In partnership with
Welcome to the Skeptical Investor Newsletter. A frank, hopefully insightful, dive into real estate and financial markets. From one real estate investor to another.
Today’s Interest Rate: 6.58%
(👇 .10% from this time last week, 30-yr fixed)
This week, we’re talkin’ Iran sidequest has (almost officially) ended but what happens to inflation for the rest of 2026? I go deep dive on oil, treasuries and interest rates.
Let’s get into it.
The Weekly 3 in News:
The Iran conflict is ending, and oil round-tripped the whole thing. WTI crude fell more than 5% to roughly $80 a barrel, a two-month low. (Al Jazeera, NewsX) Oil sits upstream of everything else investors care about this week: oil feeds inflation, inflation feeds the 10-year Treasury, and the 10-year feeds your mortgage rate. Equities agreed, with the Dow jumping about 600 points to a fresh record and Asian markets surging as the deal came into view. (CNBC)
New Leader Kevin Warsh chairs his first Fed meeting with a hot but cooling tape. The Federal Reserve meets June 16–17, and markets price a hold at roughly 97–99%. (CME FedWatch) He inherits the hottest headline inflation since 2023, but he gets to talk about it on a day when oil is falling and stocks are at records. Whether his first press conference leans into the improving forward picture or anchors on the rear-view number is what may move the bond market.
Housing inventory turned negative year over year, and demand is the reason. Active listings reached 816,924 the week of June 12, against 825,718 a year ago, a decline of about 1.07% (calculated from the two counts). (HousingWire / Altos) Weekly pending sales ran 75,856 versus 72,039 last year, and purchase applications were up 17% year over year, all with the 30-year near its 2026 highs. It is the cleanest rebuttal to the “it’s a buyer’s market everywhere” consensus, and it gets stronger if the deal pulls rates toward 6%.
A Few Fun Things Happening in Nashville This Week
Winstock Music Festival, June 19–20, with Luke Bryan and Dierks Bentley headlining. Two nights of mainstream country at full volume.
Nashville Predators Craft Beer Festival, Saturday, June 20. Local breweries, a hockey crowd, and downtown in mid-June. A good read on how much disposable income is still sloshing around the city.
Dolly Parton’s “Threads: My Songs in Symphony” at the Schermerhorn, running mid-to-late June. The Nashville Symphony plus the Dolly catalog is about as Music City as it gets.
The Iran Side Quest is Over
On Sunday, the United States and Iran announced an end the conflict, with an agreement set for signing on June 19, the U.S. naval blockade lifting, the Strait of Hormuz reopening, and a 60-day window of talks on dismantling Iran’s nuclear program. (NBC News, CNN)
The market response has been swift. Oil is falling, equities pushing to records, and Treasury yields are resuming their downward trajectory that was interrupted back in March.
I called this.
Back in March, when crude was climbing and every news outlet and wall street analyst was absolutely losing their minds, I wrote two back to back articles on the Iran Conflict.
My argument was a little unpopular at the time (I got quite the earful) and it went something like this:
This is noise.
And from an investing perspective, it won’t matter, even in the medium term.
In fact, it couldn’t even be positive.
There are weeks when the smartest thing an investor can do is sit on his hands, and the spring of 2026 was a long stretch of exactly those weeks. The temptation was to react: to oil at $108, to a 4.2% inflation headline, to a war that filled every screen. The skeptical position, the one I argued in Scary Movie 7 and again in Energy Prices Have Peaked, was that almost all of it was noise dressed up as a regime change, and that it should not alter what a disciplined investor/operator does with a good deal in front of him.
Every World Cup match is a market.
48 games. 32 countries. One tournament. From the group stage through the final, every outcome is tradeable in real time on Kalshi, a federally regulated exchange and official regional partner of the Argentine National Team.
You're not picking a spread. You buy "Yes" or "No" shares on what you think happens: who wins, who advances, who scores first. Earn returns if you're right. Peer-to-peer. No house. Cash out before the final whistle.
Trade $10, get $10 free to start.
Trade responsibly.
A reminder: Iran’s tax is over
For years, Iran, through the threat of military strangle on the Strait of Hormuz, had imposed an invisible risk premium on oil prices. A tax, effectively.
