultimately?’”
In the case of Ricoh, Cappelli said, when the company outsourced low-level administration work to process insurance claims to AI, the process required about $500,000 in outside consultant fees, as well as $200,000 per month on AI fees, ultimately resulting in costs that were three times higher than if an employee were to complete the administrative work manually. The company reduced headcount only modestly, Capelli said, from 44 to 39 employees.
Ultimately, Ricoh increased the productivity of the division three-fold, but it took time and its example underscores Slok’s concern around what AI has to offer: Productivity gains are possible, but they are not without immense initial costs in both time and money.
“So that’s the payoff,” Capelli said. “But it’s not cheap [and] it took a hell of a long time to do.”
One day, Remington Lyman was brought into his boss’s office, told that he did above-and-beyond at his job, and was handed a 2% raise with a smile. All the extra hours, all that hard work, equaled the equivalent of an inflation-matching salary bump. That was it—it was time to put his financial freedom in his own hands.
Remington began building an income-replacing rental property portfolio, so when the day came that he was laid off, he’d be more than prepared. Remington was ready to go, and that’s when the real scaling started.
Just ten years after buying his first rental, Remington has over 100 rental units, including sizable commercial buildings with strong cash flow, properties that are capital gains tax-free when he sells them, and units that generate 100% more cash flow than traditional rental properties. He scaled faster through smart partnerships, created significant equity with value-add BRRRRs (buy, rehab, rent, refinance, repeat), and even turned four units into 24 on a single deal.
It’s not special, it’s not luck. Remington is sharing the repeatable strategies he used to build massive wealth and escape corporate before it trapped him until retirement.
Dave:
You know what it’s like. You work all year long for your company. Then your boss sits you down, tells you you’ve done a great job. So you’re expecting a promotion, a raise, maybe even a company car. But then they tell you excellent work. We’re happy to be increasing your pay by 2%. 2%, that’s it. There must be a better way to make money than this. And that’s exactly what today’s guest Remington Lyman thought. Just a few years into his working career, he realized his hard work wasn’t paying off proportionally. What does reward hard work? Rental property investing. So he started buying properties with a partner using any money they could get together. Then a couple years later, when his job laid him off, he was already well on his way to financial freedom. Now he’s got single family homes, multifamily properties, commercial deals, and more that give him the income a job never could.
He started with just $7,500, but now he’s got millions in real estate all because he placed a bet on himself.
What’s up everyone? Welcome to the BiggerPockets Podcast. I’m Dave Meyer. Today on the show, we have a super fun investor story with Remington Lyman. I really enjoyed this conversation because Remington’s story is so familiar. He was not feeling like the reward he was getting from his full-time job was proportionate to the effort that he was putting in and the value that he was creating for his company. So he decided to place a bet on himself and find a way where he could be fully rewarded for the risks he was taking and for the effort he was putting in. And he picked rental property investing and has approached it in a way that I think all of you are going to learn a lot from. Let’s bring on Remington. Remington, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.
Remington:
David, thank you for having me.
Dave:
Let’s talk first a little bit about your background. Who are you and what was your history? What were you up to leading up to your investing career?
Remington:
Yeah, so I’m originally from Connecticut. I got recruited to the Ohio State University for the rifle team.
Dave:
Rifle team?
Remington:
Rifle, shooting. Yeah.
Dave:
I did not even know that was a D1 sport. That’s very cool.
Remington:
Yep. Yep. Punching holes and papers. It was good. I trained really hard and got a scholarship to college and came to university, majored in finance, my own econ. When I graduated, I got your typical finance bro job at JP Morgan. I was an analyst and was always very entrepreneurial and the W2 just wasn’t doing it for me and wasn’t accomplishing my goals. So I quickly realized I needed to start my own business. And through that process, my roommate and my lease was ending and we’re like, “Hey, instead of paying a landlord monthly payments and rent, why don’t we go out and buy a property with the intention to later on turning it into a rental property?” So that’s what we did. We went out and we actually did a house hack. That was my first deal in real estate.
Dave:
It’s a classic story. Love it. It’s very similar, honestly, how I did. I did my first deal with one of my partners was my roommate at the time as well. We got tired of paying rent. We were like, “We got to do something better here.” Where were you living at the time when you did this?
Remington:
I was living in Columbus, Ohio. So my roommate and I, we found the dumpiest apartment you could find, had a bunch of roaches and we were splitting $600, so each paying 300 to save up money. And that allowed us to put the down payment on our first duplex. And we did all the work ourselves. We did the renovation to the other side, we did the leasing, we mowed the grass, did the management and that allowed us to save a bunch of money. And three months after our first deal, we went out and purchased a four unit and did the same thing.
Dave:
Wow, that’s awesome. So what were you buying these things for?
Remington:
Our first duplex was actually pretty expensive for the time. It was about $330,000 and this was back in 2017. But after we leased up the other side, we found another roommate for our side on Craigslist and we moved in his girlfriend and we charged her like $300 a month. And so by the time all that was said and done, we were making about 50 bucks to the good every month while living pretty much rent free.
Dave:
Before we talk more about the deals that you’ve done and your real estate and what you’re doing now, I’m just curious, you said you work in sort of finance pro job working for JP Morgan. I assume it was probably pretty high paying, good job. What was it about the corporate life that wasn’t resonating with you?
