tlp

How to Research the Cincinnati Real Estate Market in 2026

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 22:45:32 GMT

How to Research the Cincinnati Market in Two Hours a Week

Saugat Pradhan started Cincy Report three months ago, before he had even moved to Cincinnati. It is approaching 20,000 followers and reaches more than 1.5 million viewers a month. His routine hasn't changed since day one: wake up, research what is happening in Cincinnati, verify it, and post a reel. Co-host Ian Cruz runs a similar routine from San Jose, California. Together they laid out how an investor can track Greater Cincinnati in two hours a week or less and where AI helps or hurts.

About This Post

This analysis draws from a conversation with Saugat Pradhan , founder of Cincy Report, and co-host Ian Cruz of Three Little Pigs Investment Services. Pradhan has four years of experience in residential, small multifamily and wholesale real estate. He moved to Cincinnati this month from South Dakota and is launching as an investor and agent. Cruz tracks Cincinnati development news as @cincycashflow and uses it to underwrite acquisitions from out of state.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The full episode also covers how Pradhan uses Claude to analyze which Cincy Report posts perform best.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

Subscribe on Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Neighborhood Signals Worth Tracking in Greater Cincinnati Right Now

Neighborhood Facebook groups often break local news before the Business Journal does. Some of the projects and issues investors should be watching:

Northside has two adaptive-reuse projects in motion. The developer of Kirby School Apartments , a former school converted to housing, has applied to build new units next door. Cruz first saw it in the Northside Facebook group, where neighbors were debating it, before it appeared in the Business Journal. At 4001 Hamilton Avenue , the old Stoll's Drug Store just landed $400,000 in Ohio historic tax credits.
Fairfield is debating an earned income tax levy for its schools. If it fails, the district plans to cut 18 elementary art, music, and PE positions and 30 English learner tutor positions and to charge $800 for youth sports. For rental owners, a school district's funding fights affect demand for three-bedroom-plus homes. Cruz follows this closely because Three Little Pigs owns property in Fairfield.
Norwood posts its city council meetings on YouTube. Cruz pulls the transcripts and has Claude summarize them into bullet points, which is the quickest way to track council decisions in any suburb that records its meetings.
Delhi Township and Bridgetown in Oak Hills Schools draw investors who buy only there. Host Slocomb Reed strongly recommends Delhi for single-family and small multifamily given its recent development activity. Pradhan's advice for any single-area investor: also watch adjacent neighborhoods, since development next door changes demand in yours.
Downtown has The Banks , a $750 million to $800 million redevelopment that the city council has cleared a path for near the stadiums. The Phoenix Building is being converted into an event venue scheduled to reopen early next year.
Liberty Township and West Chester are getting a research and jobs hub at Cincinnati Children's Liberty Campus . Pradhan expects it to lift housing demand across both.

Where Reliable Cincinnati Real Estate Information Comes From

Both researchers start from the same source. Sources ranked by how much they rely on them:

Cincinnati Business Journal. It is the one paid source either of them uses. Cruz estimates a single-city subscription at under $10 a month, and he has the print edition mailed to California. Much local TV and newspaper coverage cites it.
County auditors. Follow Hamilton County Auditor and Butler County Auditor Nancy Nix on Facebook. Ohio counties post preliminary reassessment values on different timelines, and the auditors publish updates in real time.
County and city websites for official notices, permits, and zoning.
Broker research. Colliers, CBRE, and other large brokerages post quarterly market reports on LinkedIn.
Local media , including Local 12 and the Enquirer, for confirmation. Cincy Beat is the source for events.
Neighborhood Facebook groups and neighbor apps for early signals and resident reaction.

What to avoid:

AI-generated local news sites. Pradhan found a Cincinnati development site near the top of Google whose stories turned out to be fabricated. The giveaways were AI-sounding phrasing and generated images in place of real photos.
Reddit. It is full of opinions and has little verified information.
Viral tax claims. Nancy Nix recently debunked a viral YouTube video claiming Congress had passed property tax savings for older homeowners, which told viewers to request a "senior homeowner tax review" from their auditor. No such law, form or program exists. People still called her office asking for it.

What's Working in Cincinnati

A research routine that fits in two hours a week:

Scan the Business Journal once. Cruz scrapes new articles into a Notion database and reviews them in one sitting instead of checking the site three times a day.
Use AI to find headlines, then verify each one yourself. Ask Claude or ChatGPT what is new in a neighborhood, then search each topic on Google and confirm it with a trusted source.
Cross-check with an independent source. Pradhan looks for the same story from an outlet that isn't just repeating the Business Journal before he treats it as fact.
Cite the source every time. Cruz credits the original publisher, whether Redfin, a county site or the Business Journal, so readers can check it.
Join Facebook groups for the areas you own in , and watch how residents react to proposals that affect them.
Let your feed do the work. Follow Cincinnati investors, brokers and podcasts on LinkedIn and Instagram, and within a few months much of the week's news reaches you without searching.

Where AI Helps and Where it Fails

It helps with volume. AI can screen dozens of articles, summarize council transcripts and surface topics worth checking. Pradhan also has Claude analyze which of his posts perform best.
It fails on currency. Most of the wrong answers Cruz gets from AI are outdated information presented as current.
It fails on private data. AI can't tell you what a 1960s Class C 20-unit in Cincinnati sold for, since entity transfers often never become public record. It can't tell you how insurance renewals are actually trending either.
It invents things. Narrow its search to the exact article or county site you trust, and require a link for every claim. Reed learned early to make ChatGPT cite its sources, and it starts linking once you ask.

What doesn't work: letting AI do the whole job. Every researcher on this episode uses it for the first pass and relies on their own judgment for the last.

Lessons From the Field: Checking a $3.2 Million Northside Rehab

On air, Cruz brought up 4001 Hamilton Avenue in Northside, the old Stoll's Drug Store. His AI summary said a Northside redevelopment corporation bought the building for $190,000 in 2024 and planned $3.2 million of work to create first-floor retail with three or four apartments above.

Reed immediately suspected a hallucination. He pulled up the county auditor record. The entire building is 4,400 square feet, coded as retail with apartments over.

Cruz then checked the Business Journal. The figure was real: the project is estimated to cost $3.2 million.

Verified or not, the number deserved a second look. $3.2 million over 4,400 square feet is about $727 a square foot of renovation, which Reed estimates is roughly twice what new construction would cost. The project is being funded partly with $400,000 in historic tax credits.

Verify every figure AI gives you. This one was true, and the next one might not be.
Pull the auditor record. Square footage, land use and sale history turn a headline into a number you can test.
Do the per-square-foot math. Mission-driven and tax-credit projects can pencil at costs no private investor could justify.
Check the parcels next door. Land use codes show what a neighboring building can legally become.
Treat good news as a signal, then underwrite it. A funded rehab tells you where money is flowing. It does not set your comps.

West Side Cincinnati Rentals: Westwood Streets and BRRR Math

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:21:21 GMT

$110,000 from a wholesaler, $21,000 of work, a $200,000 appraisal. Ben Austin on the West Side streets he won't cross, and why he buys every property with two exits so he can decide later whether to flip or hold.

Ben Austin bought a two-bedroom in Westwood this spring from a wholesaler for $110,000, with no inspection and no contingencies. He put $21,000 into it, and it appraised at $200,000. He could have flipped it for a $50,000 to $60,000 profit. He kept it as a rental. Austin buys every property with at least two exits, and after 16 years as a Cincinnati realtor he has specific streets he will and won't cross on the West Side.

About This Post

This analysis draws from a conversation with Ben Austin , a realtor with Keller Williams Advisors who leads the Austin Group. He also co-founded BAK Property Management. He owns about $3 million in single-family and multifamily rentals across Westwood, Clifton, Mount Washington, Reading and downtown, some of them furnished. Roughly half of his clients are investors, so he sees the West Side as both a buyer and an agent.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The full episode also covers how he turned his downtown condo into a short-term rental that booked two months out within two weeks.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

Subscribe on Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Westwood, Bridgetown, Price Hill: Where a West Side Investor Draws the Lines

Austin's best buy-and-hold results have come from the C+ and B- neighborhoods on Cincinnati's West Side: Westwood , Cheviot , Bridgetown , Green Township and Delhi . Reading has also worked for him. Mount Washington , on the east side, has become hard to find deals in.

Westwood is Cincinnati's largest neighborhood by both area and population, and the lines inside it matter. Austin uses Werk Road as his southern cutoff. Closer to Fairmount, the tenant base changes, and some Werk-adjacent blocks already feel like Fairmount even though the auditor lists them as Westwood. From there he follows Harrison Avenue north into Cheviot.
His favorite pocket is bounded by Montana Avenue on the north, Werk Road on the south, Glenmore Avenue on the west, and Boudinot Avenue on the east. He owns three properties inside it. It is a quiet residential area within walking distance of the YMCA, the library, and the restaurants and bars near the Montana, Harrison, and Boudinot triangle. Single-family homes there rent for not much less than similar homes in many East Side neighborhoods.
Bridgetown is open territory for Austin, and he is comfortable buying almost anywhere in it. The pocket around Euclid, Lawrence, and Childs rents well, sits near commercial corridors, and is in Oak Hills Schools . Host Slocomb Reed says the Oak Hills label is often what gets him to commit to a three-bedroom-plus single-family.
Cleves and North Bend draw their own demand from the Three Rivers school district. Reed owns a 24-unit in Cleves and manages other properties there.
Price Hill means a different tenant pool, with more wear and tear and higher turnover. Austin tells clients to require a much higher cap rate there to cover the extra carpet, counters, and paint.
The Incline District is the exception in Price Hill. New builds, shops, Incline Public House, Primavista, a coffee shop, and a theater all sit near the view of downtown. Austin's comfort zone ends one or two blocks west of the view, where the walkability runs out.

Why West Side BRRR Math Got Tighter After 2022

When Austin started buying in Westwood, homes sold for under $100,000 and needed $10,000 to $20,000 of cosmetic work to rent. Three things have changed since then:

Rates roughly doubled. His early rentals carry mortgages at 3.5% to 4.5%. DSCR loans now run about 7%, and conventional investment loans about 6% to 7.5%.
Wholesale deals face their own competition. Within his Westwood-Cheviot buy box, few on-market listings make sense. Wholesalers blast deals to large buyer lists, so off-market deals now draw several competing offers.
Prices haven't come back down. The market has slowed, but Austin hasn't seen values regress. Rents are plateauing, and each neighborhood has a ceiling above which tenants will simply move somewhere else.

Flips feel the rate change less, since Austin plans to be in and out in under three months. Long-term holds are harder to make work. He has widened his search in response and recently bought in Ludlow, Kentucky . His filter for any new area: the numbers work, and he would live there himself.

What's Working in Cincinnati

Buy with two exits. Austin wants every purchase to work as both a flip and a rental. That lets him commit before he knows which way he'll go. Reed puts it this way: the decision to buy is objective and the decision to sell is subjective. Buy when the numbers work, then decide after the rehab based on your finances, taxes and plans.

Austin's buy criteria:

Cash flow of $500 a month or more after new debt service.
All-in cost near 70% of ARV. The 70% rule is his starting point, and he will accept less spread when a single-family still has $50,000 to $70,000 of equity at completion.
All-in around $150,000, valued at $250,000 to $300,000. He sees that range as very doable in Westwood and Bridgetown. Better school districts push values higher.

The ARV band where both exits work. Reed and Austin agree the sweet spot for Greater Cincinnati single-family is an ARV in the $200,000s, with a purchase price under $200,000.

Under $150,000: question whether you want to own in that location longer than it takes to flip.
$150,000 to $200,000: some two-bedrooms cash flow and still leave room for a flip profit.
Above $300,000 to $350,000: single-family rents rarely cover the debt, DSCR lenders cut leverage, and the tenant pool shrinks. Sell those.

The Clifton BRRR that shows the model. Austin bought a three-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath home on Warner Street, between Ravine and Fairview in CUF, for $144,000. He put about $32,000 into it. Following the usual CUF shotgun layout, the dining room became the living room, and the old living room became a bedroom. It appraised at $300,000. He refinanced and pulled out about $60,000. The new mortgage runs $1,550 a month, and it rents to students for $2,600, so it cash flows about $1,000 a month with roughly 30% equity still in it.

Handling city complaints. Cincinnati inspectors respond quickly to neighbor calls to 311. Austin has gotten notices over a leaning fence and over a trash can at the end of his own driveway, and the trash can citation was waived.

Check the date on the notice. His fence notice was dated August 3 and arrived August 13, which cut his response window by 10 days.
Respond by email. A timestamp proves you acted before the deadline.
Escalate politely when an inspector goes quiet. Reed calls the building department's main line and asks for the supervisor on duty so a missed follow-up doesn't turn into a fine.
Stay friendly. Both hosts say courtesy with inspectors goes further than frustration.

What doesn't work: walking away from a good deal over $5,000 or $6,000. Deal flow is too competitive now to be that picky, and both Reed and Austin can name Westwood houses they passed on and wish they owned.

Lessons From the Field: A $110,000 Westwood Wholesale Deal With Bats in the Attic

Austin bought a two-bedroom on Daytona Avenue in Westwood, one block outside his favorite pocket, through a wholesaler for $110,000. He waived inspection and contingencies because the numbers worked as either a flip or a rental.

The plan was cosmetic: new cabinets, a bathroom refresh, floors and paint. The kitchen went in, and the finish work wasn't up to his standard, so the crew tore it out and rebuilt it. They also finished the basement area around an existing toilet so it could be used as living space, and replaced the garage doors and openers.

The tenant signed before the rehab was even done. Then bats showed up in the attic in July. Bats are a protected species, and removal is restricted during their maternity season. Several pest companies wouldn't take the job. The one that did had to wait until August. It then sealed the openings, installed one-way exclusion devices so the bats could leave but not return, and cleaned the attic. Reed has had bats loose inside occupied units, where the only legal response during that season is to seal the holes and open the windows.

Then a neighbor reported the leaning fence to the city.

Final numbers: $110,000 purchase plus $21,000 of work, for $131,000 all-in, against a $200,000 appraisal. It rents for $1,500, and market rent is $1,700 to $1,800.

Buying right absorbs surprises. A rebuilt kitchen, a bat exclusion, and a code notice still left $69,000 of equity.
Waiving inspection means pricing in the unknown. Keep a contingency in the rehab budget.
Know the wildlife rules before you need them. Bat removal is time-restricted, and the delay has to be explained to a tenant already living there.
Signing a tenant early costs rent. Leasing before the rehab was finished locked in $200 to $300 a month below market.
Two exits keep options open. The same house works as a $50,000 to $60,000 flip or a long-term hold.

Investing in Cincinnati: Neighborhoods, Taxes, and Rent Growth

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:42:06 GMT

Cincinnati ranked fifth nationally for home price growth in April 2026, but the number that matters is replacement cost: whole neighborhoods still sell for less than it costs to build. Ian Cruz and Slocomb Reed answer the questions out-of-state investors ask first.

Before the Great Recession, Cincinnati was a steady 2% appreciation market. In April 2026 it ranked fifth in the country for home price growth, at 6.7% year over year. The number that matters more to investors is replacement cost: whole neighborhoods of existing homes still sell for less than it would cost to build them. In a live listener Q&A, the hosts of the Cincy REI Show answered the questions investors new to Greater Cincinnati ask most: where to buy, how to estimate property taxes, what rent growth to underwrite, and where rehab budgets break.

About This Post

This analysis draws from a live listener Q&A with Ian Cruz and Slocomb Reed , co-founders of Three Little Pigs Investment Services. Reed owns Three Little Pigs Property Management in Cincinnati and is a licensed realtor. Cruz runs acquisitions and investor relations from San Jose, California. Between them, they see the market from the ground and from an out-of-state investor's seat.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The full episode also covers entity transfers and how to think about Cincinnati's east side and west side as a first-time buyer.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

Subscribe on Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Where to Buy in Greater Cincinnati as a New Investor

Growth in Cincinnati doesn't follow a compass direction. Good, average and weak pockets sit side by side inside the I-275 loop, and plotted on a map, the weak ones wouldn't make sense. The corridors below have held up over the last decade.

The Montgomery Road Corridor is the default answer for a five-to-10-year buy-and-hold. It runs from Evanston through Norwood , Pleasant Ridge , Kennedy Heights , Silverton , Deer Park and Kenwood , then out to the suburbs. Values there have risen steadily for a decade. Kennedy Heights read as depressed 10 years ago, and it doesn't anymore. Investors have called the corridor overpriced for years, and it keeps appreciating on solid demand.
Hyde Park, Oakley and the areas east and northeast of them have strong appreciation potential and rentable multifamily, but little to no positive cash flow. In Reed's words, you can pay California prices for Cincinnati real estate, and you will get California cash flow for it.
Walnut Hills has seen major redevelopment. Trendy coffee shops, restaurants and bars moved in near Woodburn Avenue, and five years of new construction to the southeast raised the neighborhood's appeal. A newer I-75 interchange makes it quick to reach downtown and the hospitals in Clifton and Corryville.
The southern Northern Kentucky suburbs near the Ark Encounter have little lodging nearby. Well-run four- and five-bedroom short-term rentals there are performing strongly.

Northside, where Reed is based, makes his point. Pick almost any direction from there and you will find a decent neighborhood with deals that hit your return metrics. Most local investors have strong opinions about which side of town is best, and those opinions mostly track where they happen to have experience.

Why Cincinnati Real Estate Still Trades Below Replacement Cost

The 6.7% home price growth figure needs context. New construction enters the market well above Cincinnati's average home price, and that pulls the headline number up. Existing homes aren't rising 6.7% across the board.

The more useful signal for investors:

Existing homes sell below replacement cost. If a house sells for $250,000 and would cost $300,000 to build, nobody builds another one, so that inventory is capped.
Model 3% appreciation, loosely. It is a reasonable number for a pro forma. Reed warns that the more precise a forecast gets, the more certain it is to be wrong, and actual results depend on the submarket.
Affordability drives migration. A Bank of America study tied migration to affordability, which favors the Midwest broadly. After COVID, remote workers earning New York and Los Angeles salaries started choosing Ohio and Kentucky.
Cincinnati has never had a Sun Belt cycle. It fell less than the Sun Belt in the Great Recession, recovered more slowly, and has posted positive appreciation every year since COVID, cooling since its peak.

What's Working in Cincinnati

How to estimate property taxes on a Cincinnati deal:

Use the auditor's calculator. On hamiltoncountyauditor.org , pull up the parcel, enter your purchase price and read the projected tax liability. Bell Moving and Storage publishes a Hamilton County property tax rate guide that walks through the math.
Know the reappraisal calendar. Hamilton County does a full reappraisal with physical inspection every six years and an update every three years in between. The last full reappraisal was in 2023, so the next one is 2029. Hamilton County posts its 2026 update values in December. Butler County's 2026 values are already published.
Watch the millage rate as well as the valuation. Some levies are fixed budgets, so a 30% jump in assessed value does not mean a 30% jump in taxes. Butler County Auditor Nancy Nix regularly posts on Facebook about offsets that limit the actual increase. Follow both county auditors.
Expect your purchase price to become the new value. If you buy above the current assessed value, plan for the next reassessment to catch up to it.
A low basis can stay low. Reassessments without a recorded sale usually apply a percentage change across similar parcels in the same census tract. After a BRRR with a cash-out refinance, your assessed value can stay below market for years.

For entity transfers, often called a drop and swap, look into Ohio House Bill 126 before making the move.

Short-term rentals: what drives demand.

Bedroom count wins. Four- and five-bedroom properties outperform one- to three-bedroom units for vacation and entertainment stays. Bathrooms have to match, and a five-bedroom sleeping 10 needs more than one and a half baths.
Medical stays are year-round demand. Clifton and Corryville hold Cincinnati Children's, UC Medical Center, the VA hospital, Jewish Hospital and Good Samaritan. Outpatient surgery patients often need a place to stay overnight and come back for follow-ups.
Attractions drive the calendar. Kings Island in Mason, Great Wolf Lodge, the downtown stadiums, the Duke Energy Convention Center and the Cincinnati Zoo all draw visitors. The Ark Encounter and the Creation Museum in Northern Kentucky are major draws that out-of-town investors often overlook.
Summer carries the year. The local rule is that you make your money in summer and try to break even in the off-season.
Underwrite a fallback. A listener brought a Walnut Hills triplex set up as a short-term rental, with a five-bedroom main unit, a two-bedroom attic unit, basement units and three kitchens. The location near the hospitals and the zoo is strong. At the asking price, though, it would not work as a long-term rental. Before buying any short-term rental, confirm it at least breaks even as a long-term, mid-term or rent-by-the-room property.

Where BRRR budgets break. On a supposedly light-to-medium rehab, the blowouts are inside the walls and underground. The real mistake is calling an older house a light rehab in the first place.

Structural issues are usually worse than they looked, and there are often more of them than were found.
Sewer lines in older neighborhoods are often clay. Have them scoped before closing.
Opened walls in homes from the 1940s and earlier, and through the Vietnam War era, hide pipe, wiring and ductwork problems you can't price until you see them.
Floor plan changes raise costs. Moving plumbing or electrical fixtures, or changing the layout, will cost more than what is visible.

Most of Cincinnati's housing stock was built before 1978. Before you commit to a budget, establish the condition of the foundation and sewer lines and whether you will be opening walls.

Lessons From the Field: When Cincinnati Rents Went Backward

In July 2022, Cincinnati rents rose 39% year over year, the fastest pace in the country. For some trailing 12-month period in every year since, Cincinnati has ranked first in the nation for rent growth. Some of those headlines described single-family rents only. Local apartment owners saw nothing close to the 15%-plus figures that made the news.

Starting in August 2024, the rental market went flat. In parts of the Three Little Pigs portfolio, and in some of the third-party properties Reed's company manages, rents fell outright. The softness lasted through the end of 2025.

The explanation Reed and Cruz share with Robbie Hendricks of Venture Real Estate Company: three or four years of rent growth got priced into one or two years leading into 2024, and the market spent the next stretch absorbing it.

Rents have since rebounded. The experience changed how Three Little Pigs underwrites. Their deals are built to hit their returns from the purchase discount and from bringing a property up to current market rents. Rent growth is treated as a bonus.

