Florida Housing Market 2026: Crash or Buying Opportunity? | Lex Levinrad · Investor Fuel Real Estate Show · Radar

Lessons from Past Cycles3:46 – 8:41

Mike HambrightHost

3:46

yeah i think what's what's interesting is when you have and and i started in 2008 so maybe a few years after you but we have been through a couple cycles right and i think the context of time is really important in this business and quite frankly most people that get into this business don't stick around long enough to see that context of what I call playing the long game, right? It's like, there's, we're in a cycle.

Mike HambrightHost

4:10

There's really two things.

Mike HambrightHost

4:11

One is when you're new, you don't really know what's possible or what's happened in the past because you didn't experience that.

Mike HambrightHost

4:17

Once you've experienced it, that's why you've got to get around, you know, guys like you to learn from like, I've seen this play before and it's going to be a little bit different, but I, you know, I kind of, I have the playbook kind of, I kind of know what to do.

Mike HambrightHost

4:27

Right.

Mike HambrightHost

4:27

And I think the other big realization when you've been in the business for a while is to understand that every time there is a, down cycle or something bad happens, there is always a silver lining to that.

Mike HambrightHost

4:40

There's always an opportunity, right? The question is, can you identify it? And you're more likely to be able to identify it if you've seen that show before, right?

Lex LevinradGuest

4:48

Yep, absolutely.

Lex LevinradGuest

4:49

Well, I think, you know, so for me, what happened was, you know, going back to my background before I even got into real estate, Notice, I was a stockbroker and financial advisor, and I got completely destroyed in the 2000 stock market crash with the NASDAQ meltdown.

Lex LevinradGuest

5:02

And then, you know, I decided, okay, I'm done with that.

Lex LevinradGuest

5:04

I'm going to go to real estate.

Lex LevinradGuest

5:05

And I moved to Florida, primarily because it was affordable to buy rental properties.

Lex LevinradGuest

5:09

And once I got into Florida, I, you know, just started buying rentals using the buy, repair, rent, refinance strategy.

Lex LevinradGuest

5:16

And it was great.

Lex LevinradGuest

5:18

And it was booming, 03, 04, 05, 06.

Lex LevinradGuest

5:21

And I never considered that the financial crisis could happen.

Lex LevinradGuest

5:25

And then when it happened, I looked at it and I said, wow, you know, like the stocks went down 2000.

Lex LevinradGuest

5:30

Now here we are seven, eight years later and it's going down again.

Lex LevinradGuest

5:33

And what do I do to recover from the situation? And the more I looked at it, the more I realized how we tend to move like as investors and as people, we tend to follow a herd instinct.

Lex LevinradGuest

5:44

So we look very, very short term.

Lex LevinradGuest

5:45

So like in 1999, we're making all this money day trading in the stocks, but we don't think, well, what if it stops? And so the same thing happened in 07, 08.

Lex LevinradGuest

5:54

So with the financial crisis and with all the banks coming down, I remember it was around October 2008, you know, so we'd seen Bear Stearns collapse and Lehman collapse and this whole situation.

Lex LevinradGuest

6:04

And I started looking at it and I was like, you know, it's almost like people feel like real estate's never going to recover.

Lex LevinradGuest

6:09

But we live in the greatest country in the world.

Lex LevinradGuest

6:13

And the state that I live in, Florida, is the fastest growing state in the country.