Remington:
Yeah, so growing up, I was always taught if I went out and trained harder, if I practiced harder, performed better than my competition, I would be rewarded. And when I got the W2 job, I worked really hard, same thing the first couple years and they gave me a 2% raise at the end of the year. I’m like, hold up, I know basic finance, that’s inflation. So I just got very discouraged and wanted something more from life.
Dave:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. But you stuck with it for a while, right? While you were building your investing career, you stayed doing corporate or did you quit immediately?
Remington:
Yeah. So I worked for about four years at JP Morgan and I got up to 10 rental properties. And then in 2019, I actually got laid off from JP Morgan and that was a real pivot in my real estate investing career.
Dave:
Were you able to cover your lifestyle at that point?
Remington:
Yeah, I was able to cover my lifestyle, but I was 22, 23 at the time and I just wanted more. I knew I wanted a big family. I liked to travel. So I just kept buying. When I got laid off, I got my real estate sales license, commission-based job, worked really hard at that, closed a bunch of deals, working a lot with investors, which allowed me to make a bunch of money and just continue to invest over the years.
Dave:
It’s a hard change, I would imagine going from that steady paycheck to being entrepreneurial. It’s exciting. It’s great and it usually works out in the long run, but I’m sure that was an adjustment for you just mentally going from having real estate be sort of like a side hustle to it becoming your main gig. What was that transition like?
Remington:
Yeah, it was really scary. And to be perfectly honest, I don’t think if I got laid off, I ever would’ve taken the jump. But now looking back, I mean, I was making $60,000 a year at JP Morgan and now I make way more money than that. Sometimes I make that in a single commission check. I’m very fortunate. I’m up to a hundred units now, residential and I’ve got four commercial deals working on purchasing more. I own my real estate brokerage, which has over 45 licensed real estate agents that I own 50% of and then the managing broker. And I just enjoy going to work every day, which JPMorgan, it’s a great company. I still bank there, but I just didn’t have the oomph to go into work every day like I do now.
Dave:
Good for you, man. It’s oftentimes those unfortunate circumstances that kind of light a fire, just necessity. You have to figure something out and entrepreneurship is scary. And so sometimes it takes a little kick to do it. But fortunately you sort of had built up some of your business. You weren’t just jumping into something brand new, which is why I think for a lot of investors, people listening to this, starting real estate as a side hustle is such a beneficial thing because it is manageable while you’re working a full-time job. And then whether it’s through necessity or someone else sort of deciding for you like it was with Remington or your own choice, you’ve sort of built some of the muscles at least, whereas you can sort of scale up at your own time. If it’s okay with you, can we just talk about how you went from that first house hack to this really impressive portfolio in just 10 years and maybe we can unlock some tips and tricks for the audience here.
So you did your first house hack with a roommate, you renovated yourself. So how’d you go out and find that deal and did you have experience with renovations at that point or how did you know how much you could take on?
Remington:
No, I really had no clue what I was doing. I started listening to BiggerPockets after I got my first deal on my way to work and that really helped a lot. It helped me make less mistakes, helped me realize why I was making the mistakes I was making, but I learned everything with the renovation with electrical, plumbing, flooring, painting, drywall, just from YouTube Academy. And whenever I had a question, I would have mentors that I would reach out to and they would guide me. But if you really accept that you’re going to make mistakes in the beginning and you’re willing to put sweat equity in and you stick with it over the long run and I think that’s where a lot of investors lose their way is the first couple of deals don’t always work out the way that you think they are and those are going to be the toughest ones, but you’re going to learn a lot and then now I make less mistakes.
I’m able to do more deals, bigger deals, have access to different types of capital and you just got to really get started.
Dave:
So you did that first deal. How long after you bought that first deal was the second fourplex?
Remington:
Well, strategy we would do is I had a business partner at the time, which I eventually bought out, but I would do a house hack and then he would do a house hack. So we wouldn’t have to wait six months to a year before doing our next one. And we would just take turns getting the loan. So we got three properties, a total of 10 units in probably a year and a half, which is pretty quick.
Dave:
That’s a super good idea. So rather than remaining as roommates, you just like, we’re each going to go acquire our own unit and we’ll be business partners on all of them for some period of time.
Remington:
Yeah.
Dave:
I like that idea. That’s a pretty good approach. So sounds like you got off to a really good start here, mostly focusing on house hacking, but I want to hear how you really started to scale because your portfolio sounds really impressive, but got to take a quick break. We’ll be right back Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. I’m here with investor Remington Lyman and we’re talking about how he started his investing career in Columbus, Ohio first by house hacking, working with a partner. After those first couple of small multifamily, I think you were up to 10, right? You had a duplex, two fourplexes. Where’d you go from there?
Remington:
Yeah, and this is where my portfolio really started to scale and it was using the Burr method. So I went out and I identified, I had been cold calling a lot, property owners, distress assets. And I found this four unit in this area that was really up and coming called Franklinton. It was in a really bad shape. The owner wanted $80,000. I was going to have to evict everyone, do a complete renovation, probably $150,000 of work. And so what I did was I had about $75,000 to my name at the time because I had just gotten laid off, but I had saved a bunch of money. I went to my mom and I borrowed about $10,000 and I purchased the four unit and then I went with a partner who was a mentor. I said, “Hey, I got this great four unit that I own cash.
