Is Columbia, South Carolina One of the Hottest New Markets?

Today we talk with Matt Crawford with the Montgomery Company in South Carolina about what is happening in the Columbia Market. We cover everything from the economic and employment trends, taxes, the current level of competition, and other things that make Columbia an investor's market.  --- Transcript Michael: Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of The Remote Real Estate Investor. I'm Michael Albaum and today I'm joined by my co hosts, Tom Schneider and Mark Woodling. And we have a very special guest with us today, Matt Crawford is an agent out of Columbia, South Carolina. And today Matt's gonna be giving us a market overview and talk about some of the things that he and his team are able to assist buyers and sellers in doing in that market. So let's get into it.     Awesome. So Matt Crawford, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. Really appreciate you being on the show.   Matt: Excellent. Thank you, Mike. Glad to be here.   Michael: And so you're out in Columbia, South Carolina. Is that right?   Matt: Yeah, Sunny Columbia mass about 85 degrees, you know, beautiful state born and raised about an hour north of here. So fantastic market, man, it's a good place to be.   Michael: Awesome. And I'm curious, Matt, who are you an agent with.   Matt: So right now, my agency is hung under the Montgomery company, which is a pretty interesting story. And just to quickly unpack that, Matt Montgomery, he's a great friend of mine. He runs a massive construction business here in the southeast. And just for the conveniency of our partnership, I ended up creating a brokerage with him. And I'm really sort of the head of the firm, sole proprietor of that brokerage, which I moved my company under, which is technically not a capital in southern capital brothers, which is our investment brokerage underneath this umbrella.   Tom: That’s a perfect segue, Matt, and, you know, before jumping into Columbia, South Carolina, I'd love to learn a little bit more about yourself and your background and how you got to where you're at today.   Matt: Yeah, 100% time, you know, it's a, it's been a journey, you know, as we all are inclined to take. And so, you know, I'm going to probably take this back five years, you know, I'm in Denver, Colorado, man, loving life, sort of so in the proverbial oats of a new broker. And I started really getting into cahoots with a lot of the investors out in Colorado, a lot of these guys were doing huge land acquisitions, building massive multifamily complexes, as well as doing something that I'd never heard of, which was institutional capital investing.   So they were piecing together these massive SFR, BTR portfolios, renting them out, stabilize them, and then doing the disposition strategy. And I was like, what a awesome niche within the real estate arena to start cutting my teeth on. And so we got licensed in Colorado started working with these guys, the barrier to entry there for a new young agent in his 20s was so massive, and like, man, it'd be great if I had $600,000 for my first rental, not the case.   So I look back to my roots back here in Columbia, South Carolina, where I can get that first rental for about 50,000. And so jumped over here about four years ago, and started building some institutional funds with a previous venture, we built that went to about 2200 homes deployed around 220 million over 24 months. I don't think I slept much. I probably lost a little bit of weight. But I learned a lot, you know, and, and from there, you know, there was a talk about destiny, talk about fate, you know, the pandemic arose, a created a little bit of space, to sort of see where I wanted to navigate. And, you know, I decided with a few of my other founders, Jordan, and Alex Fisher, to start our own company. And that's sort of how we got here today,   Tom: I had a boss who had a pretty funny joke. I was like, working a lot of hours. And he's like, Hey, good news. Tom, you're getting credit for