Flat is not the worst case. Build in scenarios where rents fall for a stretch.
Your returns should survive five years of flat values and rents. Growth should add upside and should not be what makes the deal work.
Separate single-family and multifamily data. The two moved very differently in Cincinnati over the last few years.
Underwrite by submarket. New supply on the east side and zero new supply in the northwest produce different rent forecasts inside the same metro.
Price renewals against competing inventory. If comparable units are sitting vacant nearby, a rent increase can cost you the tenant.

Cincinnati Multifamily in 2026: Underwriting for 0% Rent Growth

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 15:52:33 GMT

Venture has gone full cycle 32 times without missing pro forma. This year it offered rent concessions for the first time in 13 years. Robbie Hendricks on new supply, an 18-month soft stretch, and why every underwrite now assumes 0% rent growth.

Since 2013, Venture Real Estate Company has acquired more than 3,600 multifamily units across Greater Cincinnati. It operates about 2,000 of them today and has gone full cycle 32 times, hitting or beating pro forma on every exit. This past year it offered rent concessions for the first time in 13 years. Partner Robbie Hendricks says every underwrite the firm runs now assumes 0% market rent growth.

About This Post

This analysis draws from a conversation with Robbie Hendricks , a partner at Venture Real Estate Company. He grew up in Finneytown, Evendale and Montgomery and went to Xavier. Venture self-manages its portfolio, which runs from Westwood 11-units to suburban communities in Loveland and Eastgate. That gives Hendricks a direct read on leasing, supply and pricing across the cycle.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The full episode also covers how Venture decides when to sell and Hendricks' take on Hamilton and the Spooky Nook effect.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

Subscribe on Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Where New Supply Is Pressuring Greater Cincinnati Apartments

In Cincinnati, new apartment construction never fell off a cliff the way it did in the Sun Belt. Hendricks expects it to keep parts of the region soft for the next 18 months.

Eastgate and Loveland are where Venture feels it most. Its renovated 1980s and 1990s properties there now compete with new deliveries that come with concessions and more modern amenities.
West Chester and Liberty Township are seeing the same pattern. Investors expected new supply to dry up there, and it has kept coming.
Hebron, Kentucky is getting Hebron Station, a new build by BRG. Legacy Cincinnati owners like BRG, Fath and Hills hold 5,000 to 10,000 units each and have enough capital to build even when a development pencils poorly for newer firms. PLK is also building heavily across the region.
Montgomery Quarter and PLK's newest product set the amenity bar. Hendricks says a B+ property renting within about $500 a month of those communities will struggle to lease. It has to upgrade its amenities or lower its rent.
Landen and Maineville hold Nantucket, which Fath built in 2004 as A+ product. It is a live test case for when an aging Class A property slips into B.
Hamilton has momentum. There is public investment in downtown, new restaurants like Agave & Rye, and demand spilling over from Liberty and West Chester. 80 Acres, which had roughly 200 to 300 employees, recently went under, and a lot of new apartments are going up there too.
Westwood and Cheviot are where Venture started. The properties were affordable, there were few renovated units, and absentee owners gave poor service. Local broker Steve Turman helped the partners find their early 11-unit, 28-unit and 34-unit deals there.

A standout example of a C-class asset in an A-class market: Venture bought a 1970 property less than a mile from downtown Loveland. It was known as the one place in town to avoid. Venture turned it around and added a clubhouse and pool to compete with CMC's new construction nearby.

Why Cincinnati Real Estate Cap Rates Held While the Sun Belt Reset

Transaction volume in larger Cincinnati multifamily is way down. Rates are volatile, and many would-be sellers are still anchored to 2022 valuations that no longer pencil.

What Cincinnati lacks is distress. The reasons:

Cap rates never compressed as far here. In submarkets of Dallas, buyers paid 3 caps for 1970s and 1980s B-class product. Those deals now trade in the 6s or higher, and many blew up. Cincinnati never saw that level of euphoria.
Less floating-rate debt. Bridge loans and variable-rate debt existed in Cincinnati, but far less of it than in the Sun Belt.
Cash flow can still cover the debt. Host Slocomb Reed notes that local cap rates have stayed roughly in line with post-2023 interest rates. When a loan balloons, Cincinnati owners can usually hit the DSCR to refinance. One Venture deal bought at the wrong point in the cycle still refinanced into seven-year agency debt and keeps cash flowing for its investors.

Hendricks estimates Cincinnati rents grew about 25% between 2020 and 2024. In his view, that pulled years of future rent growth into the present, and the market is still absorbing it.

The long-term story is affordability and jobs. Venture's latest investor update highlighted several signals:

Fortune reported that Florida and Texas are the biggest losers in the housing market and Ohio is the surprise winner.
Cincinnati ranks fifth among Midwest cities for homeownership under age 35, at 17%.
Biomanufacturing firm Resilience moved its headquarters from San Diego to southwest Ohio.
Billionaire Ratmir Timashev wants to turn Ohio into an AI hub, according to Forbes.
Anduril won a major Air Force fighter program, putting Ohio at the center of military tech.

For Hendricks, a balanced housing market where people can still afford to buy makes Cincinnati easier to underwrite than the boom-and-bust metros.

What's Working in Cincinnati

Venture's 2026 underwriting rules:

Lead with cash flow. Every deal has to reach a 10% cash-on-cash return by a year-three to year-five stabilization.
Assume 0% market rent growth. That holds even on value-add, where a 1970s property is being brought back to life.
Model concessions in years one and two wherever new supply is delivering nearby.
Underwrite over 7 to 10 years. Deals have to work on a long hold.
Protect your basis against new construction. Overpay for 2004 product, then renovate it, and you are all-in at the same price as a brand-new building that undercuts your rent. A 1994 B-class property bought at the right basis can rent at a discount to new supply and still work.

Hendricks says new supply has changed Venture's underwriting. The buy box shifted for a different reason: the firm's growth. As Venture hires and scales, it is moving away from scattered-site management and C-class submarkets toward 1980s-and-newer product in B-class submarkets, where processes are easier to systematize.

How to grade a property. Hendricks rates the asset and the market separately.

An A-class market has good schools, high median household incomes, low crime and people out jogging.
C-class assets include nearly everything built in the 1970s or earlier. Reed pictures Cincinnati's brick-bunker four-family and 12-family buildings, two and a half stories tall, built from the 1940s through the late 1970s.
B-class is where it gets gray. Some 1980s brick buildings are close to maintenance-free and grade as B or better. A neglected 1992 property that needs heavy CapEx can grade as C. The 1975 to 1995 range is judged deal by deal, based on how much work it needs. Reed adds forced-air HVAC as a B-class marker, since C stock tends to run on boilers, baseboard electric and through-wall units.
Class A is defined by amenities: dog-wash stations, pickleball courts, gyms and lobby workspace. Venture added a pickleball court at a 2000-built property, and residents love it.

Scaling into larger deals. Hendricks has three pieces of advice for operators moving from four units to 40 and beyond:

Build LP relationships before you need the money. Raising in a hurry comes across as desperate.
Show mastery at each size before moving up. Venture's 11-unit and 34-unit deals built the track record that got it considered for a 68-unit.
Target portfolios of smaller properties over single 150- to 200-unit assets. Big deals sold by brokers like Kurt Shoemaker, Matt Newcomer and Nathan Murphy trade efficiently against institutions with lower cost of capital. Small-property portfolios are messier, and that is where newer buyers find discounts. Reed and co-host Ian Cruz recently bought one from a distressed seller at a discount that does not exist at 120-plus units.

What doesn't work: reading every buyer who pays more as overpaying. Some groups run on longer horizons or cheaper capital. Venture only bids to its own LP return requirements.

Lessons From the Field: The First Concessions in 13 Years

For 13 years, Venture never gave away a free month. Rents rose at every renewal, and occupancy sat near 98%.

Then new deliveries on the east side and in the northern suburbs started leasing with concessions. Some of Venture's nicer properties dropped to 88% and 89% occupancy.

The team had never offered concessions and had to work out the basics, like whether to offer them only on new leases or on renewals too. Every leasing process got stress-tested. Hendricks says a strong market had hidden operational inefficiencies for years across the industry.

Venture responded by competing on amenities and on rent gaps as small as $50. It also started offering 18-month and 24-month leases so that expirations don't bunch up during the next 18 months of expected softness.

Today Venture offers no concessions, and its stabilized portfolio is at 95% occupancy. Hendricks counts that as a sign the new supply is being absorbed.

A strong market can hide weak operations. Years of 98% occupancy made operators look better than they were.
Settle your concession policy before you need it. Decide ahead of time who gets them, new leases or renewals, and for how long.
Use lease length as a tool. Staggered 18- and 24-month terms protect the rent roll through a soft stretch.
Small rent gaps matter in a competitive market. $50 a month can decide a lease when new product is offering a free month.
Treat a soft market as a stress test. Venture came out with tighter systems and back at 95%.

How to Find Cash-Flowing Furnished Rentals in the Cincinnati Market in 2026

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 12:45:22 GMT

How to Find Cash-Flowing Furnished Rentals in the Cincinnati Market in 2026

Cincinnati short-term rental operator Yiwei Cheng breaks down what's working in 2026: which neighborhoods are still viable, what regulations have changed, how to evaluate property specs, and why midterm rentals are reshaping the furnished rental playbook.

The Cincinnati furnished rental market has about 3,000 active listings right now, per AirDNA. Supply is essentially flat year-over-year, up just 0.4%, after peaking at 3,583 in July 2024. Rates have softened. A one-bedroom in Norwood that commanded $1,700 per month a couple years ago is booking closer to $1,500 today. The townships that drove suburban STR growth over the past four years have largely shut the door.

This is not a catastrophe. It is a market that has repriced.

The Cincy REI Show brought in Yiwei Cheng, owner of Pink Cash Cow Property Management, to walk through what that repricing means for investors evaluating furnished rentals in Greater Cincinnati right now. Yiwei has managed roughly 30 properties across the market and set up over 40 since 2019. She started with arbitrage, survived a multi-year zoning lawsuit in Symmes Township, and has built a portfolio spanning downtown condos to large suburban homes in Mason and Loveland.

Hosts Slocomb Reed and Ian Cruz, CPA run The Cincy REI Show as the definitive on-the-ground resource for Cincinnati real estate investing, featuring local operators, property managers, attorneys, and investors who are actively transacting in the market.

Where Cincinnati Furnished Rentals Are Still Viable After Suburban Bans Reshaped the Map

Regulation is the first filter. Before evaluating a property's bedroom count or amenity profile, investors need to confirm whether short-term rentals are legally allowed at that address.

City of Cincinnati proper: STRs are explicitly permitted under city law. You register, pay lodging taxes, and operate. This is the most stable regulatory environment in the Greater Cincinnati market.

Viable suburban areas (as of early 2026):

Loveland: STRs allowed, active supply, strong clustering near the bike trail
City of Mason: permits required but allowed, large-home inventory performs well, especially around the Western & Southern Open tennis tournament
Mason-adjacent townships: Yiwei has operated a property here for five years with no active regulation against STRs

Areas where the door has closed or is closing:

Blue Ash: banned
Terrace Park: banned
Mariemont: banned
West Chester Township: moratorium recently passed after hundreds of active listings
Liberty Township: moratorium recently passed
Symmes Township: new permits denied; three grandfathered properties remain after a multi-year court win at the First District Court of Appeals
Newport: technically allows one zoning classification for STRs, but residential availability in that zone is minimal
Covington: allowed with a stacked licensing requirement covering multiple permits and inspections before the STR license itself
Bellevue: allowed only as a primary residence with day limits

The pattern is consistent. When a township faces neighbor complaints and lacks the authority to levy taxes like a city, it reaches for zoning mechanisms and variance requirements, then denies all permits. West Chester and Liberty followed the same path Blue Ash and Terrace Park took before them.

For investors already operating in West Chester or Liberty, Yiwei's read is direct: if you were operating prior to the moratorium, the grandfathering argument is worth exploring with a zoning attorney. That is the same legal theory that produced the Symmes Township win.

For midterm rentals (30 days or more), the regulatory question changes entirely. Ohio rental code governs monthly tenancy, and no township can restrict that. Converted inventory in West Chester and Liberty is already flowing toward furnished midterm and long-term rentals as a result.

Higher Supply, Softer Rates, and Township Bans Are Reshaping How Cincinnati Furnished Rental Deals Underwrite

Three structural shifts are hitting the Cincinnati STR market simultaneously in 2026.

1. Supply plateaued after a surge Listings roughly doubled between 2020 and 2023. The market has since plateaued around 3,000 to 3,600 listings. New supply is still trickling in, but the dramatic growth phase is over.

2. Rates have softened from peak years Operators who anchored expectations to 2021 or 2022 revenue are getting reset. A two-bedroom property that generated $4,500 per month may be producing $3,000 or less today. Nightly rates in peak season are compressing. Investors evaluating entry points need to underwrite to current achievable rates, not peak comps.

3. Guest expectations have risen In 2020 and 2021, demand was high enough that substandard properties still booked. Properties on busy roads, with one bathroom, or awkward layouts filled regardless. That is no longer true. Guests are filtering on bathroom count, parking availability, and layout before booking. Properties that don't clear those bars either price to the bottom or sit empty.

What this means for underwriting:

Pro forma STR revenue against current AirDNA actuals, not 2022 comps
Model a comparison against long-term rental rates before committing to the STR strategy
Factor in management intensity for amenities like hot tubs: the revenue upside is real, but so is the labor cost
Account for regulatory risk in any non-Cincinnati proper location; township ordinances can change within 60 days, as Yiwei witnessed firsthand

Cincinnati House Flipping in 2026: Deals, Scope, and Pricing

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 12:13:13 GMT

Contingent offers are back for the first time in five years and showings have slowed. Rebecca Sequeira, who has made money on every flip since 2016, on what she still buys, what she puts in every house, and when she cuts the price.

Rebecca Sequeira has flipped houses full-time in Greater Cincinnati since 2016. She now runs six to seven remodels a year, with active projects in Amelia, Batavia, Milford, Morrow, Kennedy Heights, Colerain and Deer Park. She is also a Coldwell Banker agent who closes 6 to 15 transactions a year for other clients, so she sees the resale market from both sides as it softens in 2026. Over half of her deals come from other realtors. She has made money on every flip since her second house nine years ago.

About This Post

This analysis draws from a conversation with Rebecca Sequeira , a full-time house flipper and Coldwell Banker realtor based in West Chester. She has a background in industrial engineering and construction project management. She writes every scope herself and has spent nine years building a bench of 30 to 35 subcontractors. That gives her a builder's read on what Cincinnati buyers will pay for.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The full episode also covers her creative deal structures, including a reverse-mortgage rent-back, a subject-to purchase and a land contract sale, plus live audience Q&A from the August mastermind.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

Subscribe on Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Where a Full-Time Flipper Is Buying in Greater Cincinnati Right Now

Sequeira's target ARV runs from $250,000 to $600,000, and her sweet spot is $300,000 to $500,000. She has sold as low as $120,000 and as high as $840,000. She prefers the suburbs and stays away from the West Side and downtown Cincinnati, though she has flipped in Clifton.

Milford holds her heaviest structural job right now. Termite damage had collapsed the floor into the crawl space. The crew ended up replacing 100% of the floor joists, the center beam, all of the subfloor and about three-fourths of the walls.
Morrow has a 1960s ranch under renovation, her favorite age of house to remodel. This one came with all-copper plumbing, and her plumber still replaces much of it because old copper thins over time.
Batavia is a teardown. She bought it from a wholesaler and found it in worse shape than expected. She demolished it, and her architect designed a two-story to build in its place.
Kennedy Heights is where her current listing sits. Comps supported $410,000. She listed at $389,000 and is still working to sell it (the full story is below).
Amelia, Colerain and Deer Park round out her active projects.
Loveland is the strongest resale signal in her book. A listing she took for friends went up at $735,000. It drew eight offers in the first day and a half and sits almost $50,000 over asking. She also holds a Loveland rental she bought subject-to the existing mortgage. It is 2,000 square feet, worth roughly $400,000 to $425,000, and rents for $3,300 a month.

Why Cincinnati Real Estate Now Rewards Pricing Discipline

Sequeira has more deals than she can take on. Her pressure points are rising costs and a resale market that has turned soft over the last six months.

Days on market are stretching. Until about two years ago, her listings went under contract in one or two days. Over the last 9 to 12 months that window has widened, and a non-flip listing of hers has now been on the market about three weeks.
Showings are slower. Her newest flip listing got one showing on day one, two on day two and one on day three. A year earlier, every interested buyer would have come through on the first day.
Contingent offers are back. This is the first time in five to six years she has seen buyers write offers that depend on selling their current home.
Price drops cut across all price points. In the realtor-only Facebook groups she follows, agents with well-priced listings are reporting zero showings.
Location and school district decide who sells. The Loveland multiple-offer listing and the stalled Kennedy Heights flip hit the market at the same time.

Her rule: if a listing gets no offers and no significant traffic in the first week, she adjusts the price. She never waits longer than two weeks.

Reed sees a related pattern on the multifamily side. For fully occupied duplex-to-sixplex listings, his team requires a verifiable preapproval and advance notice before any showing. Only about 5% of requested showings happen, since 80% to 90% of inquiries are agents chasing a fresh Zillow lead. The buyers who do show up are writing offers at the expected price.

What's Working in Cincinnati

5 scope standards Sequeira applies at every price point:

She replaces aging mechanicals. Water heaters and furnaces 12 to 15 years old come out even if they still work. The goal is to give a buyer no reason to pass.
Every house gets granite countertops. She has never installed a laminate countertop or a plastic tub surround, on houses from $120,000 up.
Fixtures are name-brand, and tile is cheap. Her plumber installs only Delta, Moen or Kohler, and nothing comes off Amazon. Most of her tile costs $2 to $3 a square foot. Shower niches and accent tile carry the higher-end look.
She redesigns for how people live now. Any one-bath house gets a second bathroom. Kitchens are almost always reconfigured. Closet pantries come out and are replaced with stacked one-foot-deep cabinets. In the Morrow house, she moved the refrigerator next to the rest of the kitchen, turned its old spot into a coffee bar, and sank a pantry cabinet into the dead space above the basement stairs.
Every house is move-in ready. She installs all new stainless appliances, including a French-door refrigerator. She stages most listings for $2,000 to $3,000, which is a couple of percentage points on a rehab of about $100,000. Buyers putting 3% down often cannot find another $3,000 for appliances, and many will walk out of a house without them.

She holds back where buyers will not pay more. She does not swap every interior door. Higher-priced houses get hardwood running through the kitchen, while lower-priced ones get LVP. Every change is judged by one question: will somebody pay more for the house because of it?

Her pitch at sales meetings is that she wants the houses other agents won't touch: cigarette smoke, cat urine, deferred everything. The agent earns two commissions and never has to market the ugly version.

Returns and capital. She and her husband target a minimum 15% return on the total cash in each deal, and they do not annualize it. They have bought with cash for the last several years. Her current volume just pushed her into her first hard money loan in seven years.

The contractor bench. All of her contractors are 1099 subs, and most bill $75 to $85 an hour, with electricians and plumbers charging more. She keeps 30 to 35 of them on her list, and at least 20 touch any one house. She hires on three criteria, in this order: work ethic, quality, then price. She pays deposits only for material-heavy trades like siding and roofing. Carpenters and full-rewire electricians bill in phases, and everyone else invoices at completion. Most of her subs came by referral from other subs, and Cincinnati REIA members can download a contractor spreadsheet that includes her crew.

What does not work: gutting a house to the studs when it doesn't need it, and using cheap finishes to make up for paying too much at purchase. You make your money when you buy.

Lessons From the Field: When a Well-Priced Flip Sits in Kennedy Heights

Sequeira finished a flip in Kennedy Heights that buyers consistently called gorgeous. The location was the problem. It sits next to a four-family with a backyard full of trash, across from more four-families and a vacant lot.

Comps supported $410,000. She listed at $389,000 to account for the location.

A full-price offer came in on the first day. It was contingent on the buyers selling their own Loveland home, which was worth $150,000 more. She accepted it on a form that kept her listing active, so the market never saw it as pending.

The buyers' home had solar panels, which turned out to be a drag on its sale, and it was priced too high. It did not sell. After three weeks, the buyers canceled over the weekend.

The contract had frozen her price for those three weeks. She also skipped open houses because she already had an offer. Showing feedback kept repeating one line: could you pick it up and move it three houses down?

On the day of the recording, she cut the price and lined up other agents to host open houses that weekend. She is also pricing a privacy fence against the neighboring lot. The house was still unsold at the time of the recording.

A location discount can exceed what the comps imply. Pricing $21,000 under comps did not offset what sat next door.
A contingent offer is only as strong as the buyer's own house. Check how that house is priced and what could slow its sale before accepting.
Keep marketing while a contingent contract is open. Stay active and keep holding open houses.
Put the listing on a clock. One week without offers or real traffic triggers a price review. Two weeks is the limit.
Fix what you can control. A privacy fence is a cheap test against a location objection that price alone has not solved.

Self-Manage or Hire a PM? A Cincinnati Broker's Rental Math

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 12:32:34 GMT

Self-manage if you're trying to save money. Hire out if you're trying to save time. Bri Leichliter built a Cincinnati property management company, sold it, and still owns five units — here's the math behind that split.

Bri Leichliter, a Realtor licensed in Ohio and Kentucky, signed her first Cincinnati property management client in April 2021, built an independent brokerage around that business, and sold it in October 2025. She still manages construction for those former clients, consults brokerages on property management systems, and owns five rental units across Westwood, White Oak, North College Hill, and Dayton, Ohio. That mix gives her a working view of Cincinnati real estate from the owner, manager, and contractor side at once.

This analysis draws from a conversation with Bri Leichliter , Realtor (Ohio and Kentucky) and property management consultant. Leichliter's years running a PM company for mostly out-of-state owners, combined with her own house hacks and BRRR, give her direct visibility into what separates rentals that build wealth from rentals that drain it.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The full episode also covers her move from GE Aviation supply chain into real estate, and her plans to invest in 55+ and assisted living housing.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

Subscribe on Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Where to House Hack and Hold Small Multifamily in Greater Cincinnati

Every month of 2026, the MLS has shown cash-flow-positive single-family and small multifamily listings in Greater Cincinnati. Two-to-four-family buildings sit in nearly every neighborhood, so a house hack does not require moving to a low-income area.