I bought it for 80,000, but I got to put about 150 into it and I think it’s going to be worth about 450,000 when I’m done with it. ” So a home run deal.
Dave:
Like those numbers.
Remington:
And he’s like, “Hey, I’ll do that 50% partner. I’ll give you all the cash to renovate. We’ll quickly renovate it and we’ll refinance it. ” And that’s exactly what we did. So we put about $230,000 into it. We appraised it at about 400, 450,000 and we pulled all of our money out and then some. And that was a good example of delayed financing because we purchased it with cash, did the renovation, did the BERM method and refinanced it. And I went on through my middle career doing that to a bunch of small multifamily properties and within six months, because you have about a six month seasoning period where a bank will refinance it for more than the purchase price and renovation, just did that with cash, waited six months, pulled all my money out and then some, and then I had extra money to do future deals.
Dave:
Dude, wow, that’s an unbelievable deal. Let’s dig into this one a little bit. There’s a couple things I think our audience should hear about. So first and foremost, tell us about this mentor.
Remington:
Yeah. So I actually met my mentor while I was working at JP Morgan. I would go into work early so I could leave a little bit early, beat the rush hour traffic, come back home and I would pull a list off the county auditor site of all the property owners, all the two to four unit owners in my zip code that I wanted to target. And our county typically had a number associated with the rental contact registry. And so I would call them up and I would be like, “Hey, I see that you’ve owned this home for 20 years. Are you interested in selling?” And most would say no, but some would have a good conversation and one person that I met was like, “Hey, I’m really old. I don’t want to sell anything, but I’ve got a really good agent that found me a bunch of deals, you should meet with him.” So he gave me his phone number, I called him up and I would have a beer with him after work once a month and that’s how I met my first mentor.
Dave:
Awesome. That’s so cool. I mean, it’s just hustle, right? You just build personal relationships based on your own hustle and effort because a lot of people want to find these mentors. There’s no prescribed way to do it. You kind of just have to put yourself out there and something will usually work like the mentors I’ve had in my career, not even in real estate necessarily, I can’t tell you how I found them. It’s just like going out and doing your work every single day and you can find these people who if you build authentic, genuine relationships with can help you with your investing career. So tell me, Remington, how’d you structure this deal? Because I think this is a common thing that people face. You got a deal on the line, good for you. You don’t have enough capital to take it down. So how did you have the conversation with your mentor and how did you legally structure it so you both had upside, risks were limited and so on.
Remington:
Yeah. So we drafted up an operating agreement, he put the money in for the renovation. I had the basis of the property that I had purchased cash. I had a little bit of extra that I needed to put into the partnership to cover to match his money that he was bringing. And once we finished the renovation and refinanced it, we just split the proceeds fifty fifty. And then later on we actually ended up selling that property. We 1031ed it from a four unit into a 24 unit apartment building that we still own today.
Dave:
Oh, so not only were you able to pull cash out on top of your investment, but you had so much equity built in that deal, you could roll it into a building six times larger. That’s incredible. Nice. And you found that deal just cold calling?
Remington:
Yeah, I found both deals actually cold calling, the four unit and then the 24 unit that I 1031 into.
Dave:
Damn, that’s awesome. Good for you. And were you still doing your own renovations at this time when you were doing these BERS?
Remington:
So I wasn’t actually swinging the hammer at that point. I was just writing checks. I was managing pretty cheap contractors. Cheap contractors are good because you save a lot of money, but there’s a lot of project management that you need to do. You need to make sure that they’re showing up to work. You need to go to Lowe’s and buy the materials because these guys don’t have money to buy it themselves and you make sure that they’re doing their work correctly. And I wouldn’t suggest that for a beginner, but I had enough experience to know what was supposed to be done correctly and how much it should cost.
Dave:
How do you like managing renovations?
Remington:
It’s probably one of my least favorite things. I try to partner with people that are really good at it. Me too. And I will bring the experience with getting the loan. I will bring the experience of finding the deal and how to structure it, but I really don’t like managing the contractors. So I try to find people that will do that part of the job.
Dave:
So that’s awesome. It sounds like an incredible home run deal. I imagine after that you kind of just Bird for a while because if you could do that kind of deal, why wouldn’t you do that all day?
Remington:
Yeah, Bird for a while at the time interest rates were like three, 4%. So I would do the Burr and then refinance into permanent 30-year fixed rate debt that was super cheap. So a lot of times I would be cashflowing and it was a really good strategy to use and it still is today.
Dave:
Yeah. And at the same time, right, Columbus kind of exploded.
Remington:
Yep. There’s a lot of out – of-state investors. There’s also a lot of local investors as well. And what you tend to see is the local investors will tend to buy AB class neighborhood properties and then the out – of-state investors will tend to buy the C-class properties because they want cashflow more. So it’s cheaper properties. But yeah, a lot of growth has happened in Central Ohio with Intel, making the chips and oral, making the drones. You got Honda building the electric battery for the cars. There’s just a lot of growth in Central Ohio because it’s been so cheap for these manufacturers to build out their headquarters. And then also there’s a lot of higher education colleges to then recruit the talent to manage that.
Dave:
So tell us a little bit just about these deals.You were doing these burs. Were you cold calling for all of them or what was your deal flow like?
