S5 E1 - Get Ready For Chaos - How Buyers And Sellers Win In 2026

We reset the year with straight talk on how Chicago buyers win without mortgage contingencies, where sellers get the biggest ROI with small upgrades, and why multi‑units beat condos for long‑term wealth. We close with a practical guide to chasing down water leaks before they crush value.

• Full underwriting to compete and close
• Appraisal gap math and DTI guardrails
• Realistic must‑haves versus budget and neighborhood
• Writing offers sellers choose under pressure
• Lighting, bulbs, and paint as top ROI levers
• Kitchen and bath refreshes with hardware and mirrors
• Staging for demand and price action
• Multi‑units over condos for rent‑driven value
• Airbnb rules, management, and furnishing budgets
• Water infiltration diagnosis from windows to roofs to gutters
• HVAC condensation versus true roof leaks
• Parents buying multi‑units for college housing

Don't forget to subscribe not only to our podcast but also to our YouTube channel, because a lot of the things I talked about, you will actually find on our Channel    Any questions, always feel free to DM us on our Instagram or call us directly at three one two four one five one five five one

Chapters

• 0:00 New Year Focus And Market Heat
• 1:20 Buyers: Full Underwriting Or Bust
• 3:40 Appraisals, DTIs, And Offer Strategy
• 5:10 Realistic Wants, Budgets, Neighborhoods
• 7:20 Must‑Haves, Timing, And Speed
• 9:20 Writing Winning Offers And Representation
• 12:07 Sellers: ROI Mindset In A Hot Market
• 14:00 Lighting, Bulbs, And Paint That Sell
• 17:10 Kitchens, Baths, And Cheap Upgrades
• 20:00 Staging For Price Action
• 22:20 Investing: Multi‑Units Over Condos
• 25:30 Airbnb Rules And Cash Flow Tactics
• 28:00 Water Infiltration: Find And Fix
• 32:00 Windows, Lintels, And Roof Details
• 36:00 Gutters, Pumps, And Real‑World Lessons
• 39:20 HVAC Condensation Gotchas
• 41:00 Parenting Plays: Buy For College
• 43:20 Wrap Up And Ways To Reach Us

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

You need to go through complete underwriting. And I'm going to tell you this because you cannot get a nice place in the city of Chicago with the mortgage contingency. And what a mortgage contingency says is that I don't know if I can get the loan, and I need 30 days to find out. What's the five P's?

SPEAKER_01: 0:22

Do you remember it? Proper preparation prevents poor performance. There you go. It doesn't matter how much money we get. If we don't close, it's no money, right? So no close is no money. I'm everything that I am because of my dad's death. And I wouldn't be as successful without his death.

SPEAKER_00: 0:41

We ready? All right. Welcome to the first episode, 2026. We're on our fifth year in the Jason theory, keeping it real. And I'm not going to get into politics or I'm not going to get into city issues. We've done that at nauseum last year. We'll get into that a little bit later. What I really want to get into, and I'm not going to be like, oh, these are my goals for the year, and this is what I think is going to happen. No predictions. We'll actually do that in February once we get a little bit more of January into us. But we really want to talk about is for buyers and sellers that you're out there and you're listening, what do you need to do for 2026? So let's tackle the buy side first. Two weeks into the market, it's already crazy. I've lost out on three multiple offers providing as is. One did no inspection, another one I did. We did uh no mortgage contingency. So the first thing I want to talk about is that you need to get fully approved. And I know people say that all the time. And it's like, oh, you know, you need to get your pre-approval. You need to go through complete underwriting. And I'm going to tell you this because you cannot get a nice place in the city of Chicago with the mortgage contingency. And what a mortgage contingency says is that I don't know if I can get the loan and I need 30 days to find out. If you have a proper mortgage broker, they're going to run you, which is through a full approval process, basically everything, like as if you're about to close. And what pops out is basically a thing that says, hey, you can get the loan. You just need to find a place and the loan and the place needs to appraise. Now, appraisal issues, there's not many of them because we're in an upward swinging market. So there's a ton of flexibility. However, if you do go no mortgage contingency, which is really the only way to get anything right now, unless you're buying something that no one wants, if you don't have a mortgage contingency, you're not protected from a short appraisal. So you really need to know what you're getting yourself into, right? So if the place is worth 500 and you go into 550 and you need to put 20% down to qualify, you need to make sure that you're aware that if the place appraises short, you're gonna have to come up with that 50 grand. What does that do? It takes 10% of your down payment off the table if you can't have more money. So all of a sudden now you may not qualify via DTI, debt to income ratio, right? You got to be able to qualify. So when I approve my clients and they're like, hey, we can spend up to 800, I'm gonna say, okay, that means we probably need to be looking at 720 to 740. I need flexibility to be able to go over the market. Now, pricing is just pricing. It doesn't say, like when someone lists something at 800 grand, you're not saying, oh my God, this place is worth 800 grand to the nose. You can't know that. Why? Because it's not apples to apples. Everything is different. So pricing is different. So when you walk into a place and it's listed at 750 and it goes for 800 and there's nine offers going up to 800, that's the fair market, right? That's what the place is worth. You're not overpaying, you're paying what the market is dictating because there's a ton of people behind you that are willing to pay that price. So you need to be fully approved and know how much money you need