Hyde Park, Oakley, Deer Park, and Amberley Village all carry small multifamily inventory in some of the highest-income parts of the region. Side-by-side units are rare, so expect a neighbor above or below you.
Westwood has strong small multifamily pockets, and location on its long cross streets matters. Leichliter's four-unit sits on Westwood Northern Boulevard north of Montana, near the Mount Airy dog park. Westwood Northern, Harrison Avenue, and Glenway cut through so many neighborhoods that the block matters as much as the street.
Mount Washington was her first house hack, a duplex bought directly from the seller off Craigslist in 2019 with a conventional loan.
Northside was her second house hack, a duplex on Jerome . She sold both house hacks as a capital play and kept every property she bought as a rental.
North College Hill holds her single-family BRRR. She bought with hard money, placed a tenant, and refinanced. The same tenant has stayed three years.
White Oak is where she bought her first single-family home, which she still owns.
Northern Kentucky has small multifamily in some of its best areas, including a four-family in Devou Park that Slocomb Reed's company manages. Prices and rents run lower than the Ohio side.

Why One Rental Rarely Builds Wealth in the Cincinnati Real Estate Market

A rental that nets $100 a month loses five years of cash flow to one furnace. Leichliter's position is direct: a single rental property is not making anybody rich, and after real expenses many single-property owners are paying into it every month.

Rental wealth comes from scale and appreciation. Some of her PM clients ignored cash flow entirely and bought for appreciation and tax strategy. Most were out of state, many on the West Coast, drawn by Midwest price points and rents. Several had self-managed for years using a trusted local handyman as their eyes on the ground.

Her framework for who should self-manage:

Self-manage if your goal is saving money. Local investors with flip experience, trade skills, or contractor relationships hold an edge over someone who inherited a house.
Hire a property manager if your goal is saving time. Owners who earn hundreds of dollars an hour should spend those hours earning, and a strong PM passes along contractor volume discounts.
Plan for the ceiling. Self-management caps out at the number of doors one person can run, unless you build an internal operations team.
Consider passive equity. Some investors belong in real estate syndication as limited partners. Professional operators budget CapEx reserves and risk, which raises the floor on returns.

House hacking gets judged by the wrong metric. A successful house hack reduces your personal housing cost, even if the property would never cash flow as a standalone rental. A Hyde Park owner who would pay $4,000 to $5,000 a month and drops to $2,000 out of pocket has a working house hack.

What's Working in Cincinnati

Leichliter's buy box has moved to five units minimum, more likely 10 and up. One vacancy in a single-family turns the asset into a liability. Multiple units in one location spread that risk.

On rehabs, she runs three rules:

Write a full scope before work starts. Hand contractors your own checklist so nothing inside or outside the unit is skipped. Budget creep comes from add-ons the original scope missed.
Open the walls behind new finishes. If new cabinets or a shower surround are going in, check the plumbing stack first. Pre-1978 homes, 1920s Cape Cods with knob-and-tube, and galvanized steel lines carry the most risk.
Scope every sewer line. A sewer scope runs about $350. A recent replacement quote she received came in above $30,000. Remodeled homes can still tie into clay pipe.

The same discipline applies at acquisition. During due diligence on a large scattered-site portfolio purchase, Slocomb and Ian's maintenance technicians ran the inspections. Some sewer lines could not be scoped, and March weather ruled out testing older AC equipment. The underwriting assigned a failure rate to each risk and budgeted a dollar amount per item.

Lessons From the Field: Whoever Controls the Money Controls the Project

After the sale closed, Leichliter kept managing construction for former PM clients. A new fiduciary controlled the client funds, and she had no access to payments.

Contractors finished work and waited. Late payments triggered stop-work orders and walk-offs on other projects. Clients with no connection to the delay absorbed the fallout.

Her fix was a one-strike rule. If a contractor is paid late once after a completed, walked job, the client pays contractors directly from then on.

Buy your own materials. Give contractors access to your Home Depot Pro account and approve purchases. Order fixtures yourself to control finish level.
Skip the 50% deposit when you supply materials. Tie draws to completed work, agreed in writing, and walk the job before final payment.
Pay 50% up front for roofing, foundation, and HVAC. On HVAC, equipment often exceeds half the job cost.
Keep the money available before work starts. Slow pay burns through good contractors, and the next job gets harder to staff.

Where Cincinnati Investors Are Finding Deals After Madisonville

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 12:57:08 GMT

Houses that sold for $30,000 in Madisonville now trade at $125,000 to $150,000 still needing full renovations. A property manager with 700-plus units on where the next wave is going, and why the 12-unit building is the target.

Ten years ago, investors bought houses in Madisonville for $30,000 to $40,000. Today those same houses, still needing $50,000 to $70,000 in renovations, trade at $125,000 to $150,000 on the low end. The source is a property manager overseeing more than 700 units across Greater Cincinnati, mostly east side multifamily from Milford to Northside, with a working view of rents, lease-ups, and code enforcement before the listing data shows it.

About This Post

This analysis draws from a conversation with George Emmons , property manager and investor with Keller Williams Seven Hills Realty. Emmons and his father have managed and invested on the east side since 2008, and his team now manages more than 700 units, from a 115-unit independent living facility in Milford to quads in nearly every neighborhood.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The full episode also covers how the family business grew from one building into a management company, and Slocomb Reed's approach to contesting City of Cincinnati violation notices.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

Subscribe on Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Where Cincinnati Investors Are Buying After Madisonville Repriced

Madisonville hit critical mass around 10 years ago, when mixed-use retail with apartments above went up along Madison Road. Deals still exist, but buyers now pay a premium over neighborhoods that have not crossed that line.
Over-the-Rhine followed the same path 20 years ago, when 3CDC and later Model Group bought and developed large sections at once.
Carthage still has $40,000 to $50,000 houses and a strong Hispanic community along Vine Street. The upside is real, and it is a 10-year hold.
Norwood has a long rental track record, and Factory 52 already shifted its rental landscape. A planned development near Harris Avenue, north of Factory 52 and south of the Norwood Lateral, stalled during COVID. If it restarts, parts of Norwood could move faster than Carthage.
St. Bernard leases up quickly. It sits just east of Exit 6 on I-75, near the Lateral, and one neighborhood up from the zoo, the hospitals, and UC. The stock is Cape Cods, early 1900s duplexes and three-families, and 1950s to 1970s fourplexes and 12-units. The largest building seen trading there was 17 units, and the city resists added density, so subdividing is hard.
Milford, Loveland, and Lebanon keep growing around walkable old-school downtowns. Home values in old downtown Milford nearly quadrupled in 10 years.
Goshen, Amelia, and Withamsville absorb buyers priced out of Milford and Loveland. The developable acreage is here, alongside 1940s to 1960s ranches and split levels that command a rent premium from school district demand.

Price-Outs, Walkable Downtowns, and Code Enforcement Are Reshaping Cincinnati Deals

The third shift is regulatory. St. Bernard rolled out a new rental registration program this year, with in-unit fire safety inspections every two years. Inspectors check outlets, egress windows, and bedroom privacy doors. Owners with unpermitted basement units will get caught. Norwood residents already call their city "a big HOA." Enforcement is a revenue driver for cities, and it also protects property values, which benefits owners who maintain their buildings.

What's Working in Cincinnati

For Multifamily Real Estate Investing in 2026, the 12-unit building is the sweet spot. It delivers economy of scale without a $25 million check or a stack of JV Partnerships. The 1960s and 1970s 12-unit vintage appears in nearly every neighborhood, and larger complexes are often multiples of 12.

Vacancy tolerance. One empty unit in a 12-unit barely dents cash flow. One empty unit in a duplex is half the income.
Staffing. A maintenance person handling unit turns has enough work to stay with you.
Value-add supply. Larger Cincinnati complexes have mostly cycled through renovations. Many 12-units have sat in one family for 60 years with no updates in 15 to 20, leaving room for $300 to $500 rent increases and a cash-out refinance.

Valuation is where Real Estate Underwriting and Due Diligence gets difficult. One to four units comp on sales. Forty units and up trade on NOI and cap rate. A 12-unit sits between them. Start with a market rent analysis, find the best-day rent and the worst-day rent, and underwrite close to the worst day. If top-dollar rent in the area is $900, a deal that needs $1,050 will never support the valuation.

Rookie investors most often miss renovation numbers and big-ticket hidden capex, such as crushed gutter drain lines that require excavation. On a single-family house, one of those problems can sink the project. Across 12 units, it hurts without killing the deal.

Lessons From the Field: When Code Enforcement Sets the Timeline

A CMHA tenant had lived in one Norwood house for more than 15 years. She passed away after health issues. Her family took over the house, could not handle the cleanup, and left belongings on the sidewalk without telling anyone.

That pile exposed the owner to a $500 trash fine if a neighbor called it in. Clearing the house required a dumpster permit, and Naorwood quoted three to four days for an inspector to confirm the placement area.

The decision was to send an extra crew immediately to move everything off the sidewalk and stage it in the side yard until the dumpster arrived.

Slocomb Reed saw the other side of enforcement in the City of Cincinnati. Two violations in Roselawn and Westwood cited belongings blocking the sidewalk, when the items sat in the grass strip between the sidewalk and the road. His team cleared both sites within hours, contested both notices, and had both fines dismissed because the inspector wrote the wrong violation.

Know each municipality's permit timeline before you need it. A three-to-four-day dumpster approval in Norwood can leave a sidewalk pile exposed to fines for days.
Clear first, then argue. Removing items within hours limits the fine and strengthens any appeal.
Read the violation as written. A citation for the wrong condition can be contested at a hearing.
Budget compliance into every Norwood and St. Bernard deal. Inspections, permits, and fines belong in the underwriting.
Scale absorbs surprises. A long-tenured tenant's turnover, a fine, and a cleanout hit a single-family owner far harder than a 12-unit owner.

Cincinnati Commercial Real Estate: Where the Suburban Deals Are

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 09:40:10 GMT

Suburban office trades near a 10 cap while retail and industrial compress to six and seven. Tanh Truong on why half-empty office in Blue Ash is the one Cincinnati asset class where basis is still negotiable.

Suburban office in Blue Ash, Kenwood, and Montgomery runs around 85% occupied. Drop into a C-class pocket like Silverton and the same asset class sits at 50% or less. That spread is where non-residential commercial value sits in Greater Cincinnati right now, and it is why an investor controlling over $50 million in retail, office, and industrial buys inside the 275 loop and stays out of the urban core.

About This Post

This analysis draws from a conversation with Tanh Truong of Invest Beyond Multifamily, a lifelong Cincinnatian who came up through residential wholesaling, flipping, and buy-and-hold before moving into non-residential commercial. His firm controls over $50 million in retail, office, and industrial assets and runs an accredited fund, with much of that activity in the Cincinnati MSA.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The full episode also includes a live screen-share walkthrough of active Cincinnati listings and how he screens them in under a minute each.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

Subscribe on Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Where Office, Retail, and Industrial Deals Sit in Greater Cincinnati

The screening starts with the terrain view of the map rather than the road view, because rooflines show where commercial development already sits. Everything worth buying clusters within about 15 minutes of the 275 loop.

Blue Ash, Sharonville, Montgomery, and Kenwood are the office targets. Occupancy in the better buildings runs near 85%, and these submarkets sit directly in the path of commercial development along the loop.
Downtown and the CBD are avoided outright. Parking is difficult, and office there took the worst of the post-COVID damage with little recovery since.
Silverton and comparable C-class pockets run 50% occupancy or less in office, with limited inventory to begin with.
Fairfield along Route 4 and Dixie Highway carries roughly 40,000 vehicles per day, a signalized intersection, national fast food, and Jungle Jim's as a regional draw. The city's economic development department is openly pro-business.
Lockland works for industrial because of its proximity to I-75. It does not work for retail or office.
Harrison Avenue on the west side is seeing real activity, including Dunkin', hotels, restaurants, and a Kroger relocation, in an area that runs C-class through Cheviot and improves toward Bridgetown.
Reading and Mason round out the retail list, with a preference for strip centers carrying three or more units.
Middletown stalled for years behind a city council that fought internally and was not business friendly, though reports on that are improving.

Industrial follows the arteries instead. I-75 matters most, then I-71, then I-74, with I-275 serving circulation rather than intercity freight. State routes 28 toward Goshen, 32, US 50, and US 52 all support industrial demand, as does proximity to the airport.

Suburban Office Is Repricing While Retail and Industrial Compress

Three asset classes in the same MSA are priced on three different curves right now.

What's Working in Cincinnati

Price per square foot is the fastest filter. Normal build cost in this market runs $150 to $200 per square foot, and custom runs $250 to $400, so anything above $200 gets skipped and anything under $150 gets a second look. Deals still under $100 per square foot exist here.

What is not working: filtering LoopNet or Crexi by cap rate, since those numbers come from broker pro formas rather than actuals, and buying a fully leased center at a seven cap with no vacancy, no below-market leases, and no excess land, which is parking money rather than investing it.

Lessons From the Field: How One Fairfield Strip Center Produced Three Wins

The center sits a mile and a half up Dixie Highway, on a signalized intersection carrying about 40,000 vehicles per day, next to a McDonald's and a Wendy's. Those two do their own site research before they build, which makes them free validation of the location. Inside the center, a Dollar Tree and later an O'Reilly's drew the traffic that kept the smaller tenants full.

Underwrite the neighbors before the building. A national brand next door has already paid for the site study, and their presence prices into your leasability.
Look for the land nobody is using. Excess parking or frontage can be parceled out and sold, ground leased, or built on, which resets the basis on the center behind it.
Call the economic development department early. Sitting in on a city council meeting shows whether the body is unified, and a unified council approves things a fractured one will not.
Signalized traffic is a real underwriting input. Cars that stop see the storefront, which is why counts and signage rank alongside rent roll on retail.

Cincinnati School Districts: Where Rent Growth Beats Appreciation

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 13:43:25 GMT

$1,900 in Winton Woods, $1,643 in Oak Hills, same bedroom count. What a 100-plus unit portfolio across nine districts reveals about which Cincinnati houses should stay rentals and which should be sold.

A three-bedroom single-family home in the Winton Woods school district supports $1,900 in market rent. The same bedroom count in Oak Hills supports $1,643. Both numbers come out of one 100-plus unit portfolio of single-family homes and duplexes across Greater Cincinnati, and that spread is why school district now sits near the front of the underwriting, deciding which houses stay rentals and which get renovated and sold to first-time buyers.

About This Post

This analysis draws from a conversation between Slocomb Reed and Ian Cruz, CPA , of Three Little Pigs Investment Services. The portfolio behind it went under LOI in January 2026, was walked property by property, was managed under a master lease from May, and closed in early August, giving them unit-level data on rents, condition, and value across nine school districts.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The full episode also covers the complete rent breakdown by bedroom count and district, and how the master lease put them in operational control three months before closing.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

Subscribe on Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Where Rents and Values Diverge by Cincinnati School District

Average rent across the single-family homes in this portfolio is $1,473 a month, which is close to useless on its own. Bedroom counts run from two to five, with three-bedrooms the majority. In-place rent on a three-bedroom is $1,450, live Zillow data supports $1,714, and the underwriting assumption was $1,696. The district-level numbers are where decisions get made.

Winton Woods and Princeton carry the highest market rents in the portfolio, and values have grown faster than those rents. Both are expected to produce owner-occupant sales.
Oak Hills supports $1,643 on a three-bedroom. Those homes were acquired more recently and run smaller than the Winton Woods and Princeton stock.
Northwest sits on the same side of the line, where equity growth over a five-year hold outpaces cash flow growth.
North College Hill and Mount Healthy rent below the highest-rent districts, and the value gap to those districts is far wider than the rent gap, keeping them in the cash flow column.
Finneytown rents higher than its rent rank suggests, a function of higher bedroom counts in those houses rather than district demand.
St. Bernard-Elmwood Place posts the lowest rents in the portfolio, driven by properties sitting in Elmwood Place specifically rather than the district as a whole.
Cincinnati Public Schools covers too many neighborhoods, census tracts, and income levels to underwrite as one market. Inside CPS the hold-or-sell answer changes by neighborhood and sometimes by block.

Why Some Cincinnati Houses Are Worth More to a Buyer Than a Renter

The seller assembled this portfolio starting in the late 1990s. One Madisonville house was bought for $10,000 and permitted up to a four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath in 2010, when Madisonville was still a lower-income rental neighborhood. It has been run as one ever since, and several Forest Park homes in the Winton Woods district follow the same pattern. Values climbed much faster than rents while the operating mindset stayed in 2005, and that gap is where the margin sat for a repositioning buyer.

The mechanics come down to return on equity. Where equity compounds faster than cash flow, ROE falls every year a house stays a rental, and renovating to owner-occupant condition captures what the rental use leaves behind. Renovated three to five bedroom homes here are expected to resell below $250,000, inside the range a first-time buyer can reach. Where rent growth has kept pace with value growth, those houses hold their yield and are worth keeping, or selling as a bundle to a portfolio investor pricing off NOI and cap rate.

The same discipline applies to mechanical risk in Cincinnati real estate at this scale. R22 was phased out more than 15 years ago, so any system still running it was underwritten for replacement within five years. R410A became illegal to manufacture at the start of 2025, and its replacements, R32 and R454B, cost more to install because the refrigerant is flammable. The assumption was replacing 25 to 55 percent of R410A systems within five years.

What's Working in Cincinnati

What is not working: underwriting a Cincinnati portfolio off a blended average rent, and treating Cincinnati Public Schools as one homogeneous district. Both hide the divergence that decides hold or sell.

Lessons From the Field: Three Maintenance Items That Set Your Sale Price

Walking every property surfaced the same three items. All three started as routine seasonal maintenance.

Tree branches were growing into roofs across multiple properties with no trimming for years. Roofs and gutter systems that could have been maintained are now beyond repair, and replacement runs thousands per property, in many cases over $10,000. Seasonal trimming costs a couple hundred dollars.

Water was getting into basements. Rainwater collecting against foundation walls creates pressure that cracks and buckles them, and the fix is steel reinforcement plus a waterproofing system at $10,000 to $20,000. A French drain on a sloped lot costs around $2,000.

Drains ran slow rather than backing up completely, so nobody addressed them. Wastewater sitting in old pipes and escaping through seams deteriorated floors, subfloors, and joists, and failed structural members turned up during due diligence.

The seller did replace cast-iron stacks with PVC, update windows, refresh kitchens and baths with LVP flooring, and keep HVAC current. The three neglected items still cost them the sale price, because each one became a negotiated discount at closing.

Deferred maintenance sets your exit price. Every item found during due diligence became a concession, which is the entire reason the basis works for the buyer.
Trim trees on a seasonal schedule. A few hundred dollars a year protects a roof and gutter system that costs five figures to replace.
Control water before it reaches the foundation. Grade the ground away from the structure and add drainage on sloped lots before the wall moves.
Treat a slow drain as a structural issue. Damage lands in subfloors and joists long before the line fully backs up, and all three of these are priceable problems for a buyer.

Boone County Multifamily: Why a 2021 Peak Buy Still Worked

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:31:28 GMT

The renovation ran 2.5x over budget and produced 3x the rent bump. John Casmon on the Boone County data behind an 81-unit Florence buy, and the census-tract tool he uses instead of radius reports.

An 81-unit townhome community in Florence bought at the top of the 2021 market sold at a profit while comparable Sun Belt vintage sold at a loss. This post breaks down the Boone County data that justified the buy, the renovation budget that ran 2.5x over and produced 3x the rent bump, and the submarket screening process behind it, including a free census-tract income tool most investors never open.

About This Post

This analysis draws from a conversation with John Casmon , general partner on over $150 million of apartment deals, host of the Multifamily Insights podcast, and owner of United Water Restoration Group. Casmon bought a 28-unit Cincinnati building while still living in Chicago, moved to Greater Cincinnati in 2019, and has hosted a local investor meetup for seven years.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The full episode also covers rate cap mechanics and counterparty risk, the BiggerPockets era and what replaced it, and Casmon's Cincinnati hidden gems.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

Subscribe on Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

New Paragraph

This deal has come up on the show from the other side. Joe Fairless cited it as the counterexample to the 2021 Sun Belt losses in Why Cincinnati Multifamily Avoided the 2021 Cap Rate Trap , which covers the rate cap math that broke deals of the same vintage elsewhere.

Boone County, Norwood, and the Montgomery Corridor: Where Investors Are Buying

Casmon's buy board is built on population direction rather than neighborhood reputation. He looks for markets that are already moving so he does not have to move them himself.

Boone County, Northern Kentucky is the anchor of the thesis. At the time Casmon ran his research, the county had posted 30-plus consecutive years of population growth. That streak covers the dot-com boom, the 2008 recession, and everything in between, which is what made it a durable signal rather than a recent trend. Boone County sits off I-71 and I-75, just outside I-275, and holds the Cincinnati airport, which is physically in Kentucky. Amazon had announced a $1.5 billion cargo hub at that airport and had not yet broken ground when Casmon underwrote his Florence deal. Boone County is the western end of the Northern Kentucky opportunity. For the river cities east of it, Covington, Newport, Bellevue, and Dayton, see Northern Kentucky Real Estate: Reading Covington and Newport Block by Block .
The Montgomery Corridor , which is also Highway 22, has been circled on Casmon's buy board for seven or eight years on the recommendation of a principal at 3CRE. It runs from Evanston near Xavier University through Norwood, Pleasant Ridge, Kennedy Heights, Silverton, Deer Park, and Kenwood before reaching the suburbs, with a section in Indian Hill schools and Blue Ash in Sycamore schools. What makes it work is access. I-71 and I-75 both run north and south alongside those neighborhoods, so a renter can reach most of the metro quickly from any of them.
Silverton, Pleasant Ridge, and Norwood are the pockets inside that corridor Casmon flags as opportunity. The pricier stretches sit further north. Casmon owns in Norwood and calls it an older neighborhood with real tradeoffs, offset by continued investment: streets being redone, new facilities, and ongoing infrastructure work. These same three neighborhoods carry a well-defined small multifamily play at the fourplex level, broken down in Cincinnati's Fourplex Playbook .
Butler and Warren Counties are where Casmon is bullish on the data and cautious on the math. The stock skews newer construction, which often stops penciling as deal size grows. Smaller three-unit and four-unit deals are where he sees those counties working.
Westwood serves as his counterexample on exit liquidity. Buyers who want Westwood want it for cash flow and the money they can make, so they negotiate hard and will not pay a premium. Casmon prefers markets where a future buyer believes in the location over the long haul, which is what lets him exit a deal even when his own business plan misses.