Remington:
No, so when I first started, and I still do today, I work with realtors. So they would find a property, whether it was on market or maybe a pocket listing that they thought would be a good deal for me. And I’ll always pay a good realtor, even though I’m a realtor myself. I would say about half the deals that I’ve purchased were through realtors. The other half have been off market opportunities, whether it’s working with wholesalers that are cold calling, whether it’s myself that’s cold calling. I also employ virtual assistants in the Philippines that will cold call for me as well. So you got to take every potential lead flow you can and analyze as many deals as possible.
Dave:
Yeah. It’s hard right now to find good deals. I mean, they’re definitely out there, but it takes a little bit of legwork. Remington, if you had to give some advice to our audience about if they could just focus on one area, like if there’s one thing they could do to improve their deal flow, sounds like you’re getting amazing deals, where would you spend your time just starting out?
Remington:
Yeah, I would talk to as many people as possible, get out there and network. Some of the best deals that I’ve found were just from talking to property owners to other realtors being like, “Hey, I’ve got this need for this asset. Do you have anything possible?” I own a small business and we wanted to really buy an office space that could support a bunch of agents. And I was networking with this commercial broker and I’m like, “Hey, we need a place that’s downtown that has good parking and that’s cheap and I want to do the renovations. So something that needs a lot of work, do you have anything?” And sure enough, the next day he called me and boom, we found our office building that I renovated. So get out there to your local meetups, BiggerPockets. There’s a lot of really good meetups and events that you can leverage to build out your network.
Dave:
Totally agree. I think the best deals I’ve ever gotten the people I call when I have a problem or an opportunity or people I’ve just gotten to know over doing this for 16 years and it takes time, but there are ways you can accelerate your network, like going to local meetups like Remington said, you can and should come to BPCon. That’s an incredible place to meet really high intent people who want to be doing deals together. Tickets are still on sale. You can go to biggerpockets.com and check those out. But whatever way you do it, figure out a way to build your network. You don’t have to be the most outgoing person in the world. You just have to find ways to build a couple meaningful relationships and it really can be the difference between sitting on the sideline scrolling Zillow and just saying like, “Oh, this all sucks.” Or finding and seeing good quality deal flow over the course of your investing career really makes a huge difference.
So it sounds like things went great through the pandemic, doing a lot of burs, but I assume you’ve had to shift your strategy like a lot of us since rates went up. Let’s talk about that when we get back from this quick break, stick with us.
Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. I’m here with investor Remington Lyman, who’s built an incredible portfolio in Columbus, Ohio with a lot of hustle, building a great network, being a good deal finder, raising capital. You’ve done a little bit of it all. Where we left off in your larger story, Remington, was at the end of COVID. So you were doing Burrs. What has happened to your business, your portfolio, your strategy since rates started going up in 2022?
Remington:
Yeah, so rates started going up and also I was just at a different point in my life. My wife and I went out and bought a nice house that we’re living in. So the house hack was out the window. Rates were coming up and really I was at about 80 rental units at the time where that’s a lot to manage and I was managing everything myself. So I needed to find a way where I could really scale up but also make it easier. So I started targeting commercial deals and I actually went out and purchased a warehouse with my business partner.
Interesting. And it was a 24,000 square foot warehouse. We picked it up as soon as it hit the market. It was listed at about 600,000. We bought it, we put about half a million into it and then we went out and we found a 10-year triple net commercial lease and it’s a great deal now. We’re cash flowing about a few thousand dollars a month and it’s in an opportunity zone. So after the end of the 10 years, we can sell it and not pay capital gains. Oh, that’s a good one. I think half the battle and the sexy part of real estate investing is finding the deal and making cashflow, but where the other half and where the real generational wealth comes in is it’s all a taxplay. So how can I generate wealth but then preserve it through these different tax opportunities?
Dave:
Let’s talk about this more because this is not the kind of deal that we hear about that often on the show. So first and foremost, can you just explain what a triple net lease is to everyone?
Remington:
Yep. So a triple net lease, so when it comes to residential investing, you’re typically paying the taxes, you’re maybe paying the lawnmower or any repairs that you need to do, maybe you need to replace a roof, that’s coming out of your pocket as the owner. With triple net leases on commercial buildings, all of that is getting passed on through the tenant. So all of the repairs, all of the property taxes, every single bill that you would typically have to pay for as the owner is getting passed on to the tenant. So it makes it very simple. You can keep your property in really good condition without coming out of pocket and it’s really easy to underwrite.
Dave:
Yeah. And it’s predictable. So unlike residential where hopefully you’re putting money aside for repairs and capital expenditures and everything, you don’t know when it’s going to hit and cash flow management is a little bit harder, but triple net leasing is super appealing because it should be a pretty similar return every single month. You shouldn’t have a lot of surprises, but you’re basically betting on the business. A lot of it is betting on the company that is going to be occupying the space because as long as they’re doing well and paying their loans, you’re doing well. If they can’t pay rent, there are obviously challenges, but if you find good operators, reliable operators, it’s an incredible way to make money. So what was the nature of the business that you brought into this warehouse space?