And when the conflict comes to an end, and it will in a few months, oil prices will be lower in 2027 than in 2025. I say 2027 because it will take a few months for oil supply to catch up to demand.
And to add to this prediction, OPEC, the cartel of oil producing countries that price fix their product to the world, is effectively over, with the UAE leaving the group, a likely unintended result of this conflict.
The end of both the Iran risk premium and OPEC price fixing will result in lower oil prices than before we started this side quest.
This is extremely important to know. And I assert it to be correct.
Further. In April, with gasoline still surging, I followed up with another article, saying: Energy Prices Have Peaked.While the energy spike was real, it was temporary, and experienced investors/real estate operators can easily manage through it by properly underwriting.
True, once again.
So, I’m giving myself 2 back pats.
I nailed it.
Nanna nanna boo boo, stick your head in do do all you doomers.
Ok enough of self-aggrandizement, let’s look at what’s next.
I Said It Was Noise.
Now, we do have a bit to go from here.
The May inflation number that landed last week was ugly, but only on the surface. My underlying logic is now playing out, so let’s look at the evidence honestly, in three charts.
Oil has round-tripped
Starting with the black slimy commodity that started it all, WTI crude climbed from roughly $70 before the conflict to about $108 at the early-May peak, then drifted lower through late May and fell off a ledge this weekend, to near $80 after the deal framework. (Al Jazeera)
The premium that built up was a fear premium, and fear premiums are, by nature, temporary. It just took 56 years…
A Quick Ad Break
Totally shameless plug for my little book. It’s the cliff notes to real estate investing.
Real estate pays you five different ways simultaneously: cash flow, appreciation, loan paydown, tax benefits, and forced appreciation via renovation. Investors who win in choppy markets are the ones who understand they are never betting on just one of them.
Just ~50 pages, and you are ready to rock and roll.
Remember, anyone can build wealth with real estate.
Even you.
When the fear resolves, the price retraces. That is what appears to be happening, and it is why I argued against rearranging a portfolio around an oil chart, and that the bond market (ie treasuries, ie interest rates) was offsides.
The inflation scare was an energy scare wearing a disguise
This is the chart I would put in front of anyone who told you in May that inflation was “back.” Headline CPI did race higher, to 2.8% in February, 3.3% in March, 3.8% in April, and 4.2% in May, the hottest in three years. (BLS) But core CPI, which strips out food and energy, barely moved over the same stretch, sitting at 2.5% in January and February and reaching only 2.9% by May. (BLS)
Put the two together and here is the setup for real estate for the end of 2026:
For-sale housing inventory tightening on resilient demand, and the new-construction pipeline that punished rents now thinning out.
2027–2028 will be the year of rent recovery, and it is showing up in the data before the headlines.
The inflation scare, was just that.
This is the chart I would put in front of anyone who told you in May that inflation was “back.”
Headline CPI did race higher, to 2.8% in February, 3.3% in March, 3.8% in April, and 4.2% in May, the hottest in three years. (BLS) But core CPI, which strips out food and energy, barely moved over the same stretch, sitting at 2.5% in January and February and reaching only 2.9% by May. (BLS)
The gap between the red and teal lines, about 1.3 points in May, is almost entirely energy.
In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics attributed more than 60% of the entire monthly increase to energy, with gasoline up about 7% on the month and roughly 40.5% over the year. (BLS) Even Morningstar, hardly a cheerleader, headlined its May review “energy-driven inflation is contained, for now.” (Morningstar)
If the energy premium drains, as oil suggests it is doing, the headline should converge back toward the core over the next couple of releases. That is the bet I have been making since March. It is not a bet, it is just arithmetic.
As the energy premium pushed headline inflation up, it dragged the 10-year Treasury up with it, and the 30-year mortgage followed. The 10-year briefly pushed above 4.60% at the height of the conflict, sat at 4.48% on June 12, and eased to about 4.42% by Monday on the deal. (Federal Reserve H.15) Freddie Mac’s 30-year averaged 6.52% on June 11, and daily quotes had ticked toward roughly 6.35% by Monday as oil fell. (Freddie Mac, Money/U.S. News)
Downward pressure on rates should resume.