One local boundary worth driving. Cross the railroad tracks going east out of Wyoming into Lockland and the shift is immediate and obvious in the street signs and the streetscape. Most Greater Cincinnati transitions are gradual. That one is not, and it is the kind of line that does not appear in any radius report.

Why Cincinnati Rent Growth Headlines Don't Match the Apartment Market

Two structural conditions are worth understanding before underwriting rent growth in Cincinnati real estate:

The supply wave was a rate story, and it mostly missed the Midwest. Development penciled at 3% to 3.5% interest rates, so a large number of developers broke ground at the same time. Apartment construction runs multiple years from groundbreaking to certificate of occupancy, so those units delivered into a completely different rate environment. More new apartments were delivered than in the previous 40 years. Projected rents did not materialize because everyone competed at once. Casmon's framing on regional exposure: the Midwest produces ripples where Sun Belt markets produce waves the size of the Titanic, in both directions.
Comps stagnate here because a large share of owners never push rent. Many Greater Cincinnati investors own free and clear, are not answering to outside capital, and have no reason to rock the boat with a paying tenant. When nobody raises rent, no comps exist to justify raising rent, and the whole submarket lags. Casmon watched a competing community near his Florence property that had never pushed rents follow him upward once he moved first. Reed described the same effect from the other direction: an owner of two four-family buildings found his management company after seeing what a renovated unit was listed for nearby.

Both conditions point the same direction for an operator. Rent growth in Greater Cincinnati apartments comes from being the one who moves first in a submarket, rather than from a rising tide the headlines promise.

What's Working in Cincinnati

Casmon's screening process is a stack, and he runs it in order. Location comes first because it is the one variable he cannot change and does not want to fight.

Population and jobs. Where are people organically moving, and why. Casmon is explicit that he has no interest in being the person driving people into an area, because that is too much work and too much heavy lifting.
Anchor amenities. Parks, lakes and rivers, major employers, universities, and hospitals. The question is what will still anchor that community in 10, 15, and 20 years.
Infrastructure and physical position. Where the submarket sits, how people get in and out, and where they are going from there. Proximity to I-275 and I-75 is what makes Northern Kentucky work. Having both I-71 and I-75 alongside it is what makes the Montgomery Corridor work.
The invisible boundaries renters actually use. Every city has a line people will not cross. In Chicago it was north and south, and which train line a neighborhood sat on. In Greater Cincinnati it is east and west, and specifically I-75 and I-71. Plenty of renters search only east of 75 and will never consider a listing west of it. That constraint does not appear in any public data set, and it defines your actual tenant pool.

Then there is the tool. Casmon uses JusticeMap to check household income by census tract rather than by the one, three, and five-mile radius figures printed in every offering memorandum. Radius averages smooth over exactly the differences that decide a business plan. On a live pull during the episode, a tract near West Chester showed a $93,000 to $115,000 average household income sitting directly against a neighboring tract at $35,000 to $43,000. That is about as wide a gap as exists anywhere on the map, and no radius figure would surface it.

Casmon's rule on that data is measured. A tract reading low does not kill a deal. It changes the questions you ask before you move forward, and it tells you whether your business plan needs to work in a low income area. The failure mode is not knowing which one you bought.

What does not work is underwriting from broker enthusiasm. Casmon's entire podcast started because every broker he asked sold him on whichever submarket held their listing, and the answers only became useful when he started asking why.

Lessons From the Field: When a $5,000 Renovation Budget Becomes $13,000

Casmon and his partner bought the 81-unit Florence townhome community in 2021. The plan was modest: paint, carpet, roughly $5,000 a unit, and a $200 to $250 rent bump.

The comps were the first problem. There were almost no townhomes for sale in Florence to compare against, so they benchmarked against three-bedroom apartments and bungalow houses and built a deliberately conservative projection off that.

Two prior buyers had the property under contract before them, and both planned to run it as affordable housing, one specifically as a Section 8 play with discounted rents. About 25% of the property was already on Section 8 or another assisted program, and the neighboring communities included a mobile home community, so the affordable read was the obvious one. Casmon underwrote it as a B to B+ market rate community instead.

Then the turn schedule broke. Working with a third-party manager, the property sat with seven vacant units. They would turn three and three more would move out, putting them right back at seven. That pattern held for roughly a year and a half. The fix was to stop pacing it: throw as many crews at it as they could get, turn all seven at once, and absorb the cost. Casmon's framing is that maintaining occupancy is far easier than making up occupancy.

The deal sold at the end of 2025 and returned solid numbers to investors.

5 things this deal makes clear for Greater Cincinnati operators:

A conservative rent projection built on the wrong comps is still the wrong projection. Casmon benchmarked townhomes against three-bedroom apartments and bungalows because nothing better existed, and the market told him he was low by roughly $500 a unit. When the comp set does not match the product, the number is a placeholder, not an underwrite.
Spend per unit and rent per unit are not a fixed ratio. The renovation ran 2.5x the plan and produced roughly 3x the rent bump. Deciding to spend more only works if you are reading real leasing feedback, which is information you do not have on day one.
Occupancy compounds in both directions. Seven vacant units that never fully turn is not a vacancy problem, it is a throughput problem, and it stays a problem until you overwhelm it. Catching up costs far more than never falling behind.
Know the mechanics of your rate cap before you need them. Paying the elevated rate and then applying for reimbursement is a cash flow event, and the counterparty behind the cap is a real risk that most sponsors never price.
The prior buyer's business plan is information, not instruction. Two groups underwrote this property as affordable housing. The 25% assisted tenancy and the neighboring mobile home community made that read defensible. Casmon reached a different conclusion from the same facts, and the difference was roughly $500 a unit in monthly rent.

Cincinnati Tax Abatements and Historic Tax Credits: How They Work

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 13:33:13 GMT

Cincinnati built almost no new apartments for 24 years. Gil Richards on the abatement math, which buildings qualify for historic credits, and why downtown is formally classified as Difficult to Develop.

Cincinnati went roughly 24 years without meaningful new apartment development, and the incentive structures built to end that drought are still what makes most urban core projects pencil. This post covers which properties qualify for historic tax credits, how the property tax abatement actually calculates, what Connected Communities changed for smaller developers, and why downtown is classified as difficult to develop.

About This Post

This analysis draws from a conversation with Gil Richards , VP of Finance and Development at Lauk Properties, which controls $55 million in Greater Cincinnati real estate across multifamily, industrial, and retail. Richards spent his first years in the market as a multifamily broker starting in January 2020, which gave him a fast read on portfolios, pricing, and capital stacks across the region.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The full episode also covers whether a real estate finance degree is worth it, the downtown residential zoning quirk that creates office condos, and Richards' Cincinnati hidden gems.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

Subscribe on Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Downtown, Over-the-Rhine, and Northside: What Changed Since 2020

Richards points to downtown as the part of Greater Cincinnati that has changed most since the start of 2020, and the reasons are structural rather than cyclical.

The Central Business District is small and dense. Below the CBD line it runs roughly 12 blocks by 16 blocks, and nearly every parcel is either already accounted for or historically protected. Two quasi-public players shape what gets built: 3CDC and the Port Authority, which most out-of-market investors never think of as a real estate developer. Two bonded sewers run as conduits that have facilitated a large share of the private development downtown. More CBD office buildings are now converting to apartments.
Over-the-Rhine carries the clearest headwind in the urban core. The 15-year tax abatements from the first wave of 3CDC-era condo conversions are expiring, and those property tax bills are climbing sharply. Values have stayed high and stopped moving, and residential property there has become harder to sell. Development continues in the parts of OTR that did not get built out during the first cycle 10 or 12 years ago.
The Banks keeps producing announcements. New projects surface there on what feels like a rolling basis, and the redevelopment has not slowed.
Northside works on a different logic. Richards describes it as a real community where people care what happens there, which is what makes the neighborhood work. Lauk owns the Kirby School there, a 1910 building rebuilt through historic tax credits.
Hamilton County carries a millage rate Richards calls out plainly. Hamilton, Cuyahoga, and Franklin counties sit among the highest property tax counties in the country, and that is a line item every Greater Cincinnati underwrite has to survive.

Downtown residential demand has returned since the pandemic dip, when close quarters pushed people away from OTR specifically. The exception is the abatement expiration wave, which is a tax problem rather than a demand problem.

Why Downtown Cincinnati Doesn't Pencil Without Public Money

Richards is direct about what that means in practice. Nobody has built a true market rate project downtown on a simple tax abatement application alone. The capital stacks that work carry more:

TIF financing on top of a standard CRA designation. The abatement by itself does not close the gap.
A subordinate ground lease with the Port Authority , structured to carry the project through construction and reduce property tax exposure during that window.
State historic tax credits , which Cincinnati has drawn an outsized share of and which were critical to the revitalization of both downtown and Over-the-Rhine.

Two more constraints shape what gets built. Downtown development cannot be 100% residential, which forces developers to carve commercial square footage out of buildings where the same footage would be worth roughly three times as much as apartments or condos. And parking remains a demand-side requirement even where it is no longer a zoning requirement. Cincinnati is not a metro where residents treat a car as optional, so market rate residential downtown carries the construction cost of parking whether or not code demands it.

The practical takeaway for an investor sizing up a downtown deal is that the capital stack is the project. Rents set the ceiling, and in this submarket that ceiling sits below construction cost. Everything that gets built downtown closes the gap with public participation of some kind, so the question to answer early is which programs a specific building qualifies for.

What's Working in Cincinnati

The two incentive programs most Cincinnati real estate investors should understand are the property tax abatement and the historic tax credit. They serve different investors and carry very different levels of difficulty.

The property tax abatement is the accessible one. Richards recommends it for anyone doing substantial rehab or new construction, and the process for buildings under four families is streamlined.

You have to pull permits. The abatement runs on submitted receipts, and receipts mean permitted work. Richards' point on the building department is that it is not the adversary investors assume it is.
The term lands between eight and 12 years. That range is the sweet spot for what to expect.
The benefit is net 50% of the incremental value of the improvements on the residential side for the larger items, measured against what the property was taxed on before abatement.
The resale multiple is where it pays off. Abated taxes carry a significant value multiple when you sell, which is the part investors doing a rehab for hold often fail to price in.

The city's logic is a straight trade. Pull permits for the mechanicals, the roof, and the other hard costs that show up in an appraisal, and pay less tax. In exchange the city gets oversight, which matters because a seller's claim that work was done is not the same as work having been done correctly behind the walls.

Historic tax credits are a heavier lift and Richards steers first-time developers away from them. The qualification path:

Connected Communities is the third piece, and it is the one that lowered the barrier for smaller operators. It is not the comprehensive plan. It is the city relaxing constraints on housing development: looser setbacks, more streamlined permits, a significant relaxation of parking requirements, and an emphasis on transit. The targeting logic is infill where water and sewer already exist, because tapping existing lines is the cheapest place to add units in an old Midwestern city. Richards estimates it has cut roughly 20% off the initial entitlement timeline. Fewer barriers means more first-time and second-time developers entering the market.

The suburbs run their own version of this. Reading passed a Community Reinvestment Area abatement covering its entire valley, which is unusual municipal cooperation for a small Hamilton County city and is doing real work on the development there. That case is covered in Reading, Ohio: Cincinnati's Unlikely Development Hotspot .

What does not work is assuming a downtown deal pencils on rents alone. Richards' whole point about the DDA classification is that the rent side has already been tested and found insufficient.

Lessons From the Field: How a Vacant 1910 Northside School Got Rebuilt

The Kirby School in Northside was built in 1910 and sat vacant from roughly 2000 onward.

Around 2011 or 2012, the city of Cincinnati was carrying a large inventory of vacant schools and other real estate that cost money to hold. Following the Great Recession, the city auctioned much of it off to shed expenses, generate revenue, and push development. Kirby was one of those auctions.

A local architecture and development firm bought it and partnered with the Cincinnati Development Fund. They got the building registered as historic and applied through the state for tax credits, and that credit became the major piece of the capital stack.

The reason it had to be is the rent. Rents at the building were running around $1 per square foot at the time. Set that against new mechanicals and everything else a 100-year-old vacant school requires and the math does not work. There was an abatement on the project as well. Without the credit, the building does not get repurposed.

Lauk Properties purchased it after the redevelopment was complete.

4 things this project shows about incentive-driven deals in Greater Cincinnati:

The credit is the capital stack, not a bonus on top of it. At $1 per square foot rents against a full mechanical replacement, the historic tax credit was the difference between a project and a vacant building. Investors who treat incentives as upside are underwriting the wrong deal.
Public inventory becomes buying opportunity on a lag. The city auctioned this school because holding it was a cost. Distressed public real estate follows recessions, and the buyers who are registered, capitalized, and paying attention get first look.
Partner with the lender who understands the structure. Cincinnati Development Fund exists for exactly this kind of deal. A conventional lender underwriting a vacant 1910 school on in-place rents reaches a different answer.
Stacking is normal here, and single-program deals usually fail. Kirby carried both a historic tax credit and an abatement. Downtown projects stack TIF, Port Authority ground leases, and credits. If your capital stack has one incentive in it, check whether the deal actually closes without the second.

Section 8 in Greater Cincinnati: CMHA vs. Butler County

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 14:04:40 GMT

Section 8 in Cincinnati: Why CMHA and Butler Metro Produce Different Returns

Two housing authorities operate about 30 minutes apart in Greater Cincinnati and produce very different Section 8 outcomes for landlords. This post puts the CMHA and Butler Metro voucher processes side by side, maps where house hacks still pencil across Northside, Hamilton, and Reading, and details what a 145-year-old duplex rehab actually costs when you sequence the work wrong.

About This Post

This analysis draws from a conversation with Chris Morgan , real estate agent with The Six Realty, residential lender with The Loan Depot, and a four-time house hacker across Northside, Hamilton, and Reading. Morgan has executed every one of those deals while holding a W2 job, and he spent 10 years building his Butler County investor network from behind the counter at Menards.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The full episode also covers order of operations on capital expenditures, contractor bidding on attic conversions, and Morgan's Cincinnati hidden gems.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

Subscribe on Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

A Cincinnati investor listed a three-bedroom expecting $1,700 to $1,800 in rent. Through the Butler Metro Housing Authority voucher program, the same unit rented for $2,200. Thirty minutes south, in Hamilton County, landlords working with CMHA are absorbing fourth and fifth inspections on the same property and watching approved rents get cut from $1,600 to $900 by an affordability calculation.

Chris Morgan has house hacked four times over roughly the last decade, currently owns in Butler County and Reading, and represents buyers and borrowers across both counties. His read on the split between these two voucher vendors comes from operating on both sides of the I-275 line.

Northside, Hamilton, and Reading: Where House Hacks Still Pencil

Morgan's four house hacks track the affordability curve in Greater Cincinnati over the last decade. Each one was chosen because it was the cheapest viable entry point at the time, and each one moved further from the urban core as prices caught up.

Northside was still achievable in 2019, which is when Morgan bought his duplex there. He was making around $14 an hour at the time and used house hacking as the entry mechanism. In 2026 he is not buying there. Pricing on small multifamily now exceeds what the property produces in cash flow, and he has seen no on-market opportunity.
Hamilton, east side is where the cash flow still exists. Morgan owns two properties on Edison and one on Pleasant Avenue, all sourced through relationships rather than the MLS. The tradeoff is turnover. On one Edison property he wrote one-year leases and turned the unit three times in six-month increments despite screening. Third Eye Brewery expanded to the east side of Hamilton down the street from his properties, and the surrounding area has not come up in the meantime.
Hamilton submarkets function as separate markets. Lindenwald, Five Points, and The Knob each carry their own dynamics, and residents in those pockets do not identify with the east side of Hamilton generally. Morgan's rule across all of them: the higher the cash flow, the bigger the headaches.
Hamilton, west side is the Spooky Nook side of the river, along with the Rossville Historic District and Main Street. Different corridor, different pricing, different investor profile from the east side properties Morgan buys.
Reading is Morgan's current house hack, a three-story wood frame building with an attic conversion. It is where he landed after Northside pricing closed. Reading has since become a development story of its own, with a valley-wide tax abatement and Class B-plus rents on Benson Street, covered in Reading, Ohio: Cincinnati's Unlikely Development Hotspot .

One boundary warning for anyone underwriting northwest of I-275. As you move southeast out of Hamilton, the lines between the city of Hamilton, Fairfield Township, and West Chester Township blur to the point that it is not obvious which one you are standing in. North of 275, south of 125, and west of I-75, pull the MLS listing or the county record and confirm the municipality and the school district before you write an offer.

Why the Voucher Vendor Decides Your Section 8 Returns

Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority (Hamilton County):

Inspector assignment is effectively random and never repeats. A failed inspection produces a second inspector who may flag different items. Slocomb Reed's management team has had fourth and fifth inspectors come out on the same property after correcting everything the prior inspectors cited, then get flagged for items as large as resurfacing a parking lot. Once a flag exists in the system it has to be addressed before the tenant is placed and rent flows. One inspector told a team member accompanying him through the inspection that he always makes sure to find problems because it gives him job security.
Rent reasonableness changed about 12 months ago. Going into 2024 and 2025, payment standards were set by zip code, so a landlord could look up rent plus utilities for a studio through a five-plus bedroom unit and know the ceiling. CMHA then layered in a calculation for what it believes the individual tenant can afford. A three-bedroom with a $1,600 zip code standard can come back approved at $900 if that tenant has no income outside the voucher, and $900 is what has to appear as contract rent in the lease.
Paperwork turnaround runs at least a week on anything. Even the simplest submission takes a minimum of a week before you hear back.

The workaround Reed's team uses is to run the CMHA rent reasonableness calculator on the authority's website alongside the prospective tenant before starting the process, so the affordability number is known before anyone invests time in the placement.

Butler Metro Housing Authority (Butler County):

Inspector continuity is the norm. Morgan's business partner, who runs the voucher side of their Edison properties, deals with the same inspector repeatedly and has built a working relationship with him.
Demand exceeds supply to the point that the wait list is closed. Butler Metro is not currently accepting additional people onto the voucher wait list. The constraint is housing units willing to take vouchers.
Rent is set on a point system tied to amenities. A dishwasher, bedroom count, and bathroom count each add points, and points raise the allowable rent. The unit still has to be marketable, because a voucher holder choosing between two comparable two-bedroom, one-bath units will take the better one. Stripping out dining rooms and living space to maximize bedroom count does not produce the full amount.

Butler Metro Housing Authority (Butler County):

Inspector continuity is the norm. Morgan's business partner, who runs the voucher side of their Edison properties, deals with the same inspector repeatedly and has built a working relationship with him.
Demand exceeds supply to the point that the wait list is closed. Butler Metro is not currently accepting additional people onto the voucher wait list. The constraint is housing units willing to take vouchers.
Rent is set on a point system tied to amenities. A dishwasher, bedroom count, and bathroom count each add points, and points raise the allowable rent. The unit still has to be marketable, because a voucher holder choosing between two comparable two-bedroom, one-bath units will take the better one. Stripping out dining rooms and living space to maximize bedroom count does not produce the full amount.

Rents through the Butler County program are holding. Morgan has connected agent clients with his partner and watched them clear numbers above their market expectations, including the three-bedroom that listed at $1,700 to $1,800 and rented at $2,200. Zip code still drives the ceiling within Butler County.

What's Working in Cincinnati

Three plays are producing results in Greater Cincinnati right now, all of them built on the same underlying condition. On-market small multifamily does not cash flow at current pricing, so returns in Cincinnati real estate have to come from somewhere other than the purchase.

Add bedrooms to units that have square footage sitting idle. Morgan's Pleasant Avenue property was a one-bedroom at 900 square feet. He framed out a second bedroom and it now rents for $1,300. He is currently running the same play on another unit, framing, drywalling, and putting in electric heat to convert unused space. When the market is not producing deals, this creates one inside a building you already own.
Pivot the voucher relationship rather than the property. Morgan's Edison properties were turning every three to six months regardless of screening. The response was to move to the Butler County voucher program to raise the rent rate high enough that the turnover cost is covered. His partner also works with Bethany House on placements. The unit did not change. The vendor did.
Buy through the network you already built. Nearly every property Morgan owns came from the MLS, with the Hamilton deals as the exception. Those came from a Butler County REIA investor who was tired of holding them and gave Morgan a discount, a relationship that traces back to 10 years of daily contact with Butler County investors at Menards. That is the pipeline producing off-market discounts in this market.

The strategy that fails is house hacking without reserves. Morgan's most common failure mode among clients he has coached is the investor who treats the $1,000 a month they are no longer paying in rent as income. A $2,000 water heater replacement arrives, there is no reserve, and the call Morgan gets is about selling the property. Buying with little or no money down does not remove the requirement to hold cash behind the deal.

Lessons From the Field: What a 145-Year-Old Northside Duplex Actually Costs

5 things Cincinnati investors underestimate in pre-1930s housing stock:

Plaster and lath is not drywall and cannot be treated like it. Structural work anywhere in the building transmits into the plaster. Sequence heavy work like roofs and framing before any plaster repair, and budget for full removal and drywall replacement rather than patching.
Cast iron drain stacks fail twice. Morgan replaced a rusted, clogged cast iron stack in his Reading house for under $3,000 through a plumber in his network. The top half corroded and clogged roughly a year later for another $3,000. Original systems typically run copper supply, cast iron drain stacks, and clay sewer laterals into the street.
Knob-and-tube is usually partially replaced, which is its own problem. Investors and homeowners commonly rewire the high-load circuits for kitchen appliances, air conditioning, and furnaces while leaving knob-and-tube on light fixtures and general outlets. Two questions to answer before closing: does it function, and how does your insurance carrier treat it.
The building envelope creates cost you cannot shop for. Slate roofs require specialists who charge accordingly, which is why most investors convert to dimensional shingles. Window openings are non-standard and require custom orders with manufacturing and delivery lead time. Three-story wood frame buildings move with the wind enough that walls are not flush, which affects drywall and LVP installation. Some contractors will not bid the work at all. Morgan sent several through his Reading attic conversion and never received bids back from them.
Steep narrow staircases are a real constraint on the exit. Morgan is a father of two and describes carrying children up two flights of original narrow stairs as the thing he would fix first. If you plan to resell to an owner-occupant with a family, price the stair replacement into the deal.