Remington:
Yeah, so it’s an art studio. They are actually funded by a pretty big donor who’s a big real estate investor, family money, and it’s a not – for-profit. And then the not – for-profit will also sublease art studios within the larger complex. So it’s a pretty good business model. They’re fully leased up. They were fully leased up in a month. Central Ohio Columbus is really trying to become a art scene. So they’re really pushing these small art studios and it’s a really great program. It was in a not so great neighborhood and the building was not being used for about 30 years, which made it really interesting when you’re trying to renovate a building that hasn’t been used for 30 years, but the neighborhood is a lot better for it. There was a lot of support with local politics for the project to come about and it’s been really good for the community.
Dave:
That’s super cool. I love that kind of mutually beneficial real estate. You’re doing something good for the community, doing something good for these artists, doing something good for your bottom line.That’s the kind of stuff we love to see here where everyone can benefit from it. Tell me about the opportunity zone side of this. Just for everyone to know, opportunity zones are a tax opportunity. I think it started in 2017 in the first round of Trump tax cuts, but basically it says if you invest in certain areas of the country that are designated, there are tax benefits for you and there’s different tiers of rules, but if you invest your money for a certain amount of time, you can unlock different levels of tax saving. I do think what you’re talking about, Remington, is the highest level. If you invest in something and keep your money in one of these opportunity zones for 10 years, the gains, the capital gains tax that you would normally pay are forgiven, right?
Isn’t it? Is that the case?
Remington:
Correct. And let me disclose, my wife’s an attorney, so she’d yell at me. “I’m not a CPA. I’m not an attorney. This isn’t tax or law advice, but yeah, that’s essentially one of the tax opportunity zone advantages. There’s other ones as well on the state level. They’ll actually give you a state level tax credit, 10% of the purchase price and the renovation costs.
Dave:
Like
Remington:
A tax credit. As a credit. And you can actually sell those. On the federal level, if you’re big enough, which we’re not, you can actually get even more from the federal level. So there’s a lot to really go after and that’s where it’s really important that you have a good attorney, a good CPA, and you really network and talk to people because when we first started this, we didn’t know about that and we left hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table because we weren’t taking advantage of every single opportunity. So get out there and ask questions to people that are smarter than you and unlock all of these advantages you can.
Dave:
Yeah. So this deal, basically you bought something you renovated, which sounds tricky, but now you have a triple net lease and after 10 years, if you go and sell it, you won’t pay any tax on your gains. It’s another home run.
Remington:
Yep, other home run.
Dave:
Is that kind of a model you’ve been trying to replicate since COVID?
Remington:
I’ve been trying to do that model. The other really big strategy that I’ve been doing recently are medium term rentals. So five years ago, short term rentals were really popular, but there is a lot of regulation that got passed with it. There’s a lot of turnover, a lot of maintenance, really sweet spot that I’ve been turning some of my units, residential units into have been medium term rentals. And I’ll get traveling nurses, I’ll get contractors, students that will lease out my units for a month to even a year at a time and they’ll pay me probably about 50% to 100% more than I would normally get with long-term rentals. And there’s not a lot of management when it comes versus short-term with medium-term. So that’s another strategy that’s been really cash flowing things pretty well in this higher interest rate, higher price market.
Dave:
Columbus seems like a really good market for medium-term rentals. Just like so the state government’s there. You have giant university hospitals. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Are you managing those yourself?
Remington:
Yeah. So I actually have a property manager that manages about 10 of those units. I self-manage one that’s near my house, but for most of them, I have a property manager that manages them, but they’re really great. They only take, I believe it’s like 15%, which is pretty cheap, medium-term rental and they do a great job. Oh,
Dave:
That’s great. So what are your goals now? I mean, you’ve accomplished a lot in 10 years, Remington. Congratulations. Thank
Remington:
You.
Dave:
It sounds fun, exciting. You’re doing a little bit of everything. What’s the goal you’re trying to work towards?
Remington:
Yeah, I mean, I just had my first kid, she’s six months old now. Oh, congratulations.
Thank you. I would say one of my biggest goals is to have nine more, have a big family and support them through real estate investing. I want to keep buying commercial assets. I want to keep growing my brokerage so the more agents that I can bring on that are successful, the more money I make through splits with them, the more opportunities that they will find for me. I partner with a lot of my agents on deals because they’re cold calling. So just continue to grow things and become successful and support my community every way I can and renovating these properties and making affordable housing for people.
Dave:
Good for you. I love that. That’s such a good goal. But I have to ask you, if you want 10 kids, how big is that primary home you just bought with your wife?
Remington:
It’s pretty big. We’ve got about a little over 3,000 square feet, so we can definitely fill it up. Yeah,
Dave:
Pack them in. Yeah, that’s great.
Remington:
Yeah, pack them in. Army style barracks.
Dave:
All right. Well, Remington, thank you so much. Again, congratulations. Love the approach to real estate. I think you’ve really accomplished a lot on hustle and effort and doing things the right way. So good for you. We’d love to keep up with you and hear about what you’re doing in real estate as you continue on this exciting journey.
Remington:
Yeah. Thank you so much for the opportunity, David.
Dave:
And thank you all so much for being here and for watching this episode of the BiggerPockets Podcast. We’ll see you all next time.
Help us reach new listeners on iTunes by leaving us a rating and review! It takes just 30 seconds and instructions can be found here. Thanks! We really appreciate it!
Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email [email protected].
