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Today's track: Starting Fires — Lazy Habits

The band is called Lazy Habits. The song is called Starting Fires.

Hold on to both of those. That's the whole issue.

Twenty-two days from now, on Thursday, November 19, Grand Theft Auto VI comes out. GTA, if you've somehow avoided it, is the video game series where you drive around a fake version of a real American city and do whatever you want. This one is set in Leonida, Rockstar's version of Florida, with Vice City (their Miami) in the middle of it.

People have been waiting for this game since 2013. Thirteen years. About as long as I've been selling houses.

And the numbers around it are hard to wrap your head around.

The last one, GTA V, made a billion dollars in three days back in 2013. At the time, nothing had ever done that faster. Not a movie, not an album, nothing. It's now sold close to 230 million copies. That's more copies than Brazil has people.

The second trailer for GTA VI was watched 475 million times in its first 24 hours across every platform, according to Rockstar. The biggest movie trailer before it, Deadpool & Wolverine, did 365 million.

The game costs $80. There's a $100 version. Sensor Tower, a company that tracks game sales, estimated about 4.3 million people had preordered by late summer, and nearly nine out of ten picked the $100 version. Their analyst said he'd never seen anything like it. The latest estimates put preorder money near $600 million, and a research firm called Newzoo thinks the first week alone could bring in as much as $4.5 billion.

Take-Two, the company that owns Rockstar, is telling Wall Street to expect $8 billion or more in bookings this fiscal year, mostly because of this one game.

Not a quarter. A year. Off one product.

Here's where it gets fun.

An economics professor in Barcelona named José García Montalvo ran the math on how many Americans will skip work on launch day. His estimate: about 1.5 million people, mostly men 18 to 30, a lot of them in tech jobs. Multiply that by what the average worker produces in a day and you get roughly $1 billion of lost output. About a 2% dip in the country's productivity, for one day.

He's careful to call it an academic projection, not a forecast. Fair. But companies are already planning around it. A car parts company in California, Burger Motorsports, announced it's shutting down for the day. Their notice said work resumes once employees have finished at least one mission and "returned to reality."

People are cashing in PTO (paid time off) they've been sitting on for years. The internet already has a name for the illness that's going to sweep the country that morning. The GTA flu.

And GTA isn't alone. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 came out last Friday. Football is on Thursday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Basketball's back. Formula One is in its final stretch. I wrote about where your attention goes back in September. This is the season it all goes somewhere else.

This is my favorite part, because it sounds like a joke and it isn't.

Economists from Princeton, the University of Chicago and the University of Rochester published a paper through the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER, the nonprofit that officially dates American recessions). They wanted to know why young men were working less.

From 2000 to 2015, men 21 to 30 cut their work by 203 hours a year. Men 31 to 55 cut 163. When the researchers looked at where young men's extra free time went, about 60% of it went to video games.

Their conclusion: games got so good that they made free time more valuable. They called gaming a "leisure luxury," the thing you do more of the second you have more time. They estimated better games alone explain a 1.5% to 3% drop in young men's work hours. Thirty to sixty hours a year, per person.

Sit with that. The quality of a video game shows up in the national labor numbers.

So when people say GTA VI is going to slow the economy down a little, that's not hype. Economists have watched it happen. And this is the most expensive, most anticipated game ever made.

The money doesn't vanish, by the way. It moves. Out of offices and into consoles, pizza, energy drinks, and streaming subscriptions. Every gold rush works like that.

In 1848, a shopkeeper named Sam Brannan heard gold had been found in California. Before he spread the news, the story goes, he bought up every pick, pan and shovel he could find. Then he walked through San Francisco shouting about the gold.

The miners came running. Most of them went home broke. Brannan sold them shovels at whatever price he wanted and became California's first millionaire without digging a single hole.

GTA VI is a gold rush. And there's already a whole economy inside it.

For years, people have been building their own worlds on top of GTA V. There's a version called roleplay, or RP, where players log into private servers and live a full fake life. Cops, mechanics, lawyers, even real estate agents. Some servers charge a membership. Some coders sell the cars, maps and scripts that make those servers run. Streamers built huge audiences broadcasting it.

Rockstar didn't shut that down. In 2023 it bought the company behind the biggest roleplay platform, FiveM. In January of this year it opened an official marketplace where creators sell their mods for real money. Rockstar hasn't announced anything like that for GTA VI yet, and the game launches on consoles first. But a former Rockstar developer said publicly last month that he expects players to eventually be able to build their own content inside it and get paid for it.

Want to see what that looks like fully built? Look at Roblox. Creators on Roblox earned $1.5 billion in 2025, according to the company's annual report. The top ten averaged around $36 million each over a twelve-month stretch. More than a hundred of them cleared a million.

And the honest other half: the median creator in Roblox's payout program made $1,440 in a year. Most miners go home broke. Some sell shovels. A few hit gold.

On November 19, everybody starts at zero. The guy with twenty years of business experience and the 19-year-old with none load into the same world on the same morning. Same map. Same rules. Nobody owns anything yet.

A brand-new frontier, and the most level playing field you'll ever see.

The people who win won't be the most talented. They'll be the most creative and the most aggressive. The ones who take massive action while everybody else is just playing.

I've been talking with AI about this for weeks. One idea I keep coming back to is an appraisal business inside the game. If there are going to be houses and businesses and economies in these worlds, somebody has to tell people what things are worth. That's what I do every day. Will it work? No idea. But I'd rather find out on day one than read about whoever did it on day 300.