In my May 31 issue I wrote that the strongest argument against my “rates grind higher” caution was a let the oil market, and that if a credible Iran de-escalation held, crude could keep sliding, the energy contribution to inflation could reverse, the 10-year could follow it down, and the 30-year mortgage could be back near 6% within weeks.
That was the bull case.
It is now the case unfolding in front of us.
A little macro context to keep this grounded, because the rate path is not only an oil story: The labor market is still firm and will keep rates high for the next few months.
May payrolls were very strong, growing by 172,000. And unemployment held at 4.3%. (BLS) The Fed’s target range sits at 3.50–3.75% and is very likely to stay there this week. (CME FedWatch) Meanwhile, stocks are back to record highs. (CNBC) A resilient job market and a Fed that will likley not ease into a 4% inflation print are the reasons I say rates are headed toward 6% mortgage rates. But we aren’t there yet.
So what does a skeptical operator actually do with this?
Mostly, what we are already doing. The energy spike hit your common-area utilities, your maintenance fuel, your turn costs. Those are real, and they are also exactly the costs a disciplined owner plans for. The durable variables, supply and demand for housing, the cost of long-term capital, the trajectory of local jobs, were quietly improving the whole time the headlines were screaming. And they will continue to do so.
On the cost side specifically, one cheap lever that paid off this spring was tightening up energy usage in the units. Even something simple like a programmable smart thermostat for your rentals, which allows you to keep tabs on energy usage, is the kind of small, boring upgrade that trims a controllable cost.
The steelman, because I owe you the other side. The honest counter has two parts, and both have merit.
First, the inventory figures come from a weekly tracker, which is noisier than the monthly releases and can wobble around zero; one or two weeks below the line is a trend only if it persists, and a move back toward 7% on the 30-year would likely refill the shelves quickly as demand cools.
Second, “supply is thinning” is not the same sentence as “rents are rising.” Nationally, apartment occupancy just slipped to 94.1%, the lowest reading since 2013, which tells you there is still slack to absorb before landlords get real pricing power back. (Multi-Housing News) Less new supply matters, but it sets the table for a recovery. We still need a bit of time for this to happen.
The lesson of the last three months is not that geopolitics is irrelevant, just that it tends to move temporary line items.
I lean bullish on the demand floor here, and I will hold that view as the weekly data strings together a few more postitive weeks.
I’ll keep you updated. But so far so good.
Nashville: The Jobs Engine Is Still Running
The reason I keep coming back to Nashville (besides being a homer :) is that our local economy keeps on chuiggin.
Music City’s unemployment is holding near 3.0% (more than a full % below the national average), we added roughly 28,000 jobs over the past year, and the City ranks second among the 100 largest U.S. metros for combined job growth and income. (Capital Analytics) Health care, manufacturing and entertainment are have remained undeterred. (RE Business Online, Hoodline)
On the apartment side, multifamily asking rents have been running around $1,642, down roughly 1.2% over the year, lagging the national figure precisely because of the sheer number of completed units that hit the market over the last 2 years. (Multi-Housing News) As that wave fades into 2026 against a still-tight labor market, the local rent picture should firm.
The for-sale side is where the latest MLS data tells a more textured story than the metro aggregates do. Over the last 30 days, from May 15 to June 14, Nashville single-family homes carried a median sale price of $649,500, up about 4% from the prior 30-day window, while the average held essentially flat at $921,046. (RealTracs MLS) Homes that did sell moved quickly, with average days on market for closed sales falling to 24 from 32, a meaningful improvement of 25%.
Underneath that firm pricing, though, the market, like many large metros, is still loose. Months of supply went from 5.42 from 4.12, an increase of about 32%, as new listings fell 33%, closings fell 19%, and average active inventory rose 9% to 2,162. (RealTracs MLS)
The read: well-priced homes still sell fast, but we still have excess inventory to work through (again like most cities).
As new apartments coming on market continue to dwindle, 2026 should end with higher rents and fewer options for the 80+ folks moving here every day.
My Skeptical Take
The theme of the last 3 months is less about oil, and more about temperament.
We had a sea of frightening headlines, which were, for the most part, noise, while the fun the fundamental picture was improving.
Unemployment low, job hiring re-accelerating, housing demand holding, housing supply pipeline thinning, and an energy shock that is fading, not festering.