to put down. If you don't do this and you don't have a full grasp of that, talk to your mortgage broker, talk to your agent who should be able to walk you through that. If you don't, when you offer, you're gonna freak out. And this is what happens a lot. People offer and then realize that they're over their skis. Other words, they can't afford what they're offering, or it's out of their comfort zone and you cancel, or you don't have the ability to offer because you're stuck in this freeze. Now, are you realistic? Right? And what does that mean? Okay. Are you honest with yourself on what you can afford in what neighborhood in what space? That is the second thing. Once you get the approval, what number did you get back from the bank? Hey, man, I really want a single family home in Bucktown, but I'm only approved to 800. Let's look for homes. No, it's not realistic, right? Not you're not gonna get anything. A lot without a house costs 600 grand. So you need to be realistic in what you're gonna get. Now, what is being realistic? That is going through what is completely necessary. So you want to have your wants. So, right, what I do is with my clients is I write out, here are my wants, and here's the money I can spend. Wants and money. Now, what you want to do is say, okay, with this money, these are the wants you can get. And there's different variables to those wants, right? Because one space and finishes and location will battle each other, right? So you only have X amount of dollars, right? When you were young, we called them widgets. When I was in high school, my chemistry teacher, who sucked, said, How many widgets? Like it didn't matter what the item was. It was just that's the widget, right? So you have, let's just say you have$800,000. So 800,000 widgets. And where do you want to apply those widgets? Is it to location? Is it to size? Is it to finishes? You have to blend that together so that you know what you actually can get, what you can realistically get. And that's where the must-haves have. Listen, there's a huge difference in saying a must-have is an attached garage and a detached garage or a space outside that's dedicated to your unit or street parking. Massive swings. You're talking about maybe 100K. You're talking about maybe being in the neighborhood that you love versus a neighborhood that you don't really love. Do you have to have an attached garage? Do you not want to touch the air for 10 steps? Because that may take you out of one neighborhood and put you in another, right? That's when you really have to decide what your musts are. And listen, if you have a significant of or if you have a partner, what are their musts? You need to discuss that and come to an agreement what the actual musts are. This needs to be done before, like it's mid-January. Those musts should be in because February and March move so fast, so many multiple offers, that if you don't have your musts done right, you are not going to be able to buy something. You're going to get two days to three days when something gets on the market to decide if you want to buy it. If your musts are not aligned and you're real and you're not realistic, you're going to just keep skipping off the Earth's atmosphere. You're not going to be able to land. You're not going to be able to buy. You're just going to continuously not figure out what you want because there's too much in the air. You have to simplify it to three or four things. I mean, is a school district important? There's another thing. Am I willing to give up X, Y, and Z because I want to be in this school district? Those are all massive things. Those are things that you need to be talking months before you buy, months. And that'll be dictated by the price. When people come to me and they say, hey, I want to buy a two-bedroom or a three-bedroom or single-family home. That's the first thing to say. And what's the what's the first thing I say? I say, hey, tell me how much money you can spend and I'll tell you what neighborhood you'll be in. And when I tell you what neighborhood you'll be in, these are the things that go down in those neighborhoods. Have you hung out in those neighborhoods? Well, you should be spending Saturday nights, Friday days, Sundays. You know, where do you work? Are you driving from where you work to where your house is? Are you taking public trans? You should make that round trip. And you don't make that round trip at 12 in the afternoon. You make that round trip when you'll make it, either 8:30 in the morning, if you're that's when you leave for work, or five when you come home. So you have an actual figure out on that. Because you may say, hey, listen, I'm not traveling an hour and a half. You know, I will take a smaller spot with less upgrades. Maybe I park outside, even though I have a dedicated parking spot, versus all this other stuff, because I'm not going to live my life in a car or in the train or on the L. So that's the stuff you need to be thinking about. And then you have to be prepared to lose. Yeah, in this market, it's like playing baseball. If you can, you know, get three hits out of 10, you're an all-star, right? Like it's I have people, it's January, what is it, January 15th, January 14th, and I have people that started on the second have already lost out on three places. It just is what it is. So that leads us to is your offer written right? That's massive. That's where it really comes in to people that have spent a ton of time in the marketplace, have the knowledge of what it takes to win. And as I've talked before, at length, you need to work with a broker that also sells because a selling broker knows what sellers want to see and they can manipulate the buy to buy it. Other words, if if an agent only works on the buy side, yeah, I'm sure they've had some success. But when you work a ton on the sell side, when you sell 60 or 70 homes yourself, not your team, you specifically sell those homes, you know what the sellers want. You've gone through all those different things. And