And I'm going to play. Obviously. You have to play to learn what people want. That's not goofing off. That's R&D (research and development).

The trick is doing both. Be in the game working while everyone else is just in the game. Build something that pays you while you sleep. Then go play and enjoy yourself, guilt-free.

The band is called Lazy Habits. The song is called Starting Fires. You get to pick which one you are.

Tech investor Chris Dixon put it best:

People love to poo-poo video games. I get it. But the research doesn't really back that up.

Researchers at the University of Rochester took people who didn't play games and had half of them play 50 hours of fast action games, Call of Duty included. The other half played The Sims. The action group got up to 25% faster at making decisions, and they were just as accurate. The lead researcher said action gamers make more correct decisions per unit of time.

Faster decisions based on whatever information you've got. That's real estate investing in one sentence.

Add what you see in any good team game: communication, collaboration, coordinating with strangers, losing and immediately trying again. Those are job skills. We just didn't call them that when we were kids.

Parents ask me all the time what their kids should do with everything changing so fast. I said it in If the Leaves Can Change and I'll say it again: niche down. If your kid loves video games, don't fight it. Lean in. Have them learn the science of it, the coding, the design, the business of it, how the money moves. Nobody knows what the world looks like in fifteen years. But a kid who's genuinely passionate keeps doing the thing either way, and that's exactly how people become experts.

It's also how everybody ends up with a second thing.

Now let me tie this to houses, because it's the same move.

Everybody's playing the new Call of Duty. In 22 days they'll be in Vice City. They're watching football, basketball and Formula One. And a lot of buyers are doing all of that asleep at the wheel.

That's exactly when we get offers in.

When I started 13 years ago, there were somewhere between 1,800 and 2,200 homes for sale on our MLS (Multiple Listing Service, the shared database every agent lists into). Right now there are about 4,700. More than double. Here are the 200 that have been sitting the longest, every one of them on the market seven months or more.

Seven months. Through a whole spring and summer. Those sellers are not having a fun fall.

Small multifamily, duplexes up to fourplexes, the two-plus-unit stuff I count as commercial, is just as stuck. There are 158 of them for sale right now, and a few have sat more than a year.

And a lot of commercial owners are on a clock. The Mortgage Bankers Association says about $875 billion in commercial real estate loans comes due this year nationally, including 13% of all multifamily mortgages. Plenty of those were adjustable-rate or short-term loans, meaning the interest rate resets or the whole balance comes due at the end. Owners who borrowed cheap now have to refinance a lot higher or sell. I broke that down in The Wall.

That's urgency. And urgency is where the deals are.

Yeah, the numbers aren't great with these rates. I'm not going to pretend they are. But at the right price, they make sense. A seller with a loan coming due and a buyer with cash ready can find a number that works for both of them. That's how it's always worked. Nobody rings a bell. You just have to be at the table, like I wrote in The Top of the K.

So here's my ask.

If you're somebody who wants to keep growing, who wants to shoot your shot while everybody else is on the couch, I want to work with you.

Here's what I need:

Then we get rolling. I'll be sending offers while everybody else is in Vice City.

And when we've got a few going? Go play. You earned it.

Free tools for Louisville buyers, sellers and investors, no sign-up and no email wall: the investment property analyzer, the BRRRR calculator, the Kentucky seller and buyer closing cost calculators, and a lot more on the tools page.

Know somebody who'd like this in their inbox every morning? Send them your personal link.

📊 Yesterday's poll: Industrial, storage and contractor garages ran away with it at 56%. Seller financing got 22%. Small apartment buildings with loans coming due tied for last at 11%, right there with "still picking." That's the lane I'd look at hardest. Remember those loans coming due from earlier? The fewer buyers chasing a lane, the fewer people that owner on a deadline has to call.

Today's poll:

Results in tomorrow's issue.

🏆 While everyone's grinding missions in Vice City, I'll be grinding the MLS. Every morning I pull the five best deals in Louisville and the five most ripe for a lowball, with the number I'd offer. I can't blast other agents' listings to a list, but I can send them to you personally. Reply "FIVE."

With Enthusiasm,
Rob Bergeron

Owner–Realtor at Award-Winning Winner Realty
Winner Realty: (502) 305-8915
Winner Realty | OffMarket.deals | Property Partner Data Company

Schedule time to discuss your goals, bottlenecks, or whatever's on your mind — book me here.

The Morning Bergeron daily track playlist

PS: Where I'd look before the GTA flu hits. Every link opens the real listings on the MLS.

All 17 Winner Realty listings — ours, houses to commercial, Louisville to Mammoth Cave.

The 200 longest-sitting homes — seven months or more on the market. These sellers are ready to hear a number.

All 158 duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes for sale — more than one door means rent from more than one place.

PSS: Are you building something for GTA VI? A server, a mod, a channel, a business inside the game or around it? Reply "GTA" and tell me. I want to hear every idea. It's the same thing I wrote about in No One's Coming. You can build almost anything now. You just have to start.

PSSS: Wondering how we got from 2,000 listings to 4,700? I wrote about the moment the market flipped.

PSSSS: It was announced Humana is likely cutting jobs late last night. I’m fully expecting them to migrate to Texas or Atlanta. Plan accordingly.