![[SC, OH, IN, KY, NC] Park National Bank $300-$500 Checking Bonus](https://globalinvestmentstrategy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/park-national-bank-1024x551-768x413.png "[SC, OH, IN, KY, NC] Park National Bank $300-$500 Checking Bonus")
Update 7/5/26: Deal is back until August 29, 2026
Update 4/19/26: Deal is back until 6/6/26. Hat tip to reader Another DP
Offer at a glance
Direct link to offer
This account has a $10 monthly fee that is waived if you do any of the following:
You can eliminate your service charge1 with one of the following:
This account has a $25 monthly fee that is waived with $25,000 or more on deposit with Park
I wasn’t able to find a fee schedule so unsure if there is any EATF.
Not really worth considering the $500 bonus as you need to tie up $25,000 and the account doesn’t earn anything AFAIK. If you put that $25,000 into a 5% APY earning account you’d earn $300+. The $300 bonus is worth doing and we will add it to the best bank account bonuses.
Hat tip to reader Dan
Useful posts regarding bank bonuses:
America foreclosed on Gen Z once. The risk now is that Gen Z finishes the job.
I wrote a piece last year that went semi-viral about the “Gen Z stare,” that labeling of young-adult awkwardness that goes far beyond the “millennial pause” in stereotyping a generation. But this interaction made me think it’s something else; it looks like the Gen Z sneer. This wasn’t the freeze response that researchers spent much of 2025 explaining (and excusing) but a worldview expressing itself casually, in the way that formed worldviews do: without effort, without doubt, and without interest in what you might say back.
I saw it in the discourse around Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg’s much-hyped UFO opus, where younger audiences tagged the film “boomer-coded” and walked away. The film’s sincerity — the quality critics praised most — was met with a sneer rather than a response.
Many Gen Zers’ formative years fell during the Great Recession, a period marked by a “jobless recovery” and a housing bust that led to a nationwide wave of foreclosures. The oldest Gen Zers were between 8 and 13 years old during the 2008-2010 foreclosure crisis, which displaced 3.8 million American families at its peak. They lived the experience of watching parents open an envelope, changing schools mid-year, the house that wasn’t there anymore. A generation was taught that the foundational promise of American middle-class life — work hard, the system holds — was simply revocable if you didn’t have enough cash in the bank.
The economic conditions they inherited as adults have only confirmed that lesson in the years since. Starter home prices are up 87% since 2019. The average new car costs $49,000, up 27% from 2020. A SignalFire analysis of hiring data from 2019 to 2024 found that across all sectors, entry-level hiring had fallen more than 50%, even as mid- and senior-level hiring recovered. Over 70% say “survival spending” is their financial norm and that wealth is genuinely out of reach. Fifty-seven percent believe their generation was set up for financial failure. Only 32% think the American Dream remains attainable.
Kaelyn, 24, was born in 2002 and wrote to Fortune after reading our coverage. She and her partner did everything the system asked: skipped college, obtained GEDs, lived with family until they were 21, saved aggressively, and eventually bought a home — a transaction she describes as arriving “with extreme caveats.”
She is now an administrator at a high-volume tax firm, working toward an enrolled agent certification. She is “one of a very fortunate and rare few” to beat the odds, she told me. And yet her read on the system is unsparing. “Everywhere I turn — healthcare, employment, even housing — those who provide the ‘opportunities’ are exploitative and slowly but surely drilling further into a broken system.” She said she’s not alone: “This is a common mentality I’ve seen among my age group. We were jaded about employment before we ever entered the workforce.”
Beyond jaded, Kaelyn added, Gen Z is simply “angry.” She grew up watching her parents “struggle through jobs that sent them home exhausted” and only having money for dinners of ramen noodles or “orzo with onions.”
That anger has a clinical name. The World Economic Forum calls it financial nihilism — the conclusion that the system no longer rewards prudence, driving a cohort toward crypto bets, prediction markets, and raided retirement accounts.
The empirical record supports them. Dartmouth economist David Blanchflower and UCL’s Alex Bryson have spent the last two years documenting what they call the disappearance of the U-curve — the long-established pattern by which happiness dipped in middle age and recovered in later life. Their findings, some previously covered in Fortune, draw on a deep dataset spanning dozens of countries to confirm that ill-being is no longer hump-shaped in age — the young are now the most miserable cohort globally. In subsequent NBER working papers under review, they sharpen the finding: the deterioration is concentrated specifically among young workers, and the trend began not with COVID but in 2010, the year the foreclosure crisis ended.
The stare, in this context, was the correct emotional response to an ambush. A generation that arrived at adulthood to find the door locked and, instead of smiling and saying thank you, froze.
Kaelyn went out of her way to bring up the Gen Z stare and to blame a broken business and consumer culture for making her generation the “guinea pigs” for social media “before anyone bothered to consider its long-term effects.” She offered some empathy for millennials, who “were screwed by [the economy] the second they hit the ground.” She said she thinks millennials seem to be “burnt out” — it was unclear whether she was referencing Anne Helen Petersen’s famous BuzzFeed essay on the burnout generation — but that Gen Z is not apathetic, lazy or stupid — it’s just really “angry.”
Foreclosure has a psychological literature, it turns out. James Marcia, building on Erik Erikson, identified defensive foreclosure as the preemptive closing off of identity exploration in response to anxiety — adopting a fixed identity defined primarily by refusal, shutting the process down before it can hurt you. The person who forecloses defensively doesn’t go through the crisis of questioning and exploring. They’ve already decided. To paraphrase the Gin Blossoms’ line from “Hey Jealousy,” if you don’t expect too much, then you won’t be let down.
