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Today's track: I Love the Unknown — Clem Snide

Before we get to the smart money, let's talk about what everybody else is worried about.

Gallup asks Americans every year what they worry about "a great deal." This year health care took the top spot again, with 61% saying it keeps them up. Right behind it: the economy, inflation, federal spending and how wealth gets split up. I’m self employed and have used Liberty Healthshare since 2019, per Colleen’s recommendation. They have been FANTASTIC! If you’ve been delaying both parties going full time in real estate because of health insurance, this has been my answer. This can be your’s too! Check them out!

The Associated Press poll on what people want the government to fix in 2026 landed in the same place: health care, the cost of living, immigration. And a New York Times poll found nearly 80% of Americans said their single biggest worry was their kids' future (I’m team, lean into whatever lights them up and makes them happy, niche down into passions!). Bigger than inflation. Bigger than war.

Read those again and tell me where they all meet.

Your house. Your house payment is the biggest bill most people have. Your insurance premium is climbing right alongside your health insurance. And the biggest thing most families ever hand down to their kids is real estate. Every one of those worries runs straight through the property you own, or the property you don't own yet.

Now, the smart money.

Every year a group called the Counselors of Real Estate puts out a list. Quick explainer, because "CRE" usually means commercial real estate and this is something different: the Counselors of Real Estate is a group of about 900 advisors around the world who get hired by the big players. Investors, developers, lenders, the folks buying the buildings with names on them. They poll each other, argue it out, and publish their Top Ten Issues Affecting Real Estate for the year ahead. The 2027 list came out last week, and you can read the whole thing here.

Here's the ten, in their order, in plain English:

Here's why I love this list. Scared money moves slow. Scared money waits for permission. That's exactly where regular people like us get to do deals. So let's go through it the way I'd explain it across the table, and I'm starting with the one that's hitting Louisville deals hardest right now.

Your roof is the new deal killer

It's not on their list by name, but it's sitting right inside number eight. It's roofs.

Insurance companies used to cover your roof at replacement cost. Replacement cost value, or RCV, means if a storm tears it off, they pay to put a new one on. Simple.

A lot of companies have switched to prorating roofs based on age. That's called actual cash value, or ACV. They figure out how much of the roof's life is used up and only pay for what's left. One analysis of more than 2,000 insurance filings found that among the ten biggest home insurers, these prorated roof schedules went from about 10% of policies in 2015 to about 60% in 2025. Six times more common in ten years.

Here's what that looks like in real money. Say a new roof costs $11,000, your roof loses $1,000 of value a year in the insurance company's eyes, and it's ten years old. A storm takes it. Under replacement cost, you pay your deductible. Under actual cash value, you pay your deductible plus the $10,000 of "used up" roof. Same storm. Same house. Wildly different check.

And Kentucky is already paying up. Insurance.com puts Kentucky's average homeowners premium at $4,471 a year in 2026, up 10.6%, the eighth highest in the country. Pew found 71% of homeowners say their insurance costs have gone up in recent years. I'm guessing that includes you.

Here's where it gets crazy in deals. On quite a few deals lately, nearly all of them when it comes to repair requests, mortgage companies are requiring new roofs. Even when it's a newer roof. A roof with plenty of life left gets flagged, and suddenly the buyer and seller are fighting over a five-figure line item nobody planned for.

So here's what I'd do, depending on who you are.

If you own a home: pull out your policy today and find the page that lists your coverages. That's the declarations page, or "dec page." Look for whether your roof is covered at replacement cost or actual cash value. Words to watch for are "roof surfacing," "roof payment schedule" or "actual cash value." If you can get replacement cost coverage, that seems like the better play. Ask your agent what it costs to switch. Compare that to a roof coming out of your own pocket.

If you're buying: get the roof's age early, and get your insurance quote before your inspection window closes, not three days before closing.

If you're selling: know your roof's age and condition before you list. If it's getting up there, you can price for it, offer a credit or replace it on your terms, instead of having it forced on you in a repair request.

If you're an investor: put the roof right next to the purchase price in your head. On a rental, one prorated roof claim can wipe out a year or two of cash flow.