that's super, super important. So at getting ready for 2026 as a buyer, get a full approval, not a pre-approval. I mean run through underwriting. That's what you want to tell your person. I want to go through underwriting because I want to know that I'm not going to have any issues, that if I have to go without a mortgage contingency, I know that I can buy this place, right? That's just being prepared, right? The five piece. Proper preparation prevents poor performance. Be prepared. Okay. What are your wants? And are you realistic in where you're looking? Realistic is important. Make sure you tell your agent, hey, don't bullshit me. Where can I live with this amount of money? Right. Don't, don't just tell me what I want to hear. Like, that's not why you hire an expert. That's not why you hire an advisor. I don't hire a financial advisor, Andy, because I want him to say, well, what do you want to do? No, man, you're the expert. Shoot me straight. Can I do this? Can I not do this? What's the most important thing? That's what you want to make sure that your agent's shooting you realistically. Prepare to lose, you know, because it's a rough market and you got to offer the right way. Offering the right way, I've talked about that a ton of times on YouTube. I've talked about it on my podcast. You can look out that that's a podcast in itself. But if you're not offering the right way and your agent doesn't know how to write off the right way, that's a problem. If you're representing yourself and you're just listening to this to figure out how to do it, you know, good luck. Because without proper representation, you're not going to get a place unless you completely and utterly overpay for the place. All right. The next thing, selling in 2026. All right, this is great. What gives you the most ROI? Return on investment. The most, like obviously, this is a crazy market. There's not a lot of inventory. So yes, every place is gonna sell. Let's just let's just get that out there. Every place is gonna sell at some price. However, if you have a marketplace where it's just super strong and it's a super seller's market, why wouldn't you prep your place so that you can make the most money? That's the one thing that I've noticed when I get calls with people, they're like, oh, well, the market's so great, who cares? Yeah, someone's gonna buy your place, but if you do this the right way, there's a 15%, 10% swing. That's substantial amounts of money, right? It's the difference between buying a place for$500,000 and$22,000 and selling it for literally$700 or selling it for$800. And there's a system into doing that. You still just can't throw it out in the market because other people they'll wait. And if they come in and they're not attracted to the place and they don't connect to the place, they'll wait for the next one and they'll continuously lose out, and eventually those people will rent, but your place still isn't sold unless you really want to just drop the price, still make money. It's gonna be hard not to make money, still make money, but not really make the most. And as an agent, our job is to make you the most money the easiest way with the least amount of stress, right? So I did a I did a couple videos on something that people don't really think about, but to me is such a major thing. The number one thing that I have for return on investment is lights and light bulbs. Number one thing. Lights and light bulbs are extremely important, first and foremost, is that lighting can be extremely expensive. I get that. But you also can go to build.com or go to Amazon and get really cool lights from 30 to 70 bucks. And lights to me, when you walk into a house, it's kind of like rims on a car. It can be really, really, it can make, you know, a$30,000 car or$40,000 car look like$50 or$55, and you're only spending a couple hundred, you know, obviously you can spend thousands on rims, but you're only spending a couple hundred bucks on rims. That's how the lights are. But the more important thing on that light thing, too, is going to be your light bulbs. And we talked about this. You have to have the, you have to have the right light for your place. The light is what will set the stage on the color of the paint and also set the stage for the mood of the house, as crazy as it sounds, right? Like most people don't want to walk into a moody home. When I mean a moody home, yellow light. There are people that do it, right? But here's the thing: we don't want to sell a house to 10% of the population. We want 100% of the population to like it, right? So if 20% of the population loves dark, moody homes, and 80% likes a house that has a 28 to 2,900 cal lighting, which is like a normal, that's a not daylight, but that's like a normal light that you would see outside when you're walking around. I want to service the 80%, not the 20, right? Because we're not selling to you. You've already bought the house. I don't need to sell it to you. We need to sell it to the other 80%. And the 80% of those people do not like moody lighting, right? So mood lighting, yellow light, everything gets yellow, everything gets dark, it gets drab. It's not something where people walk in and get attracted to and fall in love with the place. So yes, there is that 20%, but that 20% doesn't create price action. The 80% creates a price action, drives more people. When you have more demand on a single supply, the price increases. So that's what we want, right? That's the number one thing. So that light bulbs are awesome. The next thing would be paint. And it kind of goes just with the lights. If you're into Moody Lights or you're into Edison's or you're into, listen, you may be one of those people that likes five thousand, like super hospital lights, 5,000 cal, where it's the lights almost blue. People don't like that. That needs to be changed too. That exactly goes into what the next one is, and that's paint color. Paint is huge, the paint and the light. However, paint without the right lights, you're not going to