Why Cincinnati Multifamily Avoided the 2021 Cap Rate Trap

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 16:45:30 GMT

A rate cap that cost $30,000 renewed at $1.3 million. Joe Fairless on the first two losing sales in Ashcroft Capital's history and why Greater Cincinnati never had the spread to lose.

A rate cap that cost $30,000 at purchase came back at $1.3 million on renewal. That single line item helped push Ashcroft Capital into the first two losing sales in its history, in October and November of last year, after 26 profitable exits between 2015 and 2021. Joe Fairless walked a room of Cincinnati operators through what actually broke 2021-vintage multifamily, and why Greater Cincinnati never had the same math to lose.

About This Post

This analysis draws from a conversation with Joe Fairless , co-founder of Ashcroft Capital and founder of Best Ever CRE. Fairless started the Cincinnati mastermind this show records at 11 years ago and hosts the longest running daily real estate investing podcast. Ashcroft has run a full cycle: buying since 2015, 26 profitable exits through 2021, billions in assets under management, and the first two losses in the firm's history last year, which makes his read on 2021-vintage distress firsthand rather than secondhand.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The full episode also covers lender flexibility on maturing loans, the Best Ever Inner Circle, and live Q&A from Cincinnati operators in the room.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

Subscribe on Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Where Greater Cincinnati Sits While the Sun Belt Resets

Ashcroft's entire portfolio sits in the Sun Belt: Texas, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. Fairless lives in Cincinnati, started this meetup 11 years ago, and made his early mistakes in the Greater Cincinnati market before moving his buying south in 2015. Two regions, the same interest rate environment, very different outcomes.

Why Cincinnati's Cap Rate Spread Absorbed the Rate Shock

The math that broke 2021 Sun Belt deals is straightforward. Buyers paid cap rates around 3.5%. Interest rates rose, cap rates followed to roughly 5.5%, and values fell. Add floating-rate debt and a supply wave that stalled NOI growth, and the pro forma stops working. That was a perfect storm running from 2021 through 2024.

The exposure line is worth naming precisely. Anything above four units is commercial debt, and commercial loan terms are what created this cycle's distress. A 10, 12, or 20-unit building may carry different financing, and the outcome depends far more on when the property was purchased than on how large it is.

What's Working in Cincinnati

Class C operational value-add is the clearest opportunity in this market. You can buy at a 7 cap on actuals, meaning on what the property is producing today, and still have real revenue upside because rents sit below market and the previous owner was never good at filling units or collecting rent.

The operational gap is measurable before you close. A portfolio generating $50,000 to $55,000 a month in revenue can reach $70,000 a month without significant capital improvements. Treat tenants well. Fix things when they break. That is $15,000 a month generated by operating better than the predecessor did.
Grade by vintage, not by the textbook A/B/C definitions. In Cincinnati, brick bunker construction from the late 1940s through 1978 is Class C: boilers converted into electric baseboards that are uncomfortable to live with, and floor plans that have not aged well. After 1978 it starts to feel like Class B, because mechanicals improved, code improved, and floor plans moved toward central heat and central air.
Expect a heavier operational lift, and staff for it. The revenue upside in Class C is earned through management, not through a capital budget. It requires an owner who actually wants to run a property.
Know that Class C has no national buyer market right now. Fairless said nobody knows when the bottom drops for Class C, and Ashcroft would not buy it today. He believes the bottom has already dropped for Class B, which still carries value-add, and he is confident in Class A, which is why institutions are chasing Class A deals that will always trade. Cincinnati cap rates for Class C have not moved much. Less competition is the opportunity. It is also the reason to tread carefully.
If you buy stabilized, buy location. Returns on already-performing product are lower than they were, and there is no operational upside left to rescue the deal. Buy the best location you can afford and position for natural market rent growth.

What is not working: buying stabilized product and underwriting it to 2018 returns. The deals that pencil in this market are the ones where somebody else's operational failure is the value-add.

Lessons From the Field: When a $30,000 Rate Cap Renews at $1.3 Million

Ashcroft bought in 2021. Cap rates were around 3.5%. The debt was floating rate with a rate cap in place, which is standard structure for that loan type. The cap cost $30,000.

They sold. Two deals, October and November, the first losses after 26 profitable exits, and Fairless expects other 2021-vintage deals to sell at a loss as well. A longer fixed-rate term would have bought time, though the reckoning still arrives unless cap rates compress or NOI grows.

Price the rate cap renewal, not the rate cap. What a cap costs at closing tells you nothing about what it costs to replace three years later. Model the renewal at rates well above where you bought.
Loan term is the real risk control. A maturing five-year loan removed every option except recapitalize or sell. Time is the asset that lets a cycle work itself out.
You need cap rates or NOI moving your way. When cap rates expand and NOI stays flat at the same time, the loan term decides the outcome.
Know your lender's balance sheet before you need it. Portfolio lenders, meaning small banks and credit unions that keep the loan on their own books, can work with a borrower in ways a lender answering to outside investors cannot. That advantage carries from single-family into large commercial.
Separate the constants from the variables. Nobody knows where interest rates go in two years. Supply is more knowable: cheap debt produced the building wave, expensive debt stopped it, and the negative rent growth that followed should dissipate as that supply gets absorbed.

The Infinite Real Estate Glitch: Forced Appreciation Plus Leverage

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 10:26:45 GMT

A $180,000 all-in flip selling for just under $270,000, with no cash out of pocket. Slocomb Reed breaks down four Greater Cincinnati deals, and why none of them depended on the market going up.

A single-family flip near Winton Woods cost $180,000 all in, purchase price, rehab, and six months of carrying costs, entirely borrowed with no personal cash invested. It's selling for just under $270,000. Slocomb Reed calls this pattern the "infinite real estate glitch," and after a dozen years of investing across Greater Cincinnati , he broke down the two components that make it repeatable rather than lucky.

About This Post

This analysis draws from a solo episode by Slocomb Reed , co-host of the Cincy REI Show and an active Cincinnati investor and property manager with a dozen years of experience across single-family, small multifamily, and larger apartment acquisitions. Reed walks through four of his own recent deals to illustrate how forced appreciation and leverage combine to remove most practical limits on how much real estate an experienced operator can acquire.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The full episode also covers Reed's approach to using cross-collateralized hard money loans and more detail on structuring equity partnerships with outside capital.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

Subscribe on Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Where These Deals Sit Across Greater Cincinnati

The Winton Woods area , a single-family property on three-quarters of an acre backing directly onto Winton Woods with a creek running behind the lot. Reed acknowledges he likely overpaid slightly, motivated partly by his own attachment to the property, before ultimately deciding to sell rather than hold it.
Mount Airy , zoned for Northwest schools, where Reed structured a sale-leaseback with a seller who wanted to remain in the home long-term rather than move out at closing.
Rural Clermont County , far enough from Cincinnati's core that lot privacy and distance from neighbors matter more to buyers than square footage. Reed's renovation choices here, fencing the yard and maximizing privacy, were tailored specifically to that lifestyle expectation.
A six-building portfolio of 1960s brick-bunker 12-unit apartment buildings , the same replicable Cincinnati architecture style found across the metro, acquired with Ian Cruz in 2025. Reed had executed this exact playbook on individual buildings a dozen times before, but never at six buildings simultaneously.

Why Cincinnati Supports This Strategy Regardless of Market Cycle

Reed frames Cincinnati real estate as what he calls an evergreen market: it doesn't produce the sharp appreciation spikes of faster-growing Sunbelt metros, but it also doesn't experience the same severe corrections. Citing a conversation with Joe Fairless, Reed notes that Midwestern markets like Cincinnati reward slow, steady, consistent execution rather than timing a boom.

What's Working in Cincinnati

Reed's framework rests on two components, plus a bonus extension of the second.

Force appreciation through renovation or NOI improvement. This means buying a property, improving its condition or income, and creating a gap between what was spent acquiring and improving it and what the property is actually worth afterward. That gap is the source of nearly every other advantage in the framework.
Use leverage aggressively once forced appreciation creates enough of a value cushion. Refinancing at 70% to 80% loan-to-value against the new, higher value, rather than the original purchase price, lets an investor pull out most or all of the capital originally invested, freeing it to redeploy into the next deal.
Use cross-collateralization to eliminate upfront cash requirements entirely. On both the Winton Woods cottage and the Mount Airy sale-leaseback, Reed's lender accepted a second-position mortgage against another property with substantial existing equity in place of a traditional down payment, letting him borrow 100% of the purchase price, rehab cost, and even several months of carrying costs.
Accept higher-cost debt in exchange for speed and reliability. Reed's typical hard money rate runs around 14% APR, deliberately choosing lenders known for speed and ease of execution over the cheapest available rate, since the deal's overall economics can absorb that cost when the forced appreciation margin is large enough.
Bring in equity partners only on deals you've already proven, not new strategies. Reed's 50/50 partnership structure, where a capital partner funds a flip in exchange for a 50% split after their capital is returned, is reserved specifically for a business plan Reed has executed successfully before. He's explicit that outside equity should expand capacity to do what you're already good at, not fund a new, untested approach.

What is not working, or rather, what this framework explicitly is not: a bet on market timing or appreciation. Reed is direct that none of these four examples depended on Cincinnati property values rising broadly. Each one depended on the specific deal being priced below its achievable improved value at acquisition.

Lessons From the Field: The Sale-Leaseback a Wholesaler Couldn't Move Himself

A wholesaler brought Reed the Mount Airy Ranch specifically because he couldn't sell it through his own buyers list. The seller, an older homeowner, wanted to use the equity in his home to pay off his mortgage and other debts so he could live debt-free on Social Security and his pension, but only if he could remain living in the home afterward as a tenant.

The outcome was unusual even by Reed's own standard: he left the closing table with both the house and a check, since the loan proceeds exceeded the purchase price. Several months later, he executed a straightforward rate-and-term refinance into a 30-year fixed mortgage, paying off the hard money loan entirely. Some legitimate plumbing issues surfaced shortly after closing, which Reed addressed directly, but the deal otherwise required no additional capital beyond what was already borrowed.

A deal a wholesaler can't move themselves can still be a strong deal for a buyer with a different structure available. The sale-leaseback requirement wasn't a flaw in the deal, it simply required a buyer equipped to manage an ongoing landlord-tenant relationship with the seller.
Cross-collateralizing existing equity can eliminate a cash requirement entirely, even on a deal with an unconventional structure. The same technique that worked on a standard flip applied equally well here.
Recognizing bonus equity requires firsthand property knowledge, not just comps. Touring the property and understanding the quality of a 2018 remodel gave Reed confidence in the deal's actual value that a desktop analysis alone might not have surfaced.
A hard money bridge loan followed by a rate-and-term refinance is a repeatable two-step financing pattern. Reed used this same sequence, expensive short-term debt to close quickly, followed by a conventional refinance once the deal is stabilized, across multiple deal types in this episode.
Inheriting a qualified, motivated tenant at closing can make an unconventional deal simpler to operate than a typical vacant acquisition. The seller-turned-tenant was already paying market rent from day one, without any leasing or vacancy period required.

Northern Kentucky Real Estate: Reading Covington and Newport Block by Block

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 18:11:07 GMT

West Newport houses sold for $10,000 in 2016 and now go for $80,000 needing full rehabs. Garth Kukla on why proximity to a walkable corridor predicts Northern Kentucky value better than which city a property sits in.

A house on Hodge Street in Newport, once considered a rough address, is now listed on Zillow for $300,000. Garth Kukla bought his own Newport home for less than that in 2012, on what he calls one of the best streets in town. Kukla spent nearly a decade as a full-time wholesaler across Northern Kentucky, closing hundreds of off-market deals in Covington, Newport, and the surrounding riverfront cities, and his read on these neighborhoods runs down to individual streets and railroad crossings.

About This Post

This analysis draws from a conversation with Garth Kukla , a Northern Kentucky-based investor who worked as a full-time wholesaler from 2016 to 2024, transacting hundreds of off-market deals primarily in Covington and Newport. Kukla's near-decade of hands-on wholesaling, combined with actually living in several of these neighborhoods, gives him block-level pricing and boundary knowledge that most Cincinnati-focused investors never develop for the Kentucky side of the river.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The full episode also covers Kukla's transition from cold-calling and direct mail to an entirely referral-based wholesaling business, and more detail on how he qualified motivated sellers over the phone.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

Subscribe on Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Covington and Newport: Reading Northern Kentucky Block by Block

Covington is Northern Kentucky's largest city and, in Kukla's description, laid out like a gerrymandered congressional district, with sharp value swings between adjacent pockets. Latonia , technically absorbed into Covington years ago, remains a distinct and solid neighborhood in local usage. Near the river, 10th and Greenup has historically carried a serious crime reputation, while just four blocks away, 6th and Greenup , part of the Licking Riverside area, holds five- to eight-thousand-square-foot mansions built roughly 120 to 150 years ago, some subdivided into apartments but many still maintained as single-family homes worth several million dollars.

Mainstrasse Village , Covington's dense bar and restaurant corridor, runs along Main Street roughly from 5th Street to 9th Street, bounded on one side by Philadelphia Street, with no clear parallel boundary on the other side of Main. South of 9th Street down to Martin Luther King Boulevard (12th Street) has gentrified enough recently that Kukla considers it an extension of the Mainstrasse effect, comparable to how Pendleton has absorbed spillover redevelopment from OTR in Cincinnati proper. The appeal driving this corridor's value is straightforward: proximity to downtown Cincinnati without downtown parking and traffic, plus a walkable concentration of restaurants and bars including Bouquet, Otto's, and Cock & Bull near 6th and Main.

Newport has been reshaped almost entirely by the Ovation development, a large-scale riverfront project on land that once held public housing, purchased and cleared before the 2008 recession stalled it, then restarted roughly five to seven years ago. Kukla is direct that he never tracked a specific radius of "Ovation effect" pricing; instead, the entire city of Newport has appreciated as a result of the broader momentum Ovation created. West Newport, anything west of York Street, sold for as little as $10,000 per house when Kukla started in 2016. The same houses, needing full rehabs, now sell for $80,000. Streets like Hodge, Ketura, and Linsenu, once considered rough, have all seen significant appreciation, though Kukla is careful to note none of them were ever truly bad streets to begin with.

Newport's dividing lines are more nuanced than they first appear. The railroad tracks near Monmouth Street, where it butts up against Southgate, mark a genuine shift, but crossing 9th to 12th Street doesn't represent a hard drop-off the way it might elsewhere. Beyond 12th Street, the market reaccelerates: 13th Street hosted a Home-A-Rama with million-dollar new construction on land that was, a decade earlier, available for a fraction of that. Streets on the river-view (downhill) side, like Beale Street, consistently command higher rents than their non-view counterparts on the uphill side, a pattern driven purely by sightlines rather than any formal neighborhood boundary.

Bellevue , the next city east of Newport, was among the first Northern Kentucky riverfront communities to appreciate significantly. Its primary access point, Fairfield Avenue, becomes genuinely congested during evening rush hour as the sole route in and out toward Cincinnati. A meaningful stretch of Bellevue, roughly the first 15 houses along Ward and Foot heading toward the river, sits inside the 1997 flood zone, meaning mandatory flood insurance and, historically, actual water in basements during that flood. Kukla notes the market's relationship to that flood zone has flipped: difficult to sell in 2016, now an accessible, comparatively affordable entry point into a desirable riverfront location by 2026.

Dayton, Kentucky , further east, stalled for over a decade after an ambitious marina redevelopment (once called the Manhattan Project, now the Riverside Marina area) drove speculative pricing well ahead of actual construction. That development has finally begun delivering in recent years, producing riverfront mansions outside the flood wall and a broader wave of home and apartment sales. The rough dividing line between Bellevue and Dayton sits around Ward and Foot near Vine Street, with Fairfield Avenue functioning as Dayton and Bellevue's version of Mainstrasse: proximity to it is a clear value driver, while areas further south climb into hillier terrain with older Cape Cod-style homes carrying their own foundation considerations.

Ludlow and Bromley , west of Covington, have seen some appreciation as well, though Kukla did comparatively little business there and is more cautious generalizing about that corridor.

Why Riverfront Proximity Drives Northern Kentucky Value More Than City Lines

The clearest pattern across every Northern Kentucky riverfront community Kukla discussed is that proximity to a walkable commercial corridor, Mainstrasse in Covington, Ovation and downtown Newport, Fairfield Avenue in Bellevue and Dayton, matters more to pricing than which specific city a property sits in. Municipal boundaries (Covington versus Newport versus Bellevue) are administratively real but don't reliably predict value the way distance from these corridors does.

What's Working in Cincinnati

Kukla's wholesaling career surfaced a specific, repeatable framework for qualifying sellers and closing off-market deals in Northern Kentucky.

Ask directly how long a seller has been thinking about selling, and only pursue two answers. Kukla's qualifying question filtered for sellers who wanted to sell right now or at some defined point in the future. Any other answer, particularly someone shopping his offer against a competing one, signaled a seller who wasn't a fit for a wholesale transaction.
Require a specific price from the seller before proceeding. Kukla's rule of thumb: he had never successfully bought a house from a seller who couldn't or wouldn't name a number, comparing it to a grocery store cashier never asking a customer what they'd like to pay for milk.
Tell sellers directly they'll make more money with a realtor. Counterintuitively, stating this plainly and pausing for a reaction diffused sellers' defensiveness about being taken advantage of, often making them more willing to proceed with a wholesale sale on its actual merits: speed and convenience.
Identify motivation as some combination of speed, price, or convenience, since sellers rarely get all three. Sellers choosing speed and convenience were Kukla's wholesale clients. Sellers wanting a specific price were better served listing with an agent instead.
Shift from marketing spend to referral-based deal flow once a reputation is established. Kukla ran bandit signs, direct mail, and cold calling for roughly three years before transitioning almost entirely to referrals by 2021 to 2022, including referrals from other investors who found deals outside their own market knowledge and needed someone who specifically understood Northern Kentucky.

What is not working: assuming a single flagship development creates value only in its immediate radius. Kukla explicitly rejected the idea of drawing a fixed boundary around Ovation's effect on Newport, since the appreciation touched the entire city rather than tapering predictably with distance.

Lessons From the Field: The House Garth Sold Twice, Three Years Apart

Early in his wholesaling career, Kukla got a house under contract from a seller but was ultimately unable to move the deal, one of only two times in his career this happened, and the only case where the outcome wasn't a closed sale on the original terms.

The complication was straightforward: despite Kukla's rule of never taking on a contract he couldn't close, this particular deal didn't work out at the time, and the contract was cancelled. Most wholesalers might have written the seller off permanently at that point.

A cancelled contract doesn't have to mean a permanently lost relationship with a seller. Kukla's willingness to revisit the deal years later turned an early failure into an eventual success.
Market timing can resolve a deal that didn't work under the original terms. What made sense as a purchase-and-resale three years later hadn't worked as a straightforward wholesale assignment at the time.
A near-perfect track record still allows room for one real exception. Kukla's rule that he never took a contract he couldn't move held almost universally, but the one exception became, eventually, still a closed deal rather than a total loss.
Long-term relationship maintenance with sellers has real payoff, even after a failed transaction. The eventual purchase depended entirely on the seller still being reachable and willing to transact with Kukla years later.

How Cincinnati Property Managers Actually Handle Evictions

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 15:45:09 GMT

The Hamilton County timeline from a missed rent payment to a set-out; and why TLP's Izzy Ong treats every case that reaches a magistrate as a failure of the process, not a win.

TLP Property Management has a 100% success rate when eviction and small claims cases actually reach a Hamilton County magistrate, but that number is almost beside the point. Izzy Ong, director of operations for TLP, is direct that appearing in court at all is a loss, not a win, and the entire process TLP has built is designed to resolve delinquency before a filing ever becomes necessary.

About This Post

This analysis draws from a conversation with Izzy Ong , director of operations for TLP Property Management, who has run the company's tenant relations and eviction process since 2021 and now oversees the property management division for both TLP's own portfolio and its third-party clients across Greater Cincinnati. Ong's operational, day-to-day view of the eviction process, handled largely through a team based in the Philippines, gives this episode unusually specific detail on how the legal and rental-assistance mechanics actually play out in Hamilton County.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The full episode also covers TLP's approach to shielding landlord clients from direct tenant conversations during the process, and more detail on post-eviction collections.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

Subscribe on Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

How the Eviction Process Actually Works in Hamilton County

The legal timeline in Greater Cincinnati runs on a specific, predictable schedule that most first-time landlords never see mapped out in full. Rent is due on the first, considered late on the second, but TLP's leases build in a five-day grace period before late fees apply on the sixth. On the fifth, every tenant without a logged payment gets an automated reminder. After the late fee kicks in, dedicated tenant relations officers begin calling, texting, and emailing every delinquent tenant directly, not to threaten action, but to find out what's actually happening and give the tenant a chance to explain.

Notices are typically posted around the tenth or twelfth, always on a pre-announced date the tenant has already been told about, so the notice itself is not a surprise. In Ohio, a three-day pay-or-vacate notice gives the tenant three business days to cure the balance before the case is endorsed to an attorney, who files immediately. That filing appears on the tenant's landlord-tenant history and background check the moment it's filed, regardless of the eventual outcome, a detail TLP makes a point of communicating clearly upfront.

What's Working in Cincinnati

TLP's process is built around a small number of deliberate operational choices that consistently produce better outcomes than moving straight to legal action.

Reach out personally before any notice is ever posted. TLP's tenant relations officers call, text, and email every delinquent tenant individually in the days after a late fee applies, rather than moving directly to a three-day notice. This single step, more than any automation, is what TLP credits with resolving the majority of delinquencies before they ever require legal filing.
Give tenants a specific, prior-announced date for when notices will post. Tenants are told in advance which day notices go out, and every tenant with a balance gets one on the same day, reducing the shock and hostility of an unannounced notice appearing on the door.
Keep landlord clients insulated from direct tenant conversations. TLP does not involve the property owner in the emotional back-and-forth of a delinquency case. The landlord is notified once a case is formally endorsed to the eviction attorney, not before, which protects both the tenant's dignity during a difficult conversation and the landlord's time.
Proactively connect tenants to rental assistance rather than waiting for them to find it. TLP's automated messaging includes direct references to St. Vincent de Paul, Hamilton County JFS, and similar organizations from the very first late notice, and once a tenant applies, TLP's own team takes over the paperwork, since they know the process well enough to move it faster than a tenant navigating it alone.
Collect employment, vehicle, and identification details wherever possible, especially from inherited tenants. TLP encourages lease renewals partly because the free renewal application captures Social Security number and date of birth, information that materially improves the odds of collecting on a post-eviction judgment, and works with an eviction attorney whose firm also handles collections.

