My older sister Katie had the A Walk to Remember soundtrack. 2002. I was not the target audience, and I wasn’t about to admit I liked any of it — but there’s a Mandy Moore song on there that stuck. There’s a line in it that asks whatever happened to Amelia Earhart?, and for twenty-some years that line has shown up in my head every time something big just… disappears.
It showed up again this week. I was on BiggerPockets.
If you got into real estate investing anytime in the last fifteen years, you know what BiggerPockets was. It was the place. The forums were loud — nerdy in the best way. People arguing about cap rates at midnight. Somebody posting the numbers on their first duplex, getting torn apart by forty strangers, and thanking every one of them. Brandon Turner and David Greene in your ears every week. It was free, it was generous, and it turned a whole generation of people who had no business knowing what a BRRRR was into people who could actually do one.
I’m one of them.
Then it started monetizing everything. Pro this, bootcamp that, a paywall around the parts that used to be the point. The people who built the thing moved on — Brandon left the podcast at the end of 2021, David a couple of years later, and as far as I can tell there wasn’t even a goodbye episode. The CEO stepped down last year. None of that alone kills a company.
But this week I went looking for the discourse, and there wasn’t much. Threads with three replies. The Louisville forum has exactly one person posting in it — me. Kentucky, Southern Indiana: archived. Empty. Not much traction, not much arguing, not much of anything.
The most famous name in real estate education went quiet, and almost nobody noticed.
It’s a little eerie. There’s an idea floating around called dead internet theory — that most of what you see online now is bots talking to bots, and the humans mostly left. I don’t fully buy it. But I scroll a forum that used to feel like a crowded bar and now feels like a hotel lobby at 3am, and I buy it a little.
Hemingway had a character explain how he went bankrupt. Two ways — gradually, then suddenly. That’s the whole arc. That’s every fall from grace I’ve ever watched up close.
Here’s what I think actually happened, and it isn’t complicated. Stephen Covey said the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. BiggerPockets’ main thing was curious people talking to each other — for free, because they loved it. Everything else was downstream of that. Somewhere along the way the main thing became the funnel, and when you start charging for the water, the river finds another way around.
Now — I’m not writing this to dunk on a website. Resources and tools have to change with the times. That’s not a knock, that’s physics. The market I work in today doesn’t run on the same tools it ran on in 2019, and the tools I’m using in 2026 won’t be the ones I’m using in 2028. Things move quickly. I try to stay on top of it. I cannot. Not alone. Nobody can.
Which is the actual point of today.
The way I stay current isn’t a website. It’s people. I’ve got a handful of friends who are learning as hard as I am, and we text each other articles. “Yo, did you see this?” “No — that’s awesome. Did you see THIS?” That’s it. That’s the entire system. Iron sharpens iron. It’s the oldest technology there is, and it still works because nobody has figured out how to put a paywall around a group text.
BiggerPockets, at its best, was that group text at scale. The moment the group text stopped being the point, the rest of it stopped mattering.
So here’s your weekend assignment. It’s Friday. You’ve got two days.
Who sharpens your iron?
Who’s talking about the things you actually care about? Who’s living the life you want to live — not the highlight reel, the actual Tuesday? Who has the kind of character that raises your standards just by being in the room? Whose habits do you quietly want to steal?
Write them down. Not in your head — on paper. My guess is you land on about five.
Jim Rohn said you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with. I used to think that was a poster. Now I think it’s a spreadsheet.
Then do the uncomfortable part. Tell them. “You’re in my top five. I want to get together once a month — check in, see what you’re thinking about, how you’re feeling, what you’re seeing in the market.” Nobody has ever been mad to get that text. Not once.
And the play I keep coming back to: get all five in the same room. They’re all smart. They’d all like each other. You’re the only thing they have in common, and that makes you the connector, which is the best seat in any room. I did a version of this once and it’s still one of my favorite nights of the year.
The forums will keep getting quieter. The tools will keep changing. Your five won’t.
Someday we’ll know what happened to Amelia. I’m not waiting around to find out what happens to the next BiggerPockets. I’d rather go build the group text.
Since we’re talking about staying on top of it — here are the two things the group text sent me this week. Speculation to follow, labeled as such.
One: diesel. All-time record this week, past the June 2022 high. Inventories are the lowest they’ve ever been for this time of year, September is the start of peak diesel demand, and the reasons — the Middle East, Russia’s export ban — don’t fix themselves by October.