get the right pink color because the paint color normally will read true. When I mean read true, it reads how it should look between 2800 and 3200 on the Kelvin cycle on your lights. So get that light and then paint your house. Now listen, after 22 years and trying every single paint color and working for developers, we constantly change the color of new construction when we send it out. Over the last seven years, eight years, I'm telling you right now, the number one response, the number one paint color that I've gotten a great response to in new construction and single family homes is Sherman Williams Agreeable Gray. Agreeable gray. So people are like, oh, there's so many grays. There's so many grays. Well, there's different colors to the gray, just like there was at light bulbs. Agreeable gray is a warm gray. So there are blue grays and there are warm grays. Cool, like cold, cool, modern. That's gonna be on the blue scale. You don't want that. It's very sterile. There's no warmth to it. The house is warmth, like having a little bit of warmth to the house really talks to people. Agreeable gray is a warm gray. So there is a brownish warmth to it. It is gray, but it has more of a warmth and it works really good with hardwood floors and with different colored cabinets. When you do a really stark gray or really stark white, sometimes you get too much of a contrast on the selections and the floors versus the floor versus the wall. And buyers don't like that. So the warm gray kind of feeds in to the woods, to the hardwood flooring, and to all that, and to, you know, everyone's got that quartz with a little bit of gray veined or marble. That gray on the on the that warm gray, agreeable gray on the flo on the walls will actually accentuate those items that are in there. You want little things that are in the finishes to be brought out in the pink color. So everything is seamless. And once again, to remind you, you definitely want to make sure that you have the lights that are with that. Now, let's talk about people buy places for the kitchen and for the master bath and sometimes the family. But the kitchen and the baths and the master suite are most of the big things. So along with those lights in the house, if you have the old school lights in your bathroom, those have to go. You're only talking about, like I said,$50 to$70 to take those lights out. You got that old school big mirror and you got the old school lights. Both of those should go. Mirrors are not that expensive. Individual mirrors now versus the full wall is where everything is right now. That's the trend. You literally can Change the mirrors and the lights, and that bathroom has gone from 2005 to 2020s because that is the look that we're at right now. So the mirrors are huge. What's the next thing that's huge? This is all, these are all inexpensive things to do for huge returns on your investment. The next thing you want to do is hardware. Now, the the the thing with hardware is this is cabinet. So handles, let's use the layman's term. So handles, you have to, if you have a double, so if you have a handle that has two screws, you have to work with that, right? If you've got one screw and it's like a knob, you can kind of add another hole and manipulate all that and go to a bar away from a knob and kind of have a different look. But you're gonna have to work, if you've got a double screw in that cabinet, you're gonna have to work with that cabinet. Unless you're painting your cabinets. If you paint your cabinets, you can fill in those holes and do a whole new thing. So if you are painting your kitchen, which is about five to eight thousand dollars to do, if you are painting your kitchen, seal those holes and update the hardware. You know, brass, matte black, update it to what today's are. And you're talking about eight to ten dollars per handle on the high end, you can get nice hands, handles for three. Now, if you do change the handles, you have to make sure the color of your handles fits what? The faucet. So you want to make sure that the kitchen faucet plays off the handles because those are your hubcaps in the kitchen. If we want to go back to that hubcaps, those handles and the faucet kind of set the stage as a finish, right? You can have all these beautiful new painted cabinetry and new countertops, and all of a sudden you have a shitty faucet and crappy handles. You've just, you know, why not go the extra mile since it's so inexpensive and such a great ROI? Now, you could do the handles and the faucet, not touch everything and upgrade the space too. Another great return on investment, is we've talked about lights, is pendant lighting over the kitchen. Man, get rid of that old, you know, 90s or mid-2000 glass green crap that's coming off and go online and take a look at a really nice fixture because it takes your eyes off of the older stuff, right? So you have inexpensive, you spend$2,000 in your kitchen and let's draw the eyes off the kitchen cabinets, right? Oh, the kitchen looks updated because we have updated handles and updated lights. We're trying to update the place without making massive amounts of money into it. So the mirrors, the hardware, if you want to paint your cabinets, do it. You know, that's fine, but you're took you're looking at a lot more money. The lighting, the lights throughout the house, that sconces in the hallways, all that stuff, those are all inexpensive things to do to make your house look like it has been updated and you're looking under three or four thousand dollars. The ROI on all those things is 15K or plus. You're talking about spending three grand to make 15. It is a great ROI. The last thing you want to do for 2026, if you're selling, are you living in the house? If you're living in the house, you need to stage it. You may say, hey, you know, the market's great. No, you gotta stage it. People have no spatial feel. People don't understand where you can put a kitchen table, where you can put a couch. Listen, I'm telling you right now, the stats are