What is not working: assuming a court appearance represents success. TLP's 100% record when cases reach a magistrate is real, but the team treats every filing that reaches that point as a process failure, not a win, since the entire system is designed to resolve delinquency long before a courtroom becomes necessary.

Lessons From the Field: A Rental Assistance Approval That Arrived on the Day of Set-Out

The outcome, in this specific case, was that assistance funding came through just before the scheduled set-out, allowing the case to be resolved without the tenant losing their home. Ong describes it as a close call precisely because the timing worked out, not because the system reliably works that way.

Rental assistance timing can run right up against the final eviction deadline. Approval arriving on the day of a scheduled set-out is not a hypothetical risk, it is something TLP has experienced directly.
Written confirmation from the assistance organization, not the tenant, is what allows a case to pause or be dismissed. TLP will not delay legal proceedings based on a tenant's word alone that assistance is coming; they require direct written confirmation from the organization itself.
A tenant's application being in process does not guarantee protection from set-out. The process moving forward on its own legal timeline, independent of a pending assistance application, is exactly why TLP pushes tenants to apply as early as possible in the delinquency period.
Close calls like this reinforce why proactive outreach matters from day one. Ong and Slocomb both frame the earliest phase of the process, personal outreach before any notice is even posted, as the highest-leverage point for avoiding this kind of last-minute risk entirely.

Where Cincinnati Buyers Are Bidding Above Asking in 2026

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 10:42:43 GMT

A $450,000 Loveland listing sold for $570,000 cash. Ethan Bishop on which Greater Cincinnati submarkets are drawing multiple offers, which have quietly cooled, and the two-generation demand pattern driving both.

A buyer in Loveland waived inspection, put 20% down, and escalated to $536,000 on a house listed at $450,000, then still lost to an all-cash offer at $570,000 closing in 10 days. Ethan Bishop, a top-producing agent with the Chabris Group at Keller Williams Seven Hills Realty who has sold over 200 properties across Greater Cincinnati in six years, watched that bidding war firsthand, and it's a clear signal of where 2026 demand is concentrating hardest.

About This Post

This analysis draws from a conversation with Ethan Bishop , a real estate agent with the Chabris Group at Keller Williams Seven Hills Realty who has sold over 200 properties across Greater Cincinnati since going full-time in 2020. Bishop's active client base, concentrated among millennial buyers competing for starter and move-up homes, gives him real-time visibility into which submarkets are seeing genuine bidding wars versus which have quietly cooled.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The full episode covers additional detail on new construction pricing across the eastern Cincinnati suburbs and more on how street-level variation plays out in specific neighborhoods.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

Subscribe on Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Where Cincinnati Buyers Are Competing Hardest in 2026

The Two-Generation Demand Pattern Reshaping Eastern Cincinnati

A consistent thesis runs underneath most of the growth Bishop is describing: baby boomers looking to downsize out of oversized homes while staying near adult children, and millennials looking to upgrade into more space, are both converging on the same handful of walkable, small-town-feeling submarkets east of I-275. Milford, Loveland, and Lebanon each offer a version of the same formula, a charming, often century-old downtown corridor with retail, dining, and bars on the ground floor and apartments above, paired with genuinely developable agricultural land just 10 to 15 minutes away where new construction can meet contemporary buyer expectations.

What's Working in Cincinnati

Bishop's read on the current market surfaces a few clear, repeatable patterns for buyers and investors evaluating specific submarkets.

Three-plus bedroom homes are moving dramatically faster than two-bedroom product. A Mount Washington-area listing on the Anderson Township border generated eight offers within 36 hours, all above asking, while comparable two-bedroom listings in Norwood and Pleasant Ridge sit on market considerably longer.
Street-level due diligence matters more than neighborhood reputation, everywhere in Greater Cincinnati. Evanston and East Walnut Hills are the most extreme examples, where a single street can separate a stable, appreciating block from one with active safety concerns, but Bishop notes even Loveland has specific streets worth avoiding despite the submarket's overall strength.
A single aggressive cash offer can reset comps for an entire submarket, even at a price the property may not objectively be worth. Bishop's Loveland example illustrates how one buyer's willingness to pay $570,000 for a property he valued closer to $500,000 to $525,000 becomes the new data point future appraisals and listings will reference.
New construction pricing displays differently by builder, and that matters for underwriting affordability. D.R. Horton's advertised prices tend to reflect actual final cost, while builders like Fisher Homes often show a base price well below what most buyers end up paying once upgrades are included.
Baby boomer downsizing demand is an underexploited multifamily development opportunity in Milford, Loveland, and Lebanon. These buyers want walkable proximity to a small-town downtown without maintaining a large single-family home, but Bishop notes there is limited existing ground-level rental or small-multifamily product built specifically to meet that demand.

17 Real Estate Mistakes Cincinnati Investors Keep Making

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 14:18:41 GMT

Off-street parking, galvanized plumbing, school district lines that don't follow township borders, and a tax bill that can quadruple at closing. The Cincinnati-specific due diligence most investors skip.

A single-family home in Northside with off-street parking sits on the market roughly four months faster than a comparable home without it, and commands about $50,000 more in purchase price. That gap, driven entirely by a feature many out-of-state investors treat as an afterthought, is one of 17 recurring, Cincinnati-specific mistakes Ian Cruz and Slocomb Reed catalogued from over a decade of investing and property management across Greater Cincinnati .

This analysis draws from a joint discussion between Ian Cruz and Slocomb Reed , co-hosts of the Cincy REI Show, covering 17 recurring mistakes they have observed among real estate investors across Greater Cincinnati. Both hosts operate active multifamily and single-family portfolios and provide third-party property management, giving this list a level of hands-on, deal-level specificity that goes beyond generic investing advice.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The full episode covers all 17 mistakes in the hosts' original ranked order, including several additional stories not covered here.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

Subscribe on Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Cincinnati's Hidden Boundaries: Municipalities, School Districts, and Block-by-Block Variation

Several Cincinnati neighborhoods sit inside the city's boundaries but are legally independent municipalities, including Norwood, St. Bernard, and Elmwood Place . This matters beyond trivia: within the actual City of Cincinnati, trash and recycling collection for one-to-four-unit properties is included in property taxes, while across most of the rest of the metro, owners pay for waste collection separately. Investors who assume a property's municipal status based on its neighborhood name alone can misjudge both utility costs and applicable regulations.

What Cincinnati's Property Tax and Reassessment Cycle Means for Underwriting

Hamilton County reassesses property values broadly every three years, with a larger, more comprehensive reassessment every six years. The 2023 triennial reassessment, following closely behind the COVID-era appreciation run-up, produced unusually large increases and drew national attention. Since 2023, Cincinnati has continued appreciating, ranking fifth nationally in home sale price growth with a 6.7% year-over-year increase between March 2025 and March 2026, meaning further reassessment increases are plausible, even if unlikely to match 2023's scale.

The mechanism investors most often overlook is what happens to the tax basis at the point of sale. A property purchased cheaply by a prior owner, a house flipper who bought for $50,000 and sold for $200,000 after renovation, for example, carries a tax basis reflecting that original low purchase price. Once the county reassesses to the new sale price, the buyer's property tax bill can quadruple from what the seller had been paying. Underwriting to the seller's current tax bill rather than a reassessment at the actual purchase price is a common and costly miscalculation. The Hamilton County Auditor's website allows investors to input a hypothetical purchase price directly and see the recalculated tax figure before closing.

What's Working in Cincinnati

The bulk of the hosts' list centers on operational and due-diligence mistakes specific to Cincinnati's older housing stock and its tenant expectations.

Always provide on-site laundry in multifamily properties. This is a leasing issue more than a direct revenue driver. Listings without laundry on site lose applications and better-qualified tenants regardless of neighborhood, even though coin laundry itself rarely generates meaningful profit.
Underwrite parking as a core amenity, not an afterthought. The rule of thumb is a minimum of one parking spot per unit, with one spot per bedroom being ideal. Cincinnati's car-dependent culture and limited public transit make inaccessible or absent parking a leasing dealbreaker in nearly every submarket.
Check for flood zones before closing, even away from obvious water. Small creeks and minor waterways throughout Greater Cincinnati carry flood zone designations tied to flooding events from over a century ago, often in areas that do not visually read as flood-prone today.
Identify your foundation type and its specific failure mode. Poured concrete foundations are the most durable but develop thermal expansion cracks over time. Concrete block foundations are more vulnerable to failure under water pressure buildup. Stone foundations, common in properties over a hundred years old, let water pass through rather than building pressure, trading a wetter basement for exceptional long-term durability.
Treat galvanized steel plumbing as a near-certain replacement cost. Used during the Vietnam War era as a copper substitute, galvanized steel corrodes from the inside, making visual inspection unreliable. Budget for full replacement whenever it's found.
Understand aluminum wiring's insurance implications rather than assuming automatic replacement is required. Aluminum wiring, another Vietnam War-era copper substitute, requires specially rated fixtures and connectors due to its thermal expansion properties. Its presence can trigger insurance exclusions or higher premiums, and in some cases push a property into surplus lines coverage, an added cost worth underwriting upfront.
Evaluate knob and tube wiring on a case-by-case basis with your inspector and insurer. This copper-based, very old wiring type often shows up on lower-amperage circuits like light fixtures and ceiling fans, frequently left in place even after a prior remodel replaced wiring for higher-demand circuits like HVAC or ovens. It can be fragile enough that routine work, like swapping an outlet, causes it to crumble and require full replacement.
Always get a sewer scope, regardless of the property's age or apparent function. A functioning toilet does not rule out a collapsed line, root intrusion, or a significant grease and debris buildup inside cast iron drain stacks, particularly in multifamily buildings where heavier use accelerates these issues. Clay sewer laterals, common in pre- and post-World War II construction once a line extends past the house, are especially prone to this.
Choose service providers based on the quality of service delivered, not the lowest quoted fee. Because general contractor licensing does not exist in Greater Cincinnati, the bar for calling yourself a contractor is low, and cheap labor is often genuinely cheap for a reason. The same logic applies to property management: a manager charging 6% has meaningfully less revenue to invest in service quality than one charging a more typical 10%, even though the lower number looks better on a spreadsheet.
Engage a property manager early in the due diligence process, not days before closing. A property manager who will operate a building for years has a different incentive structure than an agent or lender who gets paid once at closing, and often has location-specific insight, like crime data or vacancy patterns, that no one else in the transaction has reason to raise.
Match your renovation scope to what the location's rent ceiling can actually support. Replacing a boiler system with mini-splits, upgrading electrical service, and installing granite counters and soft-close cabinets does not guarantee a corresponding rent increase in Cincinnati's C-class brick bunker stock. If comparable rents in the immediate area don't already support the higher number, the renovation cost will not return on investment.

Why Cincinnati Multifamily Investors Are Renovating Less in 2026

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 23:12:32 GMT

JD Schmerge brokers Greater Cincinnati multifamily and operates a 7-unit in South Covington. Why tenants aren't paying for upgraded finishes, why insurance and taxes now outweigh interest rates, and how much to renovate before selling.

Cincinnati multifamily has historically traded at 7% to 8% cap rates, a spread wide enough above today's roughly 6.5% debt cost that the market never saw the same distress hitting cities that traded at 4% and 5% caps during the low-rate years. JD Schmerge, a multifamily broker with Sabre Group who also owns a 7-unit property in South Covington, has a front-row view of both sides of that math right now, as a broker underwriting deals and as an operator absorbing insurance and tax increases firsthand.

About This Post

This analysis draws from a conversation with JD Schmerge , a multifamily broker at Sabre Group with over eight years of experience, primarily selling properties under 75 units across Greater Cincinnati. Schmerge's dual perspective, brokering deals across the market while personally operating a 7-unit value-add property in South Covington, gives this episode a level of real-time detail on financing, insurance, and taxes that pure sales data alone would not surface.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The full episode also covers Schmerge's take on Ohio's proposed property tax legislation and more detail on how school district board of revision cases work.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

Subscribe on Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Cincinnati Multifamily Geography: South Covington and the Northern Kentucky Case

South Covington , roughly two miles south of the Ohio River and just before the Wallace Woods neighborhood, is where Schmerge owns a 7-unit value-add property purchased in September 2025. He describes the building as a C-minus or D-class asset at acquisition, in a blue-collar neighborhood where he is deliberately avoiding over-improving finishes, with a goal of reaching B-minus or B-class within two years.

Why Cincinnati Multifamily Avoided the Distress Other Markets Saw

Three structural factors explain why 2025 was one of Cincinnati's lowest multifamily transaction volume years without producing the kind of forced, distressed sales seen in other metros.

Cincinnati's traditionally wide cap rate spread over debt cost is the biggest factor. Markets that traded at 4% to 5% cap rates during low interest rate years now face debt costs that exceed their in-place returns, forcing refinances that do not pencil. Cincinnati's historical 7% to 8% cap rate range, even with debt costs around 6.5%, still preserves a workable spread, meaning deals bought at the top of the last cycle are still refinancing at debt service coverage ratios that generally work.

Limited new construction keeps supply pressure lower than in faster-growing metros. Cincinnati typically has only 2% to 3% of existing multifamily inventory under construction at any given time, compared to double-digit percentages in some primary markets betting heavily on continued population growth.

Insurance and property tax increases have become the two biggest underwriting variables , overshadowing interest rates in some cases. Schmerge's own South Covington property carries an insurance premium more than double what the previous owner paid, a gap he attributes to the building's 1930s construction and outdated mechanicals rather than any error on the prior owner's part. Insurance underwriting for older Cincinnati-area multifamily now runs roughly $600 per unit as a rough baseline, though square footage, age, and mechanical updates all shift that figure meaningfully.

Property tax reassessment mechanics differ sharply between Ohio and Kentucky. On the Kentucky side, a sale typically triggers reassessment to the purchase price within the first 12 months of ownership, with subsequent reassessments roughly every three years, and increases have generally stayed modest. On the Ohio side, Hamilton County's 2023 triennial reassessment averaged a 65% increase from 2020 values, a shock that has made property tax forecasting a much bigger underwriting conversation for Cincinnati real estate than it has historically been. A proposed Ohio bill addressing property taxes for owner-occupants is being watched closely, since any reduction in that tax base will likely need to be recovered elsewhere, a risk school districts and counties are already responding to with more aggressive board of revision activity against recently sold properties, particularly around Ohio's drop-and-swap strategy, which Schmerge notes is already facing more scrutiny in Columbus and Cleveland than it currently does in Cincinnati.

What's Working in Cincinnati

Schmerge's brokerage experience surfaces a specific, quantifiable framework for how much renovation work a seller should actually complete before bringing a value-add multifamily deal to market.

Leave meaningful upside for the next buyer rather than fully stabilizing a property. Schmerge's rule of thumb: renovating as few as 10% of units at top-of-market rents can establish proof of concept, though that threshold is more reliable on larger properties, a 30-to-50-unit building rather than a small one where a single renovated unit is not a real sample size. Renovating beyond roughly 70% of units starts producing diminishing returns for the seller, since it shrinks the pool of buyers looking specifically for a value-add opportunity.
Selling unrealized upside commands a lower cap rate than selling in-place cash flow. Schmerge is direct that brokers can sell a buyer pool on future NOI growth potential far more easily than they can sell current in-place performance, since in-place NOI is fixed while unrealized upside lets a buyer's imagination, and their eventual lender, justify a stronger valuation.
Consider turnkey acquisitions specifically because most buyers avoid them. Schmerge estimates roughly 98% of buyers are chasing value-add deals, which has made genuinely turnkey, cash-flowing properties comparatively overlooked and less competitive to acquire, provided a buyer verifies the turnkey claim is real rather than cosmetic.
Underwrite insurance and tax increases explicitly rather than assuming the seller's current expenses will hold. Schmerge's own experience paying more than double the previous owner's insurance premium illustrates how easily an underinsured or outdated policy can distort a seller's reported operating expenses.
Match renovation spend to what the current tenant base is actually willing to pay for. Echoing Ian and Slocomb's own 73-unit portfolio decision, Schmerge agrees that in the current market, upgrading finishes tenants are not paying a premium for is money that will not come back in rent growth, and that capital is better spent on safety and mechanical improvements that do not show up as prominently in marketing photos.

Lessons From the Field: What a First-Time Owner-Operator Learned From His Own Deal

Schmerge closed on his 7-unit South Covington property in September 2025, after years of brokering multifamily deals for other buyers without ever taking one down himself. He had been waiting for a turnkey, cash-flowing deal to simply present itself, but as the end of the year approached and he wanted to capture bonus depreciation, he decided a heavier value-add deal was the better move despite not being his original plan.

The outcome nine months in: full occupancy, though leasing the renovated units took more showings and slightly longer than expected, partly because the renovation and initial leasing period fell during December and January, typically the slowest leasing months of the year. Schmerge did not have to lower his advertised rent to fill the units despite the slower timeline.

A turnkey deal may never simply appear, even for a broker who sees every listing in the market. Schmerge waited a meaningful amount of time expecting one to surface before deciding a value-add deal made more sense given his tax planning timeline.
Verify the actual insurance policy in place rather than assuming the seller's premium reflects the building's true risk. A policy that looks affordable on paper may simply be underinsured, a gap that only becomes visible once a new buyer gets their own quotes.
Self-managing a first value-add deal builds underwriting judgment that brokerage alone does not provide. Schmerge specifically credits hands-on renovation and leasing experience with sharpening his ability to evaluate line-item renovation costs for other clients' deals.
Winter leasing timelines require real patience even when the fundamentals are sound. More showings and a longer fill time in December and January did not require a rent reduction, but did require adjusting expectations for how quickly newly renovated units would lease.
A blue-collar tenant base sets a ceiling on how aggressive renovation should be. Schmerge's plan to reach B-minus or B-class within two years, rather than pursuing a full luxury reposition, reflects a deliberate match between renovation scope and what the local tenant base can support.

Cincinnati's Fourplex Playbook: Why Brick Bunkers Still Work

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 12:50:25 GMT

Bret Halsey went from pro soccer to 70-plus units in under three years, 14 of them fourplexes. How Cincinnati's repeating 1960s floor plans make the city's most common multifamily building the easiest one to underwrite.

Bret Halsey went from playing professional soccer for FC Cincinnati to owning over 70 units in under three years, 14 of them fourplexes, almost entirely sourced through his own cold calling. His path into the market started with a single four-family in Pleasant Ridge , and it turned into a repeatable formula for identifying, financing, and flipping Cincinnati's most common multifamily property type: the 1960s brick bunker fourplex.

About This Post

This analysis draws from a conversation with Bret Halsey , a former professional soccer player turned full-time real estate investor who has acquired over 70 units across Greater Cincinnati, primarily through direct-to-seller cold calling. Halsey's rapid transition from house hacker to active operator, sourcing nearly every deal himself, gives him unusually granular, hands-on knowledge of how Cincinnati's fourplex stock actually trades and renovates.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The full episode also covers Halsey's cold calling routine in detail and a story about a tenant-caused explosion that leveled one of his Price Hill fourplexes.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

ubscribe on Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Where Fourplex Investing Works Across Greater Cincinnati

Pleasant Ridge is where Halsey bought his first fourplex as an owner-occupant in September 2023, chosen partly for its proximity to his soccer training facility in Milford and partly because it hit the 1% rule with central heat and air already in place. Halsey specifically targeted this neighborhood, along with Silverton and Deer Park , as a middle ground between overpriced Oakley and Hyde Park and less desirable areas further out, describing it as sitting in the path of Oakley's gentrification spilling outward.
Oakley and Hyde Park are effectively priced out of fourplex cash flow for Halsey's model. A comparable four-unit in Hyde Park runs around $750,000 and does not cash flow at all, with Oakley only marginally better.
Norwood produced Halsey's first deal, a 45-unit property he found through nine months of cold calling and ultimately wholesaled, generating more profit than his entire year of professional soccer. Norwood also cost him a lesson: he passed on a fourplex on Bosworth Place in Pleasant Ridge priced at $270,000 to $280,000, only to see a comparable property on the same street sell for $410,000 six to nine months later.
Roselawn is, in Halsey's description, "an interesting street" almost entirely composed of fourplexes, where he has sold multiple properties to a mix of investors and owner-occupants, including one buyer who raised her daughter there.
Price Hill was Halsey's first West Side purchase, three auctioned fourplexes totaling 12 units bought for around $420,000 with six-month hard money, despite having no prior ownership experience on the West Side. One of those buildings was destroyed in a gas explosion caused by a non-paying tenant in March, a total loss that Halsey's replacement cost value insurance ultimately covered.
Bond Hill rounds out Halsey's early portfolio alongside his Pleasant Ridge and Norwood holdings, part of the initial 10-to-14-unit base he had built before scaling into larger deals.

Why 1960s Brick Bunker Fourplexes Are So Easy to Underwrite

Cincinnati's fourplex stock is remarkably uniform, built primarily in the 1960s (as early as the late 1940s, as late as the mid-1970s) in what Halsey and Slocomb both describe as a small handful of repeating brick-and-block floor plans. Because these are purpose-built multifamily structures rather than converted single-family homes, narrower buildings consistently produce one-bedroom units, while wider ones produce two-bedrooms, a pattern visible from the building's facade alone before ever stepping inside.

What's Working in Cincinnati

Halsey's approach to sourcing and financing fourplexes rests on a few specific, repeatable mechanics.