That's what the smart money means by "resilience is a bottom-line issue." It's not a big climate debate. It's your roof, your policy and your repair addendum.

Louisville by the numbers: the door is open

Here's what I pulled from our MLS (the multiple listing service, the database every agent uses) for Jefferson County this morning.

Single-family homes for sale: 2,580 in September. A year ago it was 2,060. Back in February it was 1,721. That's 25% more choices than a year ago and 50% more than this past winter.

The number I watch most is called absorption. It means: if nobody listed another house, how many months would it take to sell everything that's for sale right now? Around six months is usually called balanced. Under that, sellers have the upper hand. Over it, buyers do. Jefferson County single-family is at about 3 months, up from 2 in February. Still a seller's market, but the gap is closing.

Duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes, which I call commercial because they're two or more units: absorption is at almost 10 months. In February it was under 5. That's buyer territory, and it doubled in seven months.

What that means in plain English:

If you're a buyer, especially an investor looking at 2 to 4 units, you have more leverage right now than you've had in a long time. More choices, longer days on market, sellers who will talk about price, repairs and terms.

If you're a seller, the window to list into a market that still favors you is now, before winter, before more inventory piles up. Back-to-school listings close in November and December.

The money: nobody can predict rate cuts. Stop trying.

Number two on their list is basically "rate cuts aren't coming to the rescue." And honestly? Who can even predict rate cuts? Everything's so fickle. One jobs report, one speech, one headline and the whole thing swings.

Here's what I believe. There's opportunity whether rates get cut or not. The question was never "what will rates do." The question is, are you the person looking for the opportunity and taking advantage of it? Are you taking action? Or are you sitting on your thumbs waiting for somebody to ring a bell?

Nobody rings a bell. Not at the bottom, not at the top.

When rates are high, sellers get flexible. They'll talk about price, and about things like seller financing, which just means the seller acts as the bank and you pay them instead of a mortgage company. When rates drop, buyers flood back in and everything gets competitive. Both are opportunities. If you wait for the perfect rate, you'll be waiting with everybody else, and then competing with everybody else.

Number seven is the other money one: more than $1 trillion in commercial debt comes due in the next 18 months. Commercial loans don't work like a house loan. A lot of them run five, seven or ten years and then the whole balance comes due. The owner pays it off, refinances or sells. A lot of those loans were written when money was cheap, and refinancing at today's rates means a bigger payment on the same building with the same rents. The report's take is that the trouble is being pushed back, not going away. Mine: some owners are going to need out, not because they're bad operators, but because the math changed under them. That's why I run Maturity Watch (I wrote about the wall of loans coming due last week), and why you want to know who those owners are before everyone else does.

The data centers already showed up

AI is number one on their list, and Louisville is already in the middle of it.

Kentucky's first hyperscale data center campus, the PowerHouse and Poe Companies project on Camp Ground Road in southwest Louisville, is planned at 400 megawatts, with the first 130 megawatts slated to come online this month. The state passed a 50-year tax-exempt program for data center projects in Jefferson County. A state energy report counted 37 data centers in Kentucky, and 24 of them are in Jefferson County. And the same developers have pitched a $9.6 billion campus on about 550 acres near Carrollton.

The pushback is real too. Metro planning staff recommended banning "hyperscale" data centers over 500,000 square feet and limiting new ones to industrial areas, after thousands of public comments.

Why do you care if you'll never own one? Three reasons. They compete for the same electricians and contractors you need, which is the labor crunch, number nine. They change land values around them, especially industrial land. And the question of who pays for the power upgrades is going to land on everybody's electric bill. If you own land or industrial property in the path of this stuff, you should be paying attention.

Downtown: dinosaurs and gold

Number ten is office, and Louisville is a live example. CBRE says our office vacancy sat at 22.1% in the third quarter, but asking rents hit a record high and leasing more than doubled from the quarter before. That's the whole story in one line: empty buildings and in-demand buildings at the same time.

The city's building conversion program is turning old downtown office towers into apartments and hotels. The old Jefferson County Fiscal Court building on Sixth Street is being turned into more than 100 apartments. A nearly empty 346,000-square-foot tower at 401 South Fourth Street is slated to become a hotel. More people living downtown means more demand for everything around downtown: retail, restaurants, parking, the neighborhoods next door. If you've been ignoring downtown, I'd stop.