in. Staged homes sell for over 10% more than non-staged homes. And and it is if you've ever, if you're a buyer, because if you're selling, you're usually buying, I mean, unless you're moving to a tent. If you're a buyer, if you're a seller and you're looking around, look at the difference in your head and in your heart when you walk into a house that's staged or it's their stuff and it's done right. Tchotskis, tables, throw rugs, nice pillows, everything. Your body reacts differently to it. You may not know it and you may not say it out loud, but your body feels it. Trust me. Sophia and I do over a hundred transactions a year. I cannot tell you how many times we walk into a place and I think the place sucks, but it's done so impeccably well inside that people love it. And then I have to say, yeah, but what about this, this, this, and this? And then they pull back. But the staging and the warmth gets them, right? If you're still living in it and you're a minimalist, which means that you just don't have a lot of stuff in your house, you don't have Trotskis. Like, listen, a lot of people have their bed, their couch, their table. They're not designers, they don't have books up and they don't have this, they don't have lamps, they don't have, you know, they just don't have it, right? Because it's just life gets in the way, or they're just something they're not interested in doing, like myself. You need to get a stager because a stager will come in and he or she will make it look great. Add the artwork, add mirrors, light bounces, place looks huge with mirrors, add fake books or old school books, put tchotchkis in in shelving. You you need when someone needs to come in, it needs to look like Crate and Barrel. And yes, it is a seller's market, but take advantage of it being a seller's market, and you want to make sure that you make the place look fantastic. And by doing that, is the staging. Those are the things. So for selling, the top ROI, number one, is gonna be and if if you don't if you don't have the money to change the lights, the the fixtures, change the light bulbs. That's number one. Change the fixtures, change the mirrors and the lights in your bathroom, change the hardware in your kitchen, change the faucet in your kitchen to match the hardware. If you're painting your cabinets, you know, about$8,000, you can rearrange the holes in the kitchen cabinets and redo how you want to do your pools. The kitchen hardware, bathroom hardware is huge. And the last thing is staging. So those are all massive things. It wouldn't be me if I didn't talk about investing in 2026. So I'm gonna get into it. It'll be a short one because I have a ton of investing stuff on YouTube and the channel that you guys can look at and how to invest and Airbnb and how to come up with values. I have all that stuff. I have sheets that I go through on Excel sheets on the YouTube page, Klopus Stratton Real Estate on the YouTube. We have tons of series on that. But investing crazy. I saw a stat today, actually yesterday. There are nine renters for each place that's gonna become available this year. That's the same as a sale. So if you're selling or you're renting, you guys are on the same boat. If you're buying or renting, excuse me, nine renters to each place in the city of Chicago. We, I mean, everybody knows if you're a renter, every year your rent is going up because obviously it's a year-to-year thing and you don't have the you know, a 30-year fix, you don't have a mortgage where you don't know where your payments are going. So rents are gonna go up another 10% this year. Just get ready for it. Five to 10% easily this year. Now, if you're looking to get into the multi-unit business, which a ton of my clients are, this is awesome. If you bought a multi-unit three or four years ago, you're up probably 40%, not on value of the land, which you may be up that, but without the land, let's just say you put no improvements into it and you don't put anything into it and the land doesn't appreciate. Guys, it's a business. We've talked about this at nauseum. Your value of your property goes up when the rents go up, because the rents are the product of your business. So the rents are basically your income. And that income from that product dictates the price of the space. It's just like a stock, right? As the values of the sales go up, the value of the company goes up and the stock goes up. So the company is your three-flat, two-flat, or the condo you're renting. And every time you collect more rent, the value goes up. We've talked about this too. Right now, rates are under six, 5.75 on a jumbo, and that's without points. That's just where they're at. Now, a commercial loan will be a little bit more if you have four units or more. You can't do Fannie or Freddie Mac. So let's just say a three-unit building that you're living in, you're still gonna be at those low rates. So you're let's just say you're at 6%. That means every time that you raise the rent$600, the value of that property has gone up almost$100K. So if your rents go from if you got a three unit and your rents go from$3,000 to$3,600 a month in total, you just made$100,000. That's how the bank evaluates that. So to all my multi-unit owners, if you own multi-units, continue always to press the rents higher as much as you can. Now, listen, you don't want to lose a great renter. I totally understand that. And you don't. And I've done that too before where I have great renters and I I ease the price a little bit more. But if your renter leaves, you absolutely have to max out the amount of money that you're getting because that rental income will dictate the price of the building. And right now, multi-units are going through the roof. And guys, the rental market is not going to stop because, as I've always said, supply dictates price. When demand is when demand is constant, we have constant demand. In fact, demand is growing. But when you have constant demand and supply diminishes, that means price goes up. Get online and you can look