Nobody sent me that because I own a truck stop. They sent it because diesel is the price of everything else, about six weeks early.
Rehab budgets first. Every single thing on a job site got there on diesel — the lumber, the drywall, the dumpster, the concrete truck, the contractor. Mid-flip? Expect fuel surcharges on your quotes within the month. Pad the budget 5–10% and lock in anything you can lock in now.
Rates second, and this is the one that matters. Diesel is the front line of inflation. The Fed chair said this week the price gains aren’t “meaningfully slowing,” and if that holds, the fall rate relief everyone’s been pricing in gets pushed. I’ve said this market is rate-gated. A diesel shock doesn’t open the gate. Sellers waiting on spring for cheaper money — I wouldn’t. Buyers — seller financing gets more attractive every week the Fed sits still.
Third, the Louisville bet: we are a logistics city. Worldport, Ford, a distribution box on every interstate. When freight gets expensive, shippers move inventory closer to the customer, and “closer to the customer” in America is a map dot about where we’re standing. If I had to guess where the next wave of industrial demand shows up, I’d guess here.
Two: car payments. Sixty-day delinquencies on subprime auto loans are running above their 2008 peak. Prime borrowers are slipping too — the highest since 2011. And total auto debt still went up $28 billion last quarter to a record $1.71 trillion. People are borrowing more for cars and paying them back less. Both at once.
Here’s why a realtor cares. The car payment is the canary. People pay the car before they pay almost anything else — you can’t get to work without it — so when the car payment starts slipping, the household budget slipped a while ago. That’s not a 2008 signal; mortgage credit is tight and homeowners are sitting on equity. It’s a renter signal, and a first-time-buyer signal.
Which means two things if you’re a landlord or you’re selling a starter home. Screen harder — a $700 car note on the application is the number I’d look at before the credit score. And expect the first-time buyer pool to thin out this winter, because that same $700 note is exactly what kills a pre-approval. Fewer first-time buyers means more renters, and a two-speed market: the cash-and-equity crowd keeps moving, the sub-$250k band gets sticky.
I could be wrong on all of it. That’s what the group text is for.
📊 Two polls to catch up on — I owe you both.
Wednesday I asked what’s actually slowing you down right now. Inventory and competition won with 35%. “Nothing — I’m listing this month” came in second at 26%. “Don’t know my numbers yet” got 23%. And interest rates — the thing everybody blames — finished dead last at 16%. Read that again. The rate isn’t the bottleneck. The rate is the excuse.
Thursday I asked about your stress level. A third of you said “pretty good, honestly.” Twenty-nine percent said higher than you’d like. And a quarter of you said you’re white-knuckling it. So roughly half this room is carrying it around. If that’s you, Thursday’s issue was for you — and so is the top-five exercise above. Nobody white-knuckles it in a room full of people who’ve got their back.
Today’s poll:
Who actually keeps you current on real estate?
🏆 Speaking of top fives — the other one is ready too. Five best deals on the Louisville MLS this morning, five ripe for a lowball, my number on every one. I can’t blast other agents’ listings to a list — rules are rules — but I can send them to you personally. Reply “FIVE” and they’re yours.
Warmly,
Rob Bergeron
Owner–Realtor at Award-Winning Winner Realty
Winner Realty | OffMarket.deals | Property Partner Data Company
Schedule time to discuss your goals, bottlenecks, or whatever’s on your mind — book me here.
PS: Here’s the thing under everything else in this issue. The 30-year Treasury has traded above 5% for 56 days this year — the longest run since 2006 — and 41 sessions in a row. It hit 5.28% this week, the highest since 2007. It’s averaging 4.96% for the year, which would be the highest annual average since 2004 and the sixth straight year it’s gone up. In 2020 it was 1.5%. Mortgage rates live downstream of that number. So when someone asks me when rates come back — this is the chart I’m looking at. Higher for longer isn’t a forecast anymore. It’s the water we’re swimming in. Plan the deal around the rate you can get today, not the one you’re hoping for in March.
PSS: Three lists, updated live off the MLS, if you want to go shopping this weekend: all currently available multifamily, all five-plus bedroom homes under $300,000, and all currently available Winner Realty offerings.
PSSS: We are building Winner Realty to be diverse. We want everyone to see themselves here — and thriving. We’d love to talk to you more about it. Hit me up!