Why Louisville, especially if you don't live here

Number five, migration, is where Louisville shines, and it's why I keep telling my out-of-state readers to look here.

Zillow puts Louisville's typical home value at $263,130. The national typical value is $368,697. That's about 29% less for the same house. One apartment-loan report puts Louisville's median rent about 34% below the national average, and there's no statewide rent control in Kentucky. Lower prices, steady renters and simpler rules is a good recipe for a rental.

And you wouldn't be early. LendingOne counted 18,958 active investors in Louisville who made 9,687 purchases in the last 12 months. The people in California and Texas doing the math are already here.

If you're out of state and want in, the hardest parts are knowing which blocks to buy on, who to trust for repairs and who'll manage it. That's what we do every day. I've done more than 2,000 transactions since 2013, and I'd rather you buy the right one than the fast one.

The ones getting priced out

Number six, housing attainability, is the one that should bother all of us. The report's line is that every site selection decision is now a housing decision. When a big employer picks a city, one of the first things it asks is whether its people can afford to live there.

This is where the tools most buyers have never heard of matter. Assumable loans, where you take over the seller's existing lower-rate mortgage. Seller financing. VA loans, which can mean zero down for veterans. Down payment assistance. If you missed creative finance week, it's all in the archive.

So, who's reaching out to me today?

Here's my take on the whole list. Every one of these ten is a reason big money will hesitate. Hesitation leaves gaps, and gaps are where deals live. The winners in 2027 won't be the people who guessed rates right. They'll be the ones who took action.

So let's take some:

If you own a home and want to know where you stand, reply with your address. I'll send you what it would likely sell for today, what's competing with it and whether your roof is going to be a problem when you sell.

If you're thinking about selling this year, reply SELL and I'll send you a plan to get it listed and closed before the holidays.

If you're an out-of-state or local investor, reply with your budget and what you like to buy (single-family, 2 to 4 units, bigger commercial, land), and I'll put you on a daily feed of the listings that fit.

If you want the best deals I'm seeing right now, reply FIVE. I'll send the five best deals on the market and the five I'd lowball. Single-family, rentals, commercial.

If you own a building with a loan coming due and don't love your options, reply and tell me about it. That conversation stays between us.

And if you just want somebody to look at your insurance policy and tell you if your roof is covered right, reply ROOF and I'll send you the exact questions to ask your agent.

Text or email me. I read everything.

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. One friend signs up and you get my daily Top Five. Three friends and you get Insider Access.

📊 Yesterday's poll, "What's the scariest part of owning a rental?": repairs and 2 a.m. phone calls took it at 40%. "Scared? I'm out here buying" came next at 30%, then a tenant who stops paying at 20%, and finding a deal that cash flows at 10%. Funny, because yesterday's whole issue was about the tenant who stops paying, and the 2 a.m. toilet call beat it by double. Good news is a solid property manager and a repair fund take most of the fear out of that one.

Today's poll:

Results in tomorrow's issue.

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: Want to see what Winner Realty has for sale right now? Here is every active Winner Realty listing in one place: homes, a couple of lots and a small apartment building. If one catches your eye, text or email me.

PSS: Since today was all about where the big money is nervous, here are the kinds of properties I'd be looking at this week if I were buying. These are live searches straight from the MLS (the multiple listing service, the database every agent uses), so they change as listings come and go.

Small commercial buildings, meaning duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes in Jefferson County that have been for sale 60 days or longer. Long days on market usually means a seller who will talk about price, repairs and terms, and this is the group where absorption is almost 10 months: see them here.

Apartment buildings with 5 or more units in Jefferson County. Bigger buildings are where those loans coming due hit hardest, and where owners may need a way out: see them here.

Multi-unit buildings downtown and in Old Louisville. More people living downtown means more demand for everything around it: see them here.

Reply with your budget and I'll narrow any of these down for you.

PSSS: "Align yourself not with those that profess to know all the answers, rather, seek out those that would better understand the questions." -- Anonymous