The operators who did well were not the ones with the best geopolitical forecast. They were the ones who knew their numbers cold, planned for the potential for prices to pop, and refused to renegotiate their long-term thesis (and leases) over a one-month inflation reading.
As Warren Buffett’s mentor Benjamin Graham put it in The Intelligent Investor:
“the investor’s chief problem, and even his worst enemy, is likely to be himself.”
The spring of 2026 was a long, loud test of that idea, and the people who stayed disciplined are the ones now watching oil round-trip and rates ease, with calm.
I am bullish on real estate as a long-term wealth engine, and I have laid out the full case for why in my book, The 5 Ways: How Real Estate Investors Make Money and Build Wealth, which walks through how the returns actually stack up across cash flow, appreciation, loan paydown, tax benefits, and inflation. None of those five engines depend on calling the next oil price correctly.
And that is rather the point.
Let the noise pass through.
Until next time. Stay Curious. Stay Skeptical.
** Before you go: a tool I’d like your help on **
I built a free deal analyzer, and I want your feedback on it!
It is called DealLab, and it lets you underwrite a rental, BRRRR, a flip or a property you already own in a couple of minutes.
It uses live mortgage rates, with cap rate, cash-on-cash, DSCR, and a deal heat score built in. I just added an Advanced Mode for the pros who wanted more control over the assumptions. It is still in beta, so I genuinely want to hear what is missing or clunky.
Take it for a spin, run a real deal through it, and reply with what you’d change. Bookmark it too, it will come in handy the next time a potential deal crosses your desk.
Herzliche Grüße,
P.S. Want to level up your real estate game?
You can consult with me, The Skeptical Investor! Get professional advice from someone who actually owns, operates, and brokers real estate.
Want to Grow? - Get clarity on how to grow your business or scale.
Stuck? - Get answers to your problem, let's hop on the phone and figure it out.
No "guru" trying to sell you an expensive course. No BS. No fluff. Only results.
I'll give you my frank, brutally honest advice. Book a call with me today.
It’s 2026. Be an owner.
Please Share this Article!
We have passed 50,000 subs! Thank you for your support, next stop, 60,000!
Please help grow the community!
It takes me several hours to write this weekly article, and they will always remain free (but you get some pretty cool perks with premium, including a one-on-one with yours truly :). All I ask is that you share it with 1 friend. Just 1. If you do, you will get two gifts: free education for one of your friends, and good karma for helping to grow a community of folks trying to figure out a way to create wealth for their family.
What, did you want, a cookie? 😅
Subscribe Today! (and get some amazing perks)
Paid subscribers get the best stuff! Join the Skeptical Investor Community to access:
Premium content and NO paywall,
Every article we have published - a treasure trove of information and education,
Conversations with other investors in the Skeptical Investor community, and future meetups and special events,
Key insights and predictions on the latest financial news,
PLUS, subscriptions include an annual one-on-one call with me personally. So make sure to take advantage! Subscribe today.
Just $5 bucks a month.👇
Ready to Start Investing in Real Estate? Know someone who does?
We are real estate agents for investors, because we are investors. We specialize in helping investors find, analyze and negotiate great real estate deals, as well as manage their rental properties, here in Nashville, TN. We pride ourselves on being tough negotiators. We want our clients to get an amazing deal, we never let our clients pay retail.
Enjoying this newsletter? Know somebody looking to buy real estate? Send them to the best in the business, THE Nashville Investor Agent! Referring real estate business helps us keep the lights on and me keep pushing out fresh real estate analysis each and every week. Help peep this newsletter going for all you awesome folks out there; refer someone to us when you may hear they are in need. We promise to take great care of them and make sure they get a fantastic deal. They will thank you for it.
If you or someone you know are looking for an investment property, give us a call today!
You can also find out more about us and what we offer on our website: www.NashvilleInvestorAgent.com
Why Nashville? There is always a bull market somewhere, and one of them is Nashville. We have the lowest unemployment rate of the top 25 major cities and folks are moving here to take those jobs. Nearly 90+ people per day move to Nashville. And tourism continues to hit record levels. This past year 16.8 million folks visited our lively city. Plus we have 3 professional sports teams (hopefully a 4th soon), massive healthcare and entertainment industries, heavy manufacturing, more than a dozen colleges, no state income tax… to name a few amazing advantages. Come check us out, the water is warm :).