Calling something “boomer-coded” is defensive foreclosure in action, a categorical ruling issued without engagement, doors shut before entry.
The corporate sector is confirming that the gates are shutting on all comers, seemingly confirming the worst-baked-in fears. Sixty percent of companies report letting Gen Z hires go within the first few months in 2026, citing a lack of motivation — and Gen Z has largely responded not with reflection but with viral mockery of the employers. Fourteen-and-a-half percent of Gen Z describe themselves as ideologically “extreme,” compared to 2.7% of Millennials at the same age. Eighteen percent say they never trust the government, more than double the Millennial rate. More than 50% of Gen Z workers say their own social skills have declined — but where early commentary framed this as a wound, a significant cohort has reframed it as a posture.
The expert class bears responsibility for this trajectory. When the Gen Z stare went viral in mid-2025, the institutional response was almost uniformly defensive. Researchers advised “generational empathy” as some called the phenomenon exaggerated. It didn’t see a generation at risk of foreclosing on itself. By reflexively framing withdrawal as resistance rather than a deficit, the expert class helped remove the mechanism that might actually have helped. Even worse, they implicitly told a generation that their contempt was justified — and even now they are still expressing surprise as it deepens.
There once was a generation that called itself “blank” and “vacant,” that seethed with anger and contempt for an economy that delivered stagnancy and inflation instead of growth and prosperity: the punk generation of the late 1970s. Nobody sneered at authority and received wisdom more than Johnny Rotten.
But Richard Hell, the long-time East Villager who sang of a “Blank Generation,” was explicit that his lyrics were about possibilities — the blank as a space to write on, a refusal of the previous generation’s definitions rather than a refusal of meaning itself. The punk blank was a provocation that demanded a response. Defensive foreclosure is a termination of the exchange.
Kenzie, a Gen Z corrections officer, wrote to Fortune about navigating “a world that makes all the old solutions feel like a carrot being dangled in front of our faces.” She noted that her profession is one of the least forgiving environments for disengagement — team cohesion in a corrections facility is not a corporate talking point but a physical necessity.
But paradoxically, the jadedness of the world is exactly why finding a sense of belonging matters so much, she argued: “When I felt like I was truly a part of something and mattered to my team, that we were making a difference in our workplace and world, I worked much harder. I found reasons to keep pushing on in the hard times because I knew someone had my back.”
What Kenzie describes — the discovery that belonging generates effort, that trust compounds, that earnest investment in an institution can be returned — is precisely what defensive foreclosure costs. Not in some abstract sense, but concretely: the mentorship that stops when the mentor reads incuriosity as contempt, the promotion that goes elsewhere when the manager senses the employee has already mentally checked out, or even the patron at the coffee shop who would rather not be stared back at when making their regular order.
Here is the cruel irony the data reveal: the economic conditions that produced this psychology are slowly beginning to shift. Gen Z’s homeownership rate is already tracking ahead of Millennials at the same age — buying smaller homes in lower-cost metros, adapting, finding ways in. The $84 trillion Great Wealth Transfer is underway. The starter economy, however broken, is not permanently sealed.
Returning to Blanchflower and Bryson’s troubling findings, the data show the onset of despair among young workers in 2010, meaning that the psychology of foreclosure has been hardening for 15 years, across conditions both terrible and improved, through booms and contractions alike. It is no longer purely a response to circumstances, but a lens.
The door is beginning to open, but the generation that was trained not to approach it stands at a distance, arms folded, having already foreclosed their future options.
Kaelyn put it better than any researcher has. “We gave up on this game before we even really understood what it was,” she wrote. “Because it was dead well before we arrived.”
The economy foreclosed on Gen Z first. The risk now is that Gen Z finishes the job and forecloses on itself.
So the Australian argument holds in the US. It just needs a different starting point.
The Harvard JCHS report is the most authoritative annual measure of US housing affordability, and the 2025 findings are stark.
Monthly mortgage payments on the median-priced home – assuming a 30-year loan with a 3.5% down payment – hit $2,570 in 2024. That figure is 40% higher than it was in 1990, adjusted for the same loan terms. Qualifying for that mortgage requires an annual income of at least $126,700. Only six million of the nation’s nearly 46 million renters can meet that benchmark.
The affordability gap
In 1970 a home cost 2.3 times the median household income — the most affordable point in the modern record. Today it costs 5.1 times. Parents who bought in the early 1980s bought near the historical midpoint. Their kids are buying at the all-time high.
Price-to-income ratio Historical norm: 3.0x 2024: 5.1x (record)
Sources: National Association of Realtors; U.S. Census Bureau Current Population Survey; Best Interest Financial (Feb 2026); Housing Almanac (Apr 2026); Visual Capitalist / FRED (2025). Confirmed anchors: 1970 (2.3x), 1980 (3.65x), 1985 (3.5x), 2005 (4.7x), 2012 (3.5x), 2022 (5.83x), 2024 (5.1x). Intermediate years indicative.
The median price of an existing single-family home hit $412,500 in 2024 – five times median household income. Harvard senior research associate Daniel McCue called it “shocking” and noted it was “significantly above the price-to-income ratio of 3 that has traditionally been considered affordable.”