up what rental buildings are building built. Zero. You don't have stuff coming online for another two to three years, which means for two or three years, you're going to have massive rental growth. So as that rental growth occurs, your properties are going to be getting higher and higher. So yeah, you know, four, five, six years ago, could you have bought real estate for cheaper? Of course. That being said, there is still a massive run because of a lack of supply on the rental end. So you're, you know, if you're looking to get into that, this is a great time to do that. There's very strict Airbnb rules in the city of Chicago, which basically crunches the supply on the Airbnb, on the short-term rental. The short-term rental game is massive and it's not going anywhere because the hotel lobbies will not let the laws lax. So if you buy a multi-unit and you're an owner occupied in that multi-unit, on the three flat, you can Airbnb one. On a four unit, you can Airbnb two. I would tell you that is the route to go to a three unit where you live there, you Airbnb one, and you have a long-term tenant. So you've like, you're going to live for free, you've got an Airbnb person where the rents are 3x of what regular rent is. And then you have that long-term renter for some stability. That's the route you want to go. So that is my investing in 2026. Don't buy condos, get into multi-units, own the dirt, and have a short-term rental and a long-term rental within that building, along with you living in there. Eventually, if you move or you decide not to live in there, it gives you another rental. Keep that place in your name and you'll still keep your Airbnb license. So that's my nod on the investing in 2026. Stay away from the condos. Continue to pound on two flats and three flats. Obviously, more if you can afford it, but twos and threes are an abundance in the city of Chicago. On the Airbnb side, make sure you talk to your agent. Your agent should have an Airbnb or a short-term rental specialist that they can turn to. Your short-term specialist should overlook the building with you and make sure that, hey, you know what? I can achieve these numbers because they're going to know where the rents are and what's happening, right? Airbnb is not for every neighborhood. So don't get it twisted. You can't buy something way out west and be like, oh, I'm going to Airbnb this place. If you don't have access to the lake, to the cubs, to downtown, to what people want when they're there, it's not a great play. So make sure you know what you're getting into on the Airbnb end. Someone asked me yesterday, you know, what's the downstroke on getting a place on furnishing? You know, you're going to spend$10,000 to$15,000 furnishing your Airbnb. It's got to be furnished nice because you need those ratings. But make sure that you have a person that's in the short-term game that manages, that you can talk to. You do not want to manage a short-term rental yourself. I'm telling you this right now as a person that has them. Unless you don't do anything else for a living, you do not want to do that. If you're looking at the Airbnb in multi-unit, ping us, DM us, and we'll we can hook you up with a guy and start your search on that. All right. The last thing I want to talk about because we just had a monsoon is water infiltration into your house. And what I kind of want to talk about this is how to handle it. I get a ton of calls, and people say, hey, I got water today. I don't know where it came from. So I just kind of want to go through four steps that you want to take once you get water to figure out because water finds the lowest place, and you can have a hole in your in your roof on this side, and the water can come in from this side because water will travel through pipes, conduit, walls. It just finds its area. All right. So the first thing is when you do when you do get water, try to find out where the central location of that water is. And you're going to be able to find that. Sop the water is normally going to come from the perimeter downstairs. We'll start there first. Sop up where the water is and then wait. Get a couple people, start looking to see if it where it comes out again. You're normally, if you get a lot of water, you're normally going to have really mushy drywall and you're going to have brown spots where that water's coming from. Once you find that spot, you either need to get a drywall knife yourself or call a painter because they usually are good with drywall, or call or get online and get on TaskRabbit or Angie's list and find somebody that can manipulate and cut drywall. You got to be careful when you cut drywall that you're not cutting wires, pipes, this or that, right? But the reason you have to cut the drywall is we have to see where the water's coming from. Most people will have a vapor barrier, insulation. So drywall, vapor barrier, insulation, and then brick or block or whatever your place is made out of. We need to open up that and we need to see where the water's coming from. Is it a crack in the foundation? Where is it coming from? Does it need an epoxy shot, which basically is a shot that goes into your foundation and cleans it up? Or is it coming from a window? A lot of windows leak. And when they leak, you don't tell because they leak at basically on the sides and the top. And sometimes they'll go all the way on the side and just drip down. When you open up the wall, if you see no water, you feel no dampness, and the dry, not the drywall, but the insulation is not wet. Okay, we have to figure out where that water's coming from. Now, the next thing you do is when you're at the action point where the water came from, you want to say to yourself, what's above me? Now, if it's from the basement, what's above you may be a window on the second floor. All right, let's we cut the drywall off. We know that it's coming. If the drywall's wet up on top, it's dropping. If the drywall is, if the I'm sorry, if the insulation is wet on top, it's dropping. If the