Niche down to a specific property type and neighborhood before cold calling at scale. Halsey struggled with unfocused calling until his first mailer-sourced Pleasant Ridge fourplex gave him a concrete anchor point, after which he could quote specific purchase and resale numbers to prospects with real confidence.
Use hard money and minimal down payment to preserve capital for scaling. Halsey's fourplex strategy relied on financing at or near 100% loan-to-value, sometimes blending 90% hard money with 10% private money, prioritizing equity capture and capital preservation over immediate cash flow.
Match the exit buyer to the neighborhood. In areas like Pleasant Ridge, Halsey can price a fourplex to attract an owner-occupant buyer willing to pay a premium for residential-style financing, while properties in neighborhoods like Roselawn or on the West Side more often sell to investors. Halsey notes fourplexes can trade for $100,000 to $120,000-plus per unit due to this owner-occupant financing advantage, compared to roughly $80,000 per unit for a 6-to-10-unit building with similar rents.
Focus renovation dollars on cosmetic upgrades, not mechanical overhauls. Adding a dishwasher, reglazing original tile white, installing butcher block counters or granite depending on the neighborhood, and updating light fixtures and hardware are Halsey's highest-return, lowest-complexity improvements. Projects that strayed into garage doors, foundation work, or unexpected roof and mold remediation were the ones that blew up his budgets.
Build direct-to-seller relationships with a personal story, not just an investor pitch. Halsey found that leading with his background as a professional athlete, rather than a generic investor cold call, opened doors with property owners who might have otherwise ignored the outreach entirely.

What is not working: expecting significant cash flow from a 100%-leveraged fourplex acquisition strategy. Halsey shifted his own model away from refinancing and holding these properties once he realized his highly leveraged deals were not generating meaningful cash flow, choosing instead to sell and roll proceeds into larger acquisitions.

Lessons From the Field: When a Tenant's Gas Line Destroyed a Fourplex

Halsey bought three auctioned fourplexes on Elberon Avenue in Price Hill in July 2024, his first purchase on Cincinnati's West Side, financed with six-month hard money and a mad dash to stabilize 12 units, several of which were not paying rent at closing.

The complication arrived roughly eight months later, in March, when a non-paying tenant Halsey was in the process of evicting turned on the gas in one of the units, causing an explosion that leveled the entire building. Halsey learned the difference between actual cash value and replacement cost value insurance coverage in real time as the claim unfolded; fortunately, he had replacement cost value coverage in place.

Verify replacement cost value coverage before an unplanned total loss forces you to find out the hard way. The distinction between actual cash value and replacement cost value determined whether this loss was financially survivable.
A fast-moving disaster can outpace your insurance company's own inspection timeline. The building was demolished before the adjuster ever saw it standing, which could have complicated the claim under different circumstances.
Entering a new submarket for the first time carries compounding risk. Halsey had zero prior ownership experience on the West Side when he bought these properties, layering unfamiliar-market risk on top of the non-paying tenants he inherited at closing.
A property in active eviction still carries real risk until the tenant is physically out. The non-paying tenant responsible for the explosion was already in the eviction process at the time of the incident.
Undervalued, highly leveraged acquisitions can absorb unplanned setbacks better than fully-priced deals. Because Halsey had captured meaningful equity at acquisition, the property's destruction did not represent the same financial exposure it would have on a deal bought at full market value with thin margins.

Cleves, Ohio: How a Master Lease Deal Repositioned a 24-Unit Property

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 19:09:23 GMT

Nine of 24 units were paying rent. Slocomb Reed took over management three months before closing, cleared the building, and proved higher rents; all before owning a share of it.

A cold email to Brandon Turner's BiggerPockets address led to a 24-unit property in Cleves, Ohio changing hands twice, first as a sale, then years later as a repurchase structured entirely around a three-month master lease. Slocomb Reed, co-host of the Cincy REI Show and operator of the property since 2019, used that window to take a building with 9 rent-paying tenants out of 24 units and reposition it before he owned a single share of it.

About This Post

This analysis draws from a conversation with Slocomb Reed , co-host of the Cincy REI Show and a Cincinnati-based real estate investor and property manager who has self-operated multifamily properties across Greater Cincinnati for over a decade. Reed's firsthand account of buying, selling, and later repurchasing the same 24-unit Cleves property gives this episode an unusually complete before-and-after view of one deal across seven years.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The full episode also covers Reed's early transition from full-time realtor to full-time operator, and more detail on onboarding tenants during a disorganized property management handoff.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

Subscribe on Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Cleves, Ohio: Cincinnati's Tertiary Market Inside the Beltway

Cleves sits far enough west inside I-275 that it behaves more like its own small tertiary market than a piece of Cincinnati proper. Reed describes it as geographically separate from the rest of the metro, reached either via Columbia Parkway and Highway 50 along the river, or via I-74 to I-275, exiting at Highway 125 south through Whitewater before connecting to Highway 50 into town.

The property's isolation from other multifamily buildings turned out to be a genuine asset rather than a limitation. With no neighboring apartment complexes visible from the site, and single-family homes surrounding it instead, Reed's team controls the entire perception of the property. Prospective tenants driving past see no comparable buildings signaling a lower rent ceiling or a rougher reputation, unlike properties on streets lined with multiple older four-family buildings where a single owner has little control over collective neighborhood perception.

Why a $775 One-Bedroom Works in Cleves but Fails in Westwood

The core lesson from this property is that a given rent number only makes sense relative to its specific submarket, not in isolation. Reed's Cleves one-bedrooms rent for $775 a month as of 2026, up from an assumed $575 ceiling when the deal closed in 2019. In a denser, higher-income Cincinnati neighborhood like Westwood , that same $775 for a comparably sized unit would represent a discount deep enough to attract only the most budget-constrained, least stable tenant pool, since better-qualified renters would simply pay $100 to $150 more for a nicer comparable unit down the block.

This is the kind of submarket-specific dynamic that separates successful Cincinnati real estate underwriting from a simple citywide rent comparison. A rent figure that would signal trouble in one neighborhood can represent a healthy, stable position in another, and the difference often comes down to utility structure, wage trends among the local employer base, and school district boundaries rather than anything visible in a standard market comp.

What's Working in Cincinnati

Reed's approach to smaller, geographically isolated properties comes down to a few consistent principles.

Self-manage when a property is too small for on-site staff but too far out for third-party interest. At 24 units and roughly 20 to 25 minutes from Reed's other holdings, the property was not large enough to justify dedicated payroll staff, and its lower rent base meant proportionally lower management fees, making it unattractive to higher-caliber third-party property managers.
Underwrite utility structure explicitly, not just rent. Water provider and heating fuel type can materially change a property's operating expense ratio. All-electric construction with tenant-controlled heat removes a major landlord cost that a comparable gas-heated building elsewhere would carry.
Treat isolation from other multifamily as a control advantage, not a drawback. A standalone building surrounded by single-family homes lets an operator fully control leasing standards and reputation, free from the comps and perception set by neighboring buildings.
Match qualification standards to the true local rent ceiling, not a citywide average. Rentometer, Zillow, and similar tools rarely have adequate comps for a submarket like Cleves. Reed's own leasing history became the most reliable comp source once enough data existed.

What is not working: assuming a rent figure that works in one submarket translates directly to another. A $775 one-bedroom that represents market rate in Cleves would represent a distressed, tenant-quality-compromising rent in a denser neighborhood like Westwood or Northside.

Lessons From the Field: The Master Lease That Repositioned a Property Before Closing

Reed had originally sold this same 24-unit property to Brandon Turner years earlier, acting as Turner's buyer's agent after a cold email pitch built from a BiggerPockets analysis report. By 2019, Turner had cycled through three property managers while building Open Door Capital and relocating out of state, and reached out publicly on the BiggerPockets podcast looking for a buyer.

The outcome was a property substantially repositioned before Reed ever owned it. By the time closing arrived three months later, only a handful of units remained vacant, market testing had already shown $650 rents were achievable against an assumed $575 ceiling, and Reed's team benefited from the single period in the property's ownership history with the lowest possible expenses, no debt service, insurance, or property tax, layered against improving revenue.

A distressed occupancy rate does not have to be solved before a deal structure is agreed to. The master lease let both sides address the property's core problem, chronic underperformance from a series of disengaged managers, without either party bearing the cost alone.
Increasing the purchase price to cover a seller's carrying costs can still net a better deal than a lower price with no head start. Reed's team gained three months of unencumbered cash flow and stabilization work in exchange for a purchase price increase equal to those carrying costs.
The seller benefits from this structure even if the buyer walks away. Since Turner's mortgage payments were happening regardless of the sale's outcome, the property arrived at closing in better condition and with better tenants than if the deal had fallen through, protecting his position either way.
The lowest-revenue period of a turnaround is also, structurally, the lowest-expense period, if the deal is built that way. Taking over management before assuming any debt service meant every dollar collected in that first month could go toward stabilization work rather than covering a mortgage payment.
A responsive relationship built years earlier can resurface unexpectedly. Reed's original cold outreach to Turner, unrelated at the time to any intent to eventually buy the property back, put him in position as the only person who responded when Turner later asked publicly for a buyer.

Reading, Ohio: Cincinnati's Unlikely Development Hotspot

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 02:12:03 GMT

Reading, Ohio: Cincinnati's Unlikely Development Hotspot

Commercial rents on Benson Street in Reading, Ohio , a four-block corridor known as the largest bridal district in the world per capita, now rival what landlords command on Main Street downtown or at The Banks, Cincinnati's most prime real estate. Joe Cornwell, founder of Realty One Stop and a vertically integrated developer with over 140 units under management, is in the middle of converting a 1905 theater there into a 75,000-square-foot mixed-use building with 44 apartments, a project that illustrates just how much value sits in Cincinnati's under-the-radar corridors once someone is willing to do the ground-up work.

About This Post

This analysis draws from a conversation with Joe Cornwell , founder of Realty One Stop and ROS Construction, a vertically integrated Cincinnati developer whose portfolio includes over 140 multifamily and mixed-use units, with assets under management projected to reach $20 million to $25 million once his current Reading development stabilizes. Cornwell's construction background and hands-on role in Reading's redevelopment give him unusually specific, ground-level detail on a niche corridor most Cincinnati investors have never analyzed.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The full episode also covers Cornwell's advice on which older Cincinnati housing stock is worth a bathroom addition versus a full second-story pop-top, and more detail on Reading's new tax abatement program.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

Subscribe on Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

The Bridal District: Why Four Blocks Command Downtown Rents

Reading's Bridal District runs along Benson Street for about four blocks west of Reading Road, bordering the neighboring community of Lockland. It holds more unique bridal retailers and designer lines than anywhere else in the world, drawing clients from New York, Texas, California, Florida, Canada, and internationally. That retail draw translates directly into commercial rent, priced comparably to downtown Cincinnati's core business district, but the premium drops off sharply outside the immediate corridor. Rents fall dramatically just one block north or south of Benson Street, since foot traffic concentrates almost entirely on that single streetscape.

Why Infill Development Inside 275 Is So Rare in Cincinnati

Ground-up development inside the I-275 loop faces a structural barrier that outer suburbs do not: there is almost no available land. Roughly 99% of the core Hamilton County and western Clermont County footprint is already built out, which pushes most new residential construction toward the region's outer edges, where land is cheap and jurisdictions actively incentivize farmland development.

Building inside the loop typically means either tearing down existing structures or, as Cornwell's project does, a hybrid approach that preserves part of an existing building while adding new construction around it. His team kept the original 1905 theater's exterior brick walls and roofline while completely gutting the interior down to the dirt, then assembled three additional parcels, a house, an empty lot, and an alleyway, to create roughly 100 parking spaces alongside the development.

This scarcity is exactly why Reading's local government stands out. The city is actively incentivizing developers and investors through code enforcement on neglected properties and a newly passed Community Reinvestment Area tax abatement covering the entire valley, a level of municipal cooperation Cornwell says is rare for a small Hamilton County municipality. For an investor evaluating Greater Cincinnati infill opportunities, that kind of local government alignment can matter as much as the underlying real estate fundamentals.

What's Working in Cincinnati

Cornwell's underwriting on the Reading development surfaced a clear unit-mix pattern that applies broadly to multifamily development in Cincinnati real estate .

Two-bedroom, two-bathroom units produce the best rent per square foot. Cornwell's underwriting lands at roughly $1.75 per square foot, projecting about $1,750 a month on a 1,000-square-foot two-two. Larger three-bedroom units and smaller one-bedroom units both see rent per square foot decline, since adding a bedroom or bathroom to an already self-contained apartment costs relatively little compared to the fixed cost of kitchen, appliances, and HVAC already built into the unit.
The second full bathroom is what young professional tenants are actually paying for. Cornwell's target tenant, single or partnered, often hybrid-working, wants a private en-suite bathroom off the primary bedroom plus a separate bathroom for guests or a roommate, a distinction that matters more to this tenant class than raw square footage.
Older Cincinnati housing stock rewards different renovation strategies depending on era and neighborhood. Cape Cod-style homes, common across Deer Park, Norwood, Reading , and similar central-to-east side suburbs built in the 1940s through 1960s, typically have a plumbing stack already running near the upstairs landing closet, making a second bathroom addition there relatively cheap. Turn-of-the-century American Foursquare homes in neighborhoods like Oakley, Hyde Park, Price Hill, Westwood, Evanston, Avondale , and North Avondale were built without a shared guest bathroom at all, since the era's norm was that guests never used a resident's private bathroom. Adding a half bath off the living area or kitchen in these homes, often by reclaiming space from an underused formal dining room, is now one of the highest-return renovation moves available in that housing stock.
A two-to-three-times return threshold governs whether a renovation makes sense. Cornwell's rule of thumb: if a $100,000 renovation on a $100,000 purchase does not add at least $100,000 in equity, and ideally closer to $200,000, it is not worth doing.

What is not working: assuming ground-up development delivers fast returns. Cornwell is direct that development is neither easy nor quick money, and that a comparable amount of capital and time could produce faster, more certain returns through value-add acquisitions instead.

Lessons From the Field: What a Floodplain Discovery Did to a 44-Unit Development

knew about going in. What they did not fully anticipate was how complex FEMA-compliant building code would turn out to be once engineering work began on the roughly 11,000-square-foot ground floor footprint of the old theater building.

The complication was structural: any space below the required flood elevation could not be used as occupied residential or commercial space at all. That ruled out the ground floor's originally planned mix of retail, office, and residential use entirely, since the entire footprint sat below the mandated elevation.

A known floodplain designation does not mean you understand its full building code implications. The general flood risk was known upfront. The specific FEMA compliance requirements only surfaced once detailed engineering began.
A forced design change can improve the deal instead of derailing it. Losing ground-floor residential and commercial space led directly to an additional apartment floor, growing the unit count from 38 to 44.
Vertical integration turns an underwriting problem into a business opportunity. Rather than treating the oversized shop space as wasted square footage, the team is treating it as inventory to actively monetize through their own construction company.
Development-stage uncertainty can run far longer than most investors expect. Twelve months passed between going under contract and having certainty the deal would actually close, a timeline Cornwell says makes ground-up development unsuitable for anyone seeking fast or passive returns.
Outside feedback questioning a deal's difficulty is worth hearing, but does not have to change the decision. Experienced mentors who underwrote the deal told Cornwell the numbers worked, but questioned why he would choose a harder path than easier, faster real estate strategies available at similar scale. Cornwell and his partner proceeded anyway, treating the project's difficulty as part of its appeal rather than a reason to avoid it.

Cincinnati Zoning Variance: Turning a Fourplex Into Six Units

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 03:01:35 GMT

Two years, roughly $10,000 in zoning costs, and about 40 neighbor signatures. What Jeremy Komer's Northside conversion reveals about Cincinnati's variance process and the gap in Connected Communities.

Jeremy Komer spent close to $10,000 and two full years navigating Cincinnati's zoning process to convert a neglected fourplex on Chase Avenue in Northside into six rentable units, a project that added 30% to 40% to the property's value. His deal is a working case study in how Cincinnati's single-family zoning collides with its own missing-middle housing goals, and what it actually costs in time and money to push a property through that process.

About This Post

This analysis draws from a conversation with Jeremy Komer , a Northside-based real estate investor who has been active in Cincinnati since 2020, financing deals through everything from FHA house-hacking loans to hard money and commercial construction loans. Komer's direct-to-seller sourcing and his firsthand experience navigating Cincinnati's zoning variance process give this episode unusually specific, step-by-step detail that most investors never see documented.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The full episode also covers Komer's earlier experience managing a distressed Over-the-Rhine property under third-party management, and more detail on how he split the original parcel before closing.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

Subscribe on Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Northside's Zoning Mismatch: Single-Family Rules on Multifamily Buildings

Northside was largely built as tenement housing in the population boom that followed the Civil War, with most buildings originally holding one unit per floor. As plumbing arrived, those buildings consolidated down to a single shared kitchen and bathroom per structure, eventually functioning as single-family homes even though the physical buildings were built for multiple households. The neighborhood's zoning, designated SF-2 with a 2,000-square-foot minimum lot size, was written more than a century after much of that housing stock existed, meaning most Northside parcels are zoned for a use they were never physically built to match. Records for many of these buildings only go back to 1890, since a labor riot that year destroyed the city's earlier property records.

Cincinnati's Missing Middle Housing Push, and What It Actually Covers

The city's Connected Communities legislation is the policy backdrop for deals like this one. It reduces parking requirements and density restrictions near transit and business districts, and it allows one-to-four-unit conversions by right in single-family zones like SF-2, something that previously required the same variance process Komer went through. The stated goal is restoring what planners call missing middle housing, the multifamily housing stock that neighborhoods like Northside lost as buildings were down-converted to single-family use over the decades.

The gap in that policy is exactly where Komer's project fell. Connected Communities covers going from one unit up to four. Komer needed to go from four units to six, which still requires the full variance and plans examiner process rather than a by-right approval, even though the project fits the spirit of the same missing-middle policy.

This sits inside a broader Cincinnati real estate rent pattern worth tracking for any investor considering a similar unit-count increase: since the market shift that began in August 2024, C-class one-bedroom apartments have seen the sharpest and most persistent rent softening of any segment, with two-bedroom C-class rents holding roughly flat. A location with strong walkability and character, like Komer's Chase Avenue building, is one of the few conditions that can still command premium rent on a one-bedroom unit despite that broader softness.

What's Working in Cincinnati

Komer's approach breaks down into a few distinct, repeatable moves.

Build the seller relationship over time, not urgency. Komer met the seller by chance on the street and kept following up every month or two for roughly a year before the seller was ready to sell. No pressure, just consistent, low-friction contact.
Structure the deal around what each side actually values. The seller believed the single-family portion of the property was worth more than Komer did, and Komer wanted the fourplex the seller undervalued. Splitting the parcel let each side keep the piece they valued more, with Komer taking on all the risk and cost of getting the split approved and no obligation to close until the split was confirmed.
Use a construction loan that rolls into permanent commercial financing. Komer financed the acquisition with a standard 25% down loan, then used a Community Trust Bank product that combined the renovation loan with the commercial property loan in a single closing, avoiding a second full closing cost, which he estimated would have added roughly $10,000 to the deal.
Keep existing units generating revenue during a long entitlement process. With three of the building's units still rentable throughout the two-year zoning and permitting timeline, Komer covered his holding costs while waiting on approvals rather than carrying a vacant building.
Bring community support to the zoning fight. When the zoning committee rejected the variance application, as expected, Komer went door-to-door and collected about 40 signatures from neighbors supporting the additional housing. That petition, presented at the plans examiner hearing, became the deciding factor in getting the variance approved.

What is not working, or at least consistently underestimated: assuming Cincinnati's zoning timeline moves quickly. Komer expected the zoning process to take one or two months. It took six to seven months to move through the zoning committee rejection, the variance application, and the plans examiner hearing, on top of a separate multi-month permitting process once the zoning was approved.

Lessons From the Field: What It Actually Takes to Go From Four Units to Six

Komer's plan going into the deal was simple: buy the neglected fourplex, keep it as-is, and improve the rent roll. That changed a few months before closing, when he realized the building's mechanical access on the first floor made it feasible to convert a single two-bedroom, two-bathroom unit into three separate one-bedroom apartments.

The outcome was a $130,000 to $140,000 interior renovation and a separate six-to-eight-month exterior renovation, including a DOT permit and $750 bond to close the sidewalk and street during masonry work, all layered on top of roughly $10,000 in zoning-specific costs. The result was a 30% to 40% increase in property value, driven by the shift from limited fourplex comps to a cap-rate valuation on six units, with the interior renovation financed through the same construction loan and later refinanced through Community Trust Bank.

Expect the first zoning application to be rejected as a matter of course. A rejection at the initial zoning relief stage is close to automatic, not a signal the project is flawed.
Community support can outweigh a zoning committee's opposition at the plans examiner stage. Forty signatures gathered door-to-door became the single biggest factor in Komer's approval.
Structure acquisition terms around due diligence risk, not just price. Making closing contingent on zoning approval let Komer pursue an upside project without being stuck owning it on the seller's terms if the split or variance failed.
Commercial code applies once a building crosses four units, with real cost implications. Requirements like architect-stamped drawings, additional fire blocking, and mandatory outlets near HVAC units do not apply to smaller residential permits, and missing them causes inspection failures.
A revenue-generating property can absorb a long entitlement timeline. Keeping three units occupied throughout the two-year process kept Komer roughly break-even on holding costs while he waited on approvals that were entirely outside his control.

Why Cincinnati's Biggest Multifamily Deals Don't Pencil for Everyone

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 01:14:42 GMT

Lee Yoder holds 930 units, and almost none of them are near Cincinnati. Why institutional capital compresses returns above 100 units, and what he found in rural Ohio and Indiana instead.

Lee Yoder owns 930 units today, and only one property sits anywhere near Cincinnati proper. The rest run north through the northwest corner of Ohio and into the northeast corner of Indiana, in towns most Cincinnati investors have never heard of. Founder of Threefold REI, Yoder made that shift deliberately, not because he stopped liking Cincinnati real estate , but because the returns he needed stopped being available once his deal size crossed into institutional territory.