Existing home sales dropped to a 30-year low of 4.06 million. The US homeownership rate fell in 2024 for the first time in eight years. The median age of a first-time homebuyer hit 38.
German commercial property financing sentiment plunges, survey shows
DISCLAIMER:
Products mentioned in this video are offered by Wio Securities LLC. As with all investing your capital is at risk. Wio Securities LLC is approved by the UAE Capital Market Authority.
👉 You can check out Wio Bank via this link:
______________
👉 Join Wisdom Hatch Global Investing Community. And, Invest with Akshat (track every trade):
______________
👉 I use Vested to invest in US Stocks. EXCLUSIVE $10 bonus on 1st Deposit if you sign up using this link:
[DISCLAIMER: US Securities on Vested are offered through VF Securities Inc.. This post is in partnership with and sponsored by Vested. Creator may also hold shares in Vested]
________________
👉 Get daily stock market updates: (only at 159/month):
______________
If you were to invest Rs. 1 Lakh today, how should you go about it?
In this video, I talk about strategies to invest your INR, but in a global environment. Why not just the Indian market? Watch this video till the end to know my thoughts as well as the backing behind them.
PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS NOT AN INVESTMENT ADVICE. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN DUE DILIGENCE
*********************
Linkedin►
Twitter►
Instagram►
***********************
Attributions:
Stock videos from Pixabay and Pexels
Logos: Wikipedia Commons
source
Key Points
Student loan borrowers who applied for the SAVE plan but were never officially enrolled are now receiving denial letters from their loan servicers. These are borrowers who submitted an application for SAVE or an old application selecting the option “Lowest Repayment Plan”, but their applications were never actually processed. These borrowers had been in administrative forbearance while waiting for an outcome to their application.
Borrowers have 90 days to submit a new income-driven repayment (IDR) application or their SAVE forbearance ends and payments resume on their old plan.
Hundreds of thousands of borrowers submitted IDR applications requesting SAVE and have been sitting in a administrative forbearance (some for well over two years) waiting for an answer. That answer has now arrived: denied.
Unlike borrowers officially enrolled in SAVE, who get auto-enrolled in the Standard or Tiered Standard plan if they miss their 90-day deadline, applicants who miss the deadline get kicked back to their previous repayment plan, or the Standard plan if they weren’t enrolled in a plan before (such as new borrowers leaving college). For many, that could mean a payment far higher than what they expected under an income-driven plan.
Here is the version of the notice MOHELA is sending to affected borrowers (other servicers, including Aidvantage, are sending similar messages):
A recent legal settlement ended the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) Plan, and it is no longer available to borrowers. As a result of the settlement, MOHELA was directed by the U.S. Department of Education (ED) to deny all SAVE Plan applications. Visit StudentAid.gov/courtactions for more information about the settlement.
MOHELA records show that you submitted an income-driven repayment (IDR) plan application and requested either the SAVE Plan or the SAVE Plan and another plan. You must now select a new repayment plan. If you’re not currently enrolled in the SAVE Plan and don’t submit a new application for a different repayment plan within 90 days, your SAVE forbearance will end and you will be required to resume payments on the plan you were on before you applied for SAVE. If you’re currently enrolled in the SAVE Plan, you will be placed on either the Standard Repayment Plan or the Tiered Standard Plan, depending on your circumstances.
Borrowers who receive this letter need to take action. Submitting a new IDR application keeps them in an income-driven plan and avoids reverting to a potentially unaffordable prior payment.
The main options are Income-Based Repayment (IBR) and the new Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP), which launched July 1, 2026. RAP charges 1% to 10% of adjusted gross income depending on income, includes a $50 monthly deduction per dependent, and requires a minimum $10 monthly payment.
Borrowers pursuing Public Service Loan Forgiveness should enroll in IBR or RAP as both are PSLF-eligible.
Applications can be submitted at StudentAid.gov/idr or directly through the borrower’s servicer.
This is the second batch of notices tied to the end of SAVE.
As we reported earlier this week, borrowers enrolled in SAVE began receiving their own 90-day notices after July 1, warning they’d be auto-enrolled in the Standard or Tiered Standard plan if they didn’t pick a new plan. The application denials extend that same deadline structure to borrowers who never made it into SAVE at all — meaning nearly everyone touched by the SAVE plan now has a clock running as the SAVE forbearance winds down.
Notices will continue rolling out from servicers over the coming months, and each borrower’s 90-day window runs from the date of their individual notice. Borrowers unsure of their status should check their servicer account and StudentAid.gov to see whether they’re listed as enrolled in SAVE or as having a pending (now denied) application.
Don’t Miss These Other Stories:
Editor: Colin Graves
The post Applied For SAVE But Never Got In? Loan Servicers Are Denying Applications appeared first on The College Investor.
Adidas via eBay is selling the adidas Men’s Runfalcon 5 Running Shoes (Cloud White) for $35. You can get $14 off with coupon code ADIJULY4 at checkout, which brings the price down to $21. Shipping is free.
BUY NOW
Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you take action (i.e. subscribe, make a purchase) after clicking a link, I may earn some beer 🍺🍺🍺 money, which I promise to drink responsibly. When applicable, you should always go through shopping portals to earn cashback. But when that’s not an option, your support for the site is always greatly appreciated. Thank you for reading!