insulation is dry here and wet here, it's hydrostatic pressure and the water is coming from down or from the side, which we'll get into. So all of a sudden, I have a situation where it's dry, where it's wet. The insulation's wet the whole way up. All right, I know then it's coming from something up top. The first thing you want to do is go to a window, find the window. Now you want to start looking for bumps, or you want most windows are made basically like by particle paper. They're just pressed, right? They're not real wood anymore. No one uses real wood, it's too expensive. So they used a pressed material. That material, good and bad, expands dramatically when it gets water. Start looking for either the corners of the window to start pulling apart from the water, or you start to see expansion. Okay. Do you see that? Is the water expansion on the bottom or is it on the top? Now, if it's on the top of that window, it usually drips off the window. That normally means that the brick or the material outside on top of that window needs to be caulked or needs to be tuck pointed. Now, what you need to do is when you're outside, do you have a lintel? I know this is a lot of information. The lintel is that metal piece that's above the window. That lintel holds the brick or the material, right? That lintel should have what's called flashing, plastic. Please, I have this. Google my YouTube, how a window and flashing works. I have this in great detail in front of a window so you can kind of patch what I'm saying here with that. And then do you have weeps, which are little pieces of rope that come out? Is the water being flushed? Listen, if you bought a place between 2006 and 2013, you may not have a lintel, you might not have flashing, and you may not have weeps, which means that the water, when it gets behind material, can't get out and it's just coming into your house. That's the number one thing. To fix that lintel is about a thousand a window. It's not cheap, but you will not stop the water. Now, a lot of people will tell you, well, just caulk where it is there and stop the water. Yeah, it you can do that, but I'm gonna tell you right now, when you get a home inspection, you sell your place, that home inspector is gonna be like, none of these windows have lintels, none of these windows have flashing, you're gonna get water. And then you're gonna ping in your head, man, you know, he's right, because I used to get water. That's where the water's coming from. Now, if the window is perfect, you have lintels, you have weeps, the next thing is, is it the roof? All right, now you got to get a roofer and you got to go up. Don't just send the roofer up and don't go up. Go up with him as long as it's safe. It's a flat roof and you know, obviously be safe. But you want to take a look at now is the termination bar. The termination bar is where the roof goes in and it's a metal piece that terminates the roof. And the top of that should be caulked, and all the holes should be in the termination bar, and all the holes should be silicone and caulked. So no water goes in there. Then you want to look at the parapet wall. The parapet wall is the wall. That the roof is hooked up to. Does the parapet wall need to be tuck-pointed? Are there voids in the bricks and in the mortar? What's a void? Just what you thought. A void is lack of nothing. It's nothing, right? A void, nothing. Are there spots where there's no grout and there's holes and void? Because, you know, when it rains bad and it's coming at different sides, a little pinhole like this could let in gallons of water as it's just pouring in. So is that done? And then the coping is what's on top of the roof. If you can't follow this, I have this all on YouTube. Look up the roofs, my roof section. So the roof goes into the coping and the coping sits on top of the parapet wall. That coping has seams. Are the seams caulked? Is there flashing where the water can get out? All that stuff's important, but you always want to start from the bottom and figure out where's the water coming from. Don't start at the top, start at the bottom, because normally that'll tell you where it is. The last thing I'm going to tell you about the water is, and this just happened to me, and I'm so upset. So this is a real life situation. Three days, whatever that was, Thursday, when we got the rain of the century, you know, the hundred-year rain that we get now every twice a year. I got water. And the what's the first thing I did? We cut it open with my painter Andrew. And then I said, you know what? Let's go outside. I went outside, and what did I look for? What I know. Where are the gutters? Were the gutters overloaded? Were the gutters frozen? Were the gutters not working right? And the gutters where the water was was exactly where my outside gutter is. And I was so mad at myself because I knew that you want to take the gutter and remove it from that underground space. You don't want that water going down into that sewer that's on the outside. Why? We want the water away from the house. Now, I can't dig up that thing, but that sewer that grabs just the rain water from my roof, that may be cracked. And when it's overloaded, it finds its way. Guys, water finds its way. Now listen, I have perimeter drain tile, I have all the anti-flood stuff. But when it's a hundred-year rain, sometimes it just overflows. So tomorrow I'm having both of my gutters removed, which I've done in every house except for this one. And shame on Jason. I'm having my gutters removed and I'm taking the gutter water and I'm dumping it into areas where there's huge patches of grass by my house or the front. And that is so the water can soak into the table, into the dirt, and gets away from the house. You want those gutters four to five feet away from your house. And listen, even a person that would tell every single person that I go with, get those gutters, I just forgot. Been in that house eight years, seven years, never got an ounce of water. We get this massive rain. And where