About This Post

This analysis draws from a conversation with Lee Yoder , founder of Threefold REI, who has taken three multifamily syndications full cycle and currently holds 930 units concentrated in northwest Ohio and northeast Indiana. Yoder's experience straddling both a small Cincinnati-area portfolio and a much larger rural multifamily operation gives him an unusually direct comparison point on where returns are actually available at different deal sizes.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The full episode also covers Yoder's decision to bring property management in-house after years working with a third-party Cincinnati management company, and more detail on his rent roll and leasing performance in Williamsburg.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

Subscribe on Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Why Yoder Left Cincinnati for Rural Ohio and Indiana

Williamsburg, Ohio , in Clermont County, is Yoder's property closest to Cincinnati, roughly 15 minutes from the outer belt on Route 32 past Batavia. The appeal is straightforward: cheaper land and rent than closer-in submarkets, a small school district, a walkable downtown with a coffee shop and donut shop, and easy access back to every Cincinnati amenity via the outer belt. Two-thirds of the unit mix is one-bedroom, one-third two-bedroom. One-bedrooms moved from $850 back up to $900 in early 2026 after a rough stretch; two-bedrooms have held steady around $1,100.
Northwest Ohio and northeast Indiana are where the bulk of Yoder's 930 units sit, in small towns like West Liberty, similar in character to Williamsburg but small enough that few investors outside a tight radius have heard of them. Yoder targets a minimum of 100 units per acquisition there specifically so the deal can support a dedicated on-the-ground team.
Cincinnati inside the outer belt , particularly for properties over 100 units, is where Yoder says he consistently loses to institutional buyers who have a lower cost of capital and target lower returns, since their investors are largely preserving existing wealth rather than building it. Yoder still finds smaller Cincinnati deals with a workable price per door but says he has lost interest in that segment now that his fund size requires bigger acquisitions.
The Cincinnati east side broadly , including the Eastgate area near Williamsburg, has seen heavy new apartment construction in the last several years. Yoder says that supply has occasionally pulled his own C-class tenants toward newer B-class product offerings with months of free rent as concessions, a pattern he expects to ease as those new deliveries slow into 2026 and 2027.

The Cap Rate Gap Between Cincinnati and Rural Multifamily

What's Working in Cincinnati (and Just Outside It)

Yoder's strategy comes down to a small number of deliberate choices about where to compete and how to hold.

Go where the big players aren't. Yoder specifically targets deal sizes and locations that fall below the threshold institutional capital requires, whether that means staying under 100 units in Cincinnati or going rural at scale further out.
Buy for cash flow, not a five-year flip. Yoder's earlier syndications targeted a shorter hold and exited faster than projected. His current portfolio is built around a 10-year hold horizon, planning to refinance around year five and return investor capital while continuing to collect cash flow rather than counting on a large sale-driven upside.
Bring property management in-house once you have the scale and expertise to do it. Yoder worked with a Cincinnati-based third-party management company for years, learned the business from them, and eventually built an internal team once he understood the operation well enough to run it with tighter focus and lower cost, since the internal team's only incentive is making the properties profitable, not generating a separate management fee.
Match capital investment to what the tenant base can actually pay. For C-class properties right now, Yoder deliberately avoids upgrading finishes like countertops or cabinets that are functional but dated, since C-class renters currently want affordability over upgrades they cannot pay for. Yoder's approach is to accept a lower rent, like $850 instead of $950, rather than force a renovation cost onto a tenant base that will not absorb it.

What is not working: assuming Cincinnati's headline market-wide rent growth numbers apply evenly across asset classes and unit types. Much of the reported growth is concentrated in single-family rentals and Class-A apartments, while Class-C one-bedrooms specifically have lagged or declined.

Lessons From the Field: What a Rent Leasing Platform Change Revealed About the Market

A leasing technology change can surface a market shift before broader data confirms it. TLP recognized the March shift within about three weeks specifically because they had already been tracking their own inquiry-to-lease funnel closely since 2023.
More inquiries do not guarantee more leases, at least not immediately. The gap between the January inquiry spike and the March conversion spike shows real demand and converted demand can move on different timelines.
AI leasing tools require real setup investment before they perform. Both operators described a genuine break-in period training the AI on quirks and edge cases before it delivered clean results.
Independent portfolios seeing the same shift at the same time is a stronger signal than either alone. TLP's Cincinnati experience and Yoder's rural Ohio and Indiana experience lined up almost to the week, despite having no shared management or geography.
Class-C recovery lags Class-A recovery, and the timing gap itself is data. Rents for older one-bedroom stock only began recovering roughly 18 months after the August 2024 downturn began, well after Class-A rents had already stabilized and climbed.

Hunter, Hammer, Brain, Money: A Framework for Real Estate Partnerships

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 23:12:56 GMT

How Ian Cruz and Slocomb Reed used four defined roles to scale from an 8-unit Northside deal to 73 units in under two years — plus what Cincinnati's rental data shows right now.

Greater Cincinnati had 1,264 active rental listings against 1,730 active for-sale listings as of late February 2026, according to a proprietary web scrape TLP Investment Services had just launched. Ian Cruz and Slocomb Reed, co-founders of TLP Investment Services, shared that data alongside a breakdown of how their own partnership scaled from an 8-unit value-add deal to a 73-unit portfolio in under two years, at a live session of Cincinnati's Best Ever REI Mastermind.

About This Post

This analysis draws from a live presentation by Ian Cruz and Slocomb Reed , co-founders of TLP Investment Services, at Cincinnati's Best Ever REI Mastermind, a monthly meetup held at the Deer Park Community Center. Their combined finance and operations background, and the deals they walked through in real time, give this session an unusually direct look at how multifamily partnerships and financing actually come together.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The full episode also covers audience Q&A on partnership decision-making when partners reach an impasse, and more detail on how TLP structures general partner compensation.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

Subscribe on Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Where TLP Is Scaling Value-Add Multifamily in Greater Cincinnati

Northside is where TLP's partnership began, with an 8-unit deal in 2024: two four-family buildings sitting side by side, separately parceled, but listed by a commercial broker as a single 8-unit commercial property. The value play was recognizing that the combined residential valuation of the two buildings individually was meaningfully lower than what the commercial listing price implied. TLP exited that deal after about 18 months.
Northside and College Hill together make up TLP's 2025 portfolio, a 73-unit deal spanning six apartment buildings, five of them on the same Northside street and the sixth in College Hill. The properties are 1960s and 1970s C-class assets, occupancy has run below target due to some tenant turnover, but revenue is at the highest point since acquisition due to executed business plan improvements.
TLP is now under contract on a scatter-site portfolio of over 100 units , with plans to acquire a deal of similar size or larger every year going forward, using the acquisition and asset management capacity built across the first two deals.

What Cincinnati's Rental and For-Sale Data Actually Shows Right Now

TLP's web scrape, tracking specific Greater Cincinnati zip codes, surfaced several data points as of late February 2026.

Average days on market ran 57.8 for rental listings overall, with apartments at 59.2 and single-family rentals at 54, a smaller gap between the two than expected. For-sale listings averaged 85.8 days on market, roughly four weeks longer than rentals.
Price reductions hit over 300 of 1,734 active for-sale listings in just the four days before the meetup.
Rent figures across all rental listings averaged $1,718 a month with a median of $1,495. Apartments alone averaged $1,516 with a median of $1,300. Single-family rentals averaged $2,279 with a median of $2,095.
August 2024 marked a clear inflection point. Rents could be asked at nearly any level through that July, then by September the market flipped hard toward tenants, with price reductions and longer vacancies becoming standard.
A K-shaped split has held since that fall 2024 to winter 2025 transition. Premium locations and premium properties, class A assets, continue seeing rent increases and falling days on market. Older 1960s and 1970s one- and two-bedroom stock has stayed flat to declining over the same period.
Net move-ins at TLP's own portfolio ran nine more move-ins than move-outs over the trailing 12 months, one internal metric the team tracks alongside the market-wide data.

The structural point underneath all of it: Cincinnati real estate still has starter-home neighborhoods where purchase prices sit in the high $100,000s to low-to-mid $200,000s, a price range where owning still beats renting on a monthly cost basis, something increasingly rare in other major metros.

What's Working in Cincinnati

Partnership structure. TLP frames every partnership around four roles, useful for any investor considering bringing on a partner.

The Hunter finds the deal. This person is wired to enjoy sourcing opportunities and stays plugged into brokers and off-market channels.
The Hammer executes the business plan. This covers leasing, maintenance, and keeping CapEx under control once the deal closes.
The Brain underwrites the deal. This role lives in the spreadsheets, structures the debt and equity, and builds the model the rest of the team executes against.
The Money raises capital from investors and brings a base of relationships willing to fund the deal.

No single person fills all four roles well, and TLP's partnership works because Ian and Slocomb overlap enough to cover for each other while still each carrying primary ownership of distinct roles.

Lessons From the Field: Financing a $3 Million Bridge Loan in Five Days

A financing gap in the final days of closing is a real scenario, not a hypothetical. Property condition assessments on agency debt can surface repair demands late enough to threaten the entire closing timeline.
A pre-built network of hard money contacts is the difference between losing a deal and closing it. TLP fielded three offers inside five days because those relationships already existed.
No origination fee can matter more than a lower rate on genuinely short-term debt. The math changes when a loan is only outstanding for a few months rather than years.
Absorbing unexpected cost into the acquisition fee, rather than passing it to investors, is a deliberate choice about who a partnership protects first. TLP treated protecting investor returns as non-negotiable even when it meant a smaller payout for the general partners.
A defined exit strategy on a partnership matters as much as the deal itself. Every property in TLP's portfolio has a set sale deadline, which the team credits with keeping decision-making focused even when individual deals get stressful.

Cincinnati Wholesaling in 2026: Why Buyers Are All Flippers Now

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:42:52 GMT

Hedge funds are gone, rates broke the buy-and-hold math, and Cincinnati's off-market deal flow now turns block by block. Where the deals are and what buyers inherit when they sign.

Dylan Koch has closed roughly 300 off-market transactions since starting Morning Brew Properties in late 2021, and the buyer pool on the other side of those deals has changed completely. He used to sell heavily to hedge funds and small multifamily buy-and-hold buyers. Now, over the past 12 to 18 months, he is selling almost exclusively to flippers, a shift driven by interest rates that make buy-and-hold math harder to pencil across much of Greater Cincinnati .

About This Post

This analysis draws from a conversation with Dylan Koch , founder of Morning Brew Properties, a direct-to-seller marketing and wholesaling company operating across Hamilton, Butler, Warren, and Clermont counties. Koch's data set spans roughly 300 off-market transactions and a 50-unit rental portfolio built entirely from his own deal sourcing, giving him an unusually current read on where deal flow is concentrated and how the buyer pool has shifted.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The full episode also covers Koch's transition from working as a pharmacist into full-time real estate investing, and a full breakdown of what wholesalers look for in a serious buyer.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

Subscribe on Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Where Cincinnati's Off-Market Deals Are Flowing in 2026

Hamilton, Ohio , in Butler County, has been the biggest surprise in Koch's five years of buying, largely concentrated in zip codes 45011, 45013, and 45015 on the west side of the river. Demand there is tied directly to the Spooky Nook Sportsplex and a wave of private development downtown.
Cheviot, Westwood, and Delhi , on Cincinnati's west side, are Koch's strongest rental markets, driven by a favorable price-to-income ratio. Properties zoned for Oak Hill schools sell especially well.
Deer Park, Pleasant Ridge, Evanston, and Avondale , on the east side, round out Koch's rental targeting. Avondale tends to carry a lower price point relative to its rental income potential.
Madisonville was a major focus for Koch in 2022, but by 2026 it has become difficult to comp. Similar homes matching on beds, baths, square footage, and proximity to MedPace and the Ackerman Group's new development can differ in value by hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on the specific block.
Norwood carries the same block-by-block unpredictability. Koch describes it as having distinct sub-markets within the same zip code, where comps a few streets apart do not translate.
Evanston, Avondale, and North Avondale together require close, block-level attention. Some blocks show serious upside potential, and adjacent blocks carry real red flags.
Reading behaves similarly to Norwood, split between its walkable Vital District and the surrounding hill-and-valley terrain, with sharp value lines between them.
St. Bernard holds Koch's largest personal rental portfolio. Comps there can run from $350,000 to $400,000 on one block and drop to $175,000 to $200,000 just a couple of blocks away. The small downtown has been building real walkability over roughly 15 years, evidenced by a new Dairy Queen that reportedly draws a line of 25 people.
Hyde Park and Oakley produce fewer deals for Koch. Higher price points mean sellers with real equity are less willing to take the discount a flipper's numbers require.

Koch's marketing footprint mirrors this pattern geographically: all of Hamilton County, the southern and northwest portions of Butler County up to about Franklin, the west side of Clermont County out to roughly Bethel, and limited activity in Warren County near Mason and Loveland.

Why Cincinnati Wholesale Deals Are Shifting from Rentals to Flips

What's Working in Cincinnati

Koch's operation runs on a few specific mechanics that separate a professional wholesale operation from an amateur one in 2026.

Target the sub-$250,000 to $350,000 ARV range. Koch intentionally avoids higher price points, where buyers expect $60-per-square-foot quartz finishes rather than the $40-per-square-foot white shaker cabinets and granite that work in his target range, and where sellers with real equity are harder to move off asking price.
Back into the offer rather than using a flat percentage rule. Instead of the common 70% to 75% of ARV minus repairs formula, Koch calculates backward from realtor commission, holding costs, and loan costs, then requires a larger spread as the price point rises to compensate for the added time, energy, and risk.
Screen buyers on cash position, experience, and speed. Cash beats hard money, hard money beats conventional financing, and a buyer's ability to close in 30 days or less matters as much as their offer price. Koch increasingly relies on a repeat list of 15 to 20 known buyers rather than mass marketing every deal.
Budget for real overhead. Koch runs $10,000 to $15,000 a month in ad spend, $120,000 to $180,000 a year, and advises anyone entering wholesaling to expect a minimum three-month runway and to be prepared to spend $10,000 to $15,000 before seeing a return.
Comply with Ohio's new wholesale disclosure rule. Ohio SB 155 now requires wholesalers to disclose, before the purchase agreement is signed, if the property will be mass marketed, with penalties reaching three times the assignment fee plus attorney fees for noncompliance.

What is not working: relying on an assignment agreement alone to understand a wholesale deal, and mass-marketing every property to a broad buyer list instead of building relationships with buyers who have already closed and performed.

Lessons From the Field: What You Inherit When You Sign a Wholesale Assignment

That inherited inspection contingency meant Ian could have terminated the contract unilaterally, without even involving the wholesaler, simply by delivering written notice to the seller. He had no intention of exploiting that position to kill the deal, but the discovery underscored a real gap in how assignment agreements work: they are built only to substitute the buyer's name onto the original contract, not to summarize or guarantee the terms underneath it.

Always request the original purchase and sale agreement before signing an assignment. The assignment agreement itself is not designed to disclose earnest money exposure or contingency terms.
Earnest money risk transfers to the assignee. If the deal falls apart after assignment, the new buyer, not the wholesaler, is typically the one who forfeits the deposit.
Inherited contingencies are real leverage. A generous inspection period negotiated by the wholesaler becomes the buyer's leverage once the assignment closes.
A blacked-out purchase price is a signal to verify, not skip. Confirming the underlying price against the total the buyer is paying is a basic check before proceeding.
New disclosure law changes the paper trail on every wholesale deal. Both wholesalers and buyers now have a documented reason to request and retain the underlying disclosure and purchase agreement.

Short-Term Rentals in Cincinnati: Where They Still Work in 2026

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 08:31:05 GMT

A neighborhood-by-neighborhood map of where short-term rentals are legal in Greater Cincinnati; and what the flattening market means for the ones that are.

In Symmes Township , three short-term rental owners had to fight all the way to the Ohio First District Court of Appeals just to keep operating, after the township first tried to reclassify their properties as a bed and breakfast, then as a hotel, to shut them down. Yiwei Cheng, founder of Pink Cash Cow Property Management , has managed around 30 furnished rental properties across Greater Cincinnati since 2019, and her portfolio has lived through nearly every version of that regulatory fight, along with the shift in what actually books in 2026.

About This Post

This analysis draws from a conversation with Yiwei Cheng , founder of Pink Cash Cow Property Management, who has managed around 30 short-term and midterm rental properties across Greater Cincinnati since 2019 and set up more than 40 over the years. Her combination of ownership, arbitrage, and third-party management experience gives her visibility into performance data and regulatory outcomes across neighborhoods that a single-property owner would not have.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The full episode also covers Cheng's early mistakes pricing her first Airbnb and a full breakdown of Cincinnati's biggest annual events by booking demand.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

Subscribe on Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Where Short-Term Rentals Are Still Legal and Working in Greater Cincinnati

The City of Cincinnati is the safest legal ground in the region. Short-term rentals are written directly into city law, so an owner who registers and pays the required taxes is protected regardless of neighborhood. Downtown and OTR condos slowed hard during COVID but have since become part of a broader mix rather than the whole strategy.
Mount Auburn is where Cheng bought her own first home, drawn by a tax abatement and proximity to downtown. It sits near Oakley and Hyde Park without carrying the single-bathroom housing stock that made those two neighborhoods a harder fit for her.
Oakley and Hyde Park carry a lot of older housing with only one bathroom, which Cheng now actively avoids when sourcing STR properties, regardless of neighborhood desirability.
Norwood illustrates just how much the numbers have moved. In 2018 and 2019, an $80,000 house there rented for around $500 a month, barely cash flowing on a 30-year mortgage. As a furnished rental today, a one-bedroom in Norwood was getting $1,700 a month on midterm stays and is now booking closer to $1,500, still well above what it would produce as a standard long-term rental.
Loveland allows short-term rentals outright and has a real cluster of them near the Loveland bike trail.
Symmes Township , next door to Loveland, does not allow new short-term rentals. A neighbor's complaint led the township to try reclassifying an existing property as a bed and breakfast, then a hotel, before passing a new ordinance within two months that created a permit pathway while publicly stating it would deny every permit filed under it.
West Chester Township and Liberty Township each had hundreds of short-term rentals operating before both put moratoriums in place within the last year, banning any new ones going forward.
Blue Ash, Terrace Park, and Mariemont ban short-term rentals outright.
Covington, Kentucky allows short-term rentals, but requires three separate licenses (occupational, rental, and a short-term rental application), inspections, and a minimum distance between properties, making it a heavier lift to set up than most Ohio-side markets.
Newport, Kentucky technically allows short-term rentals in one zoning district, but that district has so little residential housing stock that it is not a realistic option for most investors.
Bellevue, Kentucky allows short-term rentals only if the property is the owner's primary residence, with a cap on the number of rental days per year.
The City of Hamilton allows short-term rentals with a license, though Cheng notes guest quality there has been inconsistent. Midterm rentals are performing well in Hamilton, driven by people displaced by fire or flood and by construction workers, and Cheng is watching a proposed data center project there that, if approved, could significantly increase midterm demand from construction crews. The townships surrounding the city of Hamilton do not allow overnight stays at all, which is part of why Spooky Nook-driven demand pushes toward the city proper.
Mason allows short-term rentals with a permit, though Cheng's own property sits in the unincorporated township next to Mason, which currently has no regulation against it. That property has run successfully since 2021, benefiting from relocation demand and the annual Cincinnati Open tennis tournament, historically the single biggest short-term rental month in the entire region, not just Mason.

The Cincinnati Short-Term Rental Market Has Plateaued: What the Data Shows

What's Working in Cincinnati

Cheng's screening criteria for a furnished rental property in Greater Cincinnati comes down to three property traits.

A minimum of two full bathrooms. Cheng is direct that a single-bathroom property, common in older Oakley and Hyde Park housing stock, does not perform in 2026 even when priced competitively.
A workable bedroom-to-bathroom ratio. A five-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath layout, the kind created by finishing an attic into extra bedrooms without adding plumbing, sounds like more inventory but functions poorly once ten guests are sharing one full bathroom.
No walk-through bedrooms. Any layout where a guest has to pass through one bedroom to reach another kills the privacy that furnished rental guests expect, regardless of how the listing counts total bedrooms.

Amenities matter in a specific order, based on what Cheng has seen drive bookings.

Parking , ranked as the single most important amenity. Garage parking beats driveway parking, which beats street parking, and this matters most downtown, where some zoning does not even allow street parking for guests.
A pool , which Cheng says reliably justifies its added expense through higher revenue.
A hot tub , which increases revenue but comes with enough ongoing maintenance, draining, cleaning, and pH balancing between every guest, that Cheng has chosen not to offer one herself.
Family-friendly amenities , like a crib or high chair, which Cheng sources cheaply through Facebook Marketplace and includes automatically in larger homes to capture family travel demand.

The seasonal playbook Cheng runs is to raise nightly rates as high as the market allows during peak season, then shift the same property toward 30-plus day midterm stays in the off-season to protect occupancy without racing rates to the bottom. She holds a firm rate floor rather than chasing every winter booking, because she has found that guests who push hardest for discounts upfront are also the guests most likely to leave problem reviews or attempt chargebacks.

What is not working: buying based on the assumption that any location or layout will succeed as a short-term rental. Cheng is specific that success now requires matching property type to location and to the realistic current rate environment, not the 2021-to-2023 pricing many owners are still anchored to.

Lessons From the Field: Fighting a Township Over the Right to Operate a Short-Term Rental

Cheng and her co-plaintiffs took the case one level higher, to the First District Court of Appeals overseeing Hamilton County, and won. The outcome protects the three specific properties involved in the lawsuit, but it does not open the door for any new short-term rental to start operating in Symmes Township going forward.

A single neighbor complaint can trigger a multi-year legal fight. The entire case originated from one retired resident objecting to who was coming and going next door.
Municipalities can shift legal theories mid-fight. Symmes Township moved from a bed and breakfast classification to a hotel classification once the first did not hold up.
Winning grandfathered status does not create new opportunity. The court victory protected existing operators only. It did not make Symmes Township viable for new short-term rental purchases.
A fast-moving ordinance change is a warning sign, not a resolution. The two-month ordinance passage that promised to deny every permit was a tactic, not a genuine compliance pathway.
Joining forces with other affected owners strengthens a legal case. Cheng's lawsuit succeeded as a group of three owners rather than a single property fighting alone.

Fairfax, Madisonville, and Newport: Cincinnati Real Estate in 2026

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 05:07:31 GMT

Where Cincinnati Investors Are Still Finding Margin

In Fairfax , empty lots that once sat overlooked are now selling for $120,000 to $150,000, driven almost entirely by proximity to the Mariemont school district. Jerry Garrison, a Keller Williams agent and single-family investor who has worked Greater Cincinnati real estate for two decades, has watched that price shift play out street by street, first in Fairfax, then in Madisonville, and now across the river in Newport, Kentucky.

About This Post

