Stock advice

[Wolf359]

Correct. I still look at it but I do not use unemployment number primarily for any decision making. They won't tell you if someone got a pay cut, turned part time, lost their health insurance, or have to move back to their parents. Typically road traffic or market rent paint a much better picture on those early on (mortgage delinquent would be next but will lag for a while). Of course, currently we cannot use road traffic as an indicator, but things like rent is always the better way to judge people's confidence / affordability.

Rent is a local indicator though. I wouldn't use it myself because all the landlords that I know basically have tenants that have been paying rent. Most of the ones I know have been at it for a while so maybe part of our bias is that we're better at selecting good tenants or the units they own are not low end enough that you get a lot of people that are unemployed now. A couple other factors are that our state has a high minimum wage and they also rolled out a program that offers up to 10k for unpaid rent. The first program they rolled out for 4k ran out pretty quickly, we'll see how long the new 10k lasts. All my tenants have actually been paying rent. It's actually been pretty good for me because they're also not making a lot of complaints/breaking things either so my maintenance costs have been down this year.