is it? Right on the gutter. So what do I do? I said, man, there's another gutter down, down 10 feet, 20 feet down, there's another gutter. And I know where that room is. So I go in that room and what's in there, I didn't even know there's water in that room. And not a lot, just soft drywall because the gutter was there too. So what I'm saying is to you is that there is a reason you're getting water. You just have to eliminate all those things. You want to start on the bottom, see where the gutters are. Are the gutters full with debris? The gutters need to be cleaned. If it's not the gutters, is my pump working? Is my sub pump working? Is my ejector pump working? The second, all that meantime, I called somebody, you're calling somebody to cut the drywall. I know you don't want to cut your walls. When you get water, the only way to know where it's coming from is to cut the wall because you have a vapor barrier and insulation which will hide where the water's at. I used to do immediately would call my home inspector to get infrared imaging. The problem is sometimes infrared doesn't pick up on this stuff because of the vapor barrier. So that's the main reason that you want to cut it out and make sure you go into it and really dissect what the issue is. So I know water infiltration is a huge thing. The last thing I'll leave you with is don't forget that in the city of Chicago, we have massive temperature differences. In the summer, if you start to see water on your ceiling, the first thing you want to make sure is is that water following the HVAC? If it's following the HVAC tube, your HVAC may not be like they may have skipped a step and they may have not insulated the ductwork. When your insulated ductwork's not working and you don't keep a constant temperature in your house, let's just say you leave for a couple days and you let the house go to 85. When you come home and you turn on that AC to 67, you're gonna get water. Why? Because you have really warm ducks that warm air is humid and you're jamming this cold air. And that warm air is gonna drop that humidity and it's gonna drop onto your ceiling. So whenever you see water on your ceiling, it's 90% of the time not from the roof, it's from your HVAC ductwork. So that's the thing you want to really make sure is that, hey, let me investigate. I would also tell you, too, I have clients that call me all the time when they have issues and I go to their house and I try to figure out, since I've dealt with this a lot, hey, listen, this is where I think it is, this is what I think is occurring. Don't hesitate to call your real estate agent and say, hey, listen, I got some water. You know, they shouldn't be defensive about it. Can you come over and kind of help me figure out where it came from? And a good agent should be able to say, you know what, I've battled with all these issues before. Let me come over, let me see what the issue is. Let's see if we can knock it out together. At least I can give you some ideas of where you need to start and where you need to go. So that's it. We talked about return of investment on selling, great ROI, what you need to do as a buyer in 2026. We talked about water infiltration, and then we also talked about how great the multi-unit market still is in the shit of Chicago and will be for a long time. I really can't stress enough from personal decisions I made. Do not think that condos are where you want to go to make investments. Now, listen, if you're just starting out, yeah, and you only have a certain amount of money, get that condo, upgrade it, live in it, turn it into a rental, pull the equity out. But the goal is to get into the multi-unit business because that's where you're really gonna see the tax savings, you're gonna see the rent growth, and you're gonna see the dirt growth, and you have the ability to tear down that building, to turn it into condos, to convert it to a single family home, whatever you want to do, you have complete control of that real estate. So eventually you want to get to multi-units if you can go that route. If you can get there right away, that's amazing. I would tell you if you're a college kid and you're coming out of college and you're and your parents have the means, you know, or you're in college now, I know how expensive college is. Looking at it with my son, you know, be like, hey, dad, or my, I don't really want to go into student housing. How about we buy a two-unit? I have roommates, I'll manage the property, you have an investment, and the money that we're paying in rent to the school, let's pay it into the equity of the house. I do a ton of business like that where parents buy multi-units for their kids so that the kids live there next to their college and have an investment piece, have responsibility to manage that property, collect rents, and upkeep the pop the property. So you're getting your kid involved in the most like, you know, nine out of 10 millionaires are in real estate. You're getting them involved in real estate and you're getting them involved to be held accountable. That's the route that I would go versus the condo route. So that's another thing I want to hit on is that it is a great thing for parents to get their kids into is home ownership and possibly doing that during their college years versus paying astronomical fees for student housing. So that's it. Thank you so much for spending some time with us over here at the Jason's Theory. And we'll take it from there and we'll see you next month in February with Sophia when we go over what our predictions are for 2026, because we'll have a much better feel for that as January passes. So be good and we'll talk soon. Thank you so much. Don't forget to subscribe not only to our YouTube, because a lot of the things I talked about, you will actually find on YouTube when you search our page. But don't forget to subscribe to the podcast. Any questions, always feel free to DM us on our Instagram or call us directly at three one two four one five one five five one. Be good.