Have you been waiting for just the right time to invest in property? Well, your time might have come because there are three things that have happened in the last few months that caught my team's attention. And based on our years of an investing experience, we think this could be the opportunity of the decade. So in this video, I'm going to explain the three things we found and why this is potentially such an interesting opportunity. Plus, at the end, I'll explain how you can take advantage of it and why you need to act fast because the window of opportunity may not stay open for long. I'm going to make two statements about house prices and you can guess which one is true. One, house prices are almost the most expensive they've ever been in history. And two, house prices are currently cheaper than they've been for a decade. So which of those is true? Well, it's a trick question. The answer is both. If you look at UK average house prices, they peaked in the third quarter of 2022 at 273,000 pounds. Due to the COVID rush to buy bigger homes outside cities, a stamp duty holiday, and the stimulus money washing through the system. As of the fourth quarter of 2023, prices had come down to £259,000, which is a 5% drop. Now, 5% is not a lot, especially when you consider mortgage rates increased by almost 150%. So if you were paying around 2% on your mortgage a few years ago, you'd be looking at a closer to 6% today. If you presented that fact about mortgage rates to any economist and asked them what they thought would happen, they would say that it would drive house prices down, grammatically down. Maybe they'd even start using words like crash and collapse, yet they've only fallen by 5%. That doesn't seem like enough. So what's going on? Well, that's where that second data point comes in. There has been a crash, but it's been a silent crash, and it's been silenced by inflation. So house prices have come down a bit, but everything else has gone up by a lot. In other words, the pound has lost value, which is why everything else in your life is costing you more. If you adjust for inflation, property prices peaked at the beginning of 2022, and since then, they've fallen by more than 15%. And that's why, after adjusting for the impact of inflation, which is known as stating something in real terms, house prices are the same now as they were back in 2013. So if we've already had a COVID-related boom, followed by a silent correction, meaning we're not on the verge of a crash right now. What will come next? Well, in my opinion, within the next year or maybe two, house prices will go up a little bit, but nothing out of the ordinary. But after those couple of years, could we go into a full-on property boom? It sounds far-fetched, given how subdued the market is now, but remember how quickly things can change. In the summer of 2022, people were frantically outbidding each other for very average investments, and barely six months later, the market was absolutely dead. And the man who popularised the idea of the 18-year property cycle believes that house prices will peak in 2026, and before that happens, they'll go up at least 20% from their current levels. But hang on a minute, if that happens, wouldn't it be better to wait until after the boom when house prices have fallen and buy them instead? Well, yes, of course, ideally it would, but there are a few drawbacks to this plan. One, is that you actually need to be brave enough to buy while everyone else is panicking. It's easy to agree with Warren Buffett's line about being greedy when others are fearful, but doing it is quite another. The second, is that even if you are brave enough, getting a mortgage will be a lot more challenging, because banks won't be feeling particularly brave. A big decline in property prices will have left them highly vulnerable, and they won't be in the mood to make new loans. And thirdly, there's the small matter that you don't know with certainty that this will happen. If you did know it with certainty, you should be doing everything in your power to save cash now by any means necessary to make sure that you're ready to snap up bargains in a few years' time. But as you can't be certain, what's more likely, is you use this potential future crash as just another reason to do nothing for a few years, missing out on not just potential growth, but rental income as well, while your cash in the bank does nothing. I get it though. Buying when there's potentially a boom and crash in the near future is scary. But the thing that reassures me and encourages me to keep buying is my knowledge of what's historically happened at the very end of cycles in the past. Fred Harrison, who I mentioned earlier, nicknamed the last couple of years of the cycle, the winner's curse, because this is the time when everyone is frantically drawing it out bit each other, paying ludicrous prices just to get on the ladder, and whoever ends up winning and paying the most, we'll see their investment slashed in value. But this is a phenomenon that only happens briefly at the end of a cycle. And as long as you sit out that madness, historically you would have come out ahead. For example, back in the last crash, house prices peaked in the third quarter of 2007, after which they came down by 19%. But as long as you hadn't bought any later than the beginning of 2006, you would have gone through the boom and come out the other side of the crash without your property ever being worth less than you paid for it. It was the same in the previous crash, about 18 years earlier, when house prices peaked in the third quarter of 1989. As long as you hadn't bought any later than the third quarter of 1988, you could again, have gone through the whole crash without your house ever being worth less than you paid for it, even though prices fell by 18%. In other words, when you look at the data, the true boom, the winner's curse that you want to avoid, is an extremely short period. How do we know we're not in this winner's curse stage right now? Well, this is where it's important to stop trying to be clever with historical patterns and look at the world around you. Our buyer is getting carried away and paying silly money of viewing his past. Our banks falling over each other to land, very clearly not. But that might not be the case for long. Once you notice this type of behavior beginning, history tells you that you might not want to be buying. And it's precisely this lack of excitement that makes 2024 such a potentially compelling time, especially because there's something else going on that could make it the prime time to grab a bargain. I've been investing in property for a worryingly long time. I've invested when the market was booming in 2006 and in 2022, and I've invested when the market was gripped by panic, like in 2020 and 2011. But none of these have been my favorite time to buy. My favorite market conditions are what I describe as mildly negative. Because, like I've said, buying in the middle of a blood bath is hard psychologically and it's hard practically because of the reluctance of lenders to lend. And it's obviously difficult to buy in a boom when people are willing to pay silly prices and it's a struggle to even secure a viewing. Mildly negative is perfect because you can still get alone. You're not freaking out and there are bargains out there without much competition. We see exactly the same on a bigger scale with our source and company, Property Hub Invest, which buys over 100 million pounds worth of property per year. People think that we must love a property boom, but we don't, because it's a nightmare to go out and secure the discounts that our clients want. We love mildly negative too. And that's why we as a business are so enthusiastic about 2024, because this year has mildly negative written all over it, not necessarily in terms of prices. As I said, I think prices will actually go up this year, but in terms of sentiment and sentiment is what matters for getting deals. There are two factors that could keep 2024 negative and allow there to be great deals to be done. Firstly, there are lots of long-term landlords leaving the market for a few different reasons. There's political drama about rental reform, which will tip the balance of power against landlords. There's the increase in mortgage rates, which will suddenly make a lot of people's investments less profitable. And there's the fact that a lot of landlords are pretty old. Many of the people who bought in the 1990s and 2000s, which on the whole were particularly good times of property, will be coming up to retirement date, a time when they'd be considering their decisions anyway. And because they think political factors could cut the profitability of their investments, many of them are taking the opportunity to cash out their giant capital gains. And because these properties might be looking a bit tired, because they haven't been invested in much recently. And because there might be tenants in place who they don't want to disrupt or can't disrupt, meaning that properties won't be suitable for owner occupiers, there can be opportunities to go in and negotiate particularly strong deals. So that's investors getting out, but something else that'll be happening in 2024, or perhaps more accurately not happening, is many investors coming in, why is that? Because of the general election. Markets of all kinds hate uncertainty. And with a potential change of government, and all the drama and emotion that goes around that, which will be forced to live through in the second half of this year, investors will be sitting back and waiting rather than entering the market. Home owners also might be delaying a move, waiting to see what happens with mortgage rates, and there probably won't be any real moves on that front until the middle of the year. So this is what I mean by the investment opportunity of the decade. Think about it. The decade started with the property market completely seizing up. Then it became a red hot, and it was hard to do any deal at all. Then we had to adjust to a huge spike in mortgage rates. And before long, we might go into a boom, where the market gets a red hot again, followed by a total panic, where it's impossible to borrow. Yet right now, this subdued, negative market could represent the best buying opportunity we'll see for a long time. Of course, it's important to acknowledge this is just one vision of how things could play out this year and beyond. There are undoubted risks that could cause the housing market and the wider economy to start suffering later this year. It could be that interest rates don't fall as much as expected, because inflation continues to be an issue. Or it could be that the sudden rise in interest rates we've already seen, it sees something else up. Just as we've seen issues in US banks and UK pension funds, something else could break deep in the financial plumbing, which has enough on effect for everyone and everything. You can't rule these scenarios out, but the thing is, you can never rule out the potential for something to go badly wrong. Go back to 2016, eight years ago. At every point between then and now, you could have made an argument for not acting because of some kind of perceived disaster, whether that be Brexit, COVID, or one of the 20 other panics we've probably forgotten about already. So am I certain that the years ahead will be good ones for property? No, I can't be, no one can. But I do know that if you wait until the day when there are no clouds on the horizon before you invest, well, ironically, that'll probably be the worst time you could possibly invest, because it's the time when everyone else will be too, and they'll be pushing prices to unsustainable highs. In the past, whatever has been going on, the best course of action has been to just keep buying. That's what I've done, and it's what I plan to continue doing. That said, although I think 2024 could be a great year to invest, there are five areas around the UK that I don't think are going to perform well at all. And if you invest there, you could end up seriously regretting it. So check out this video here to make sure you're investing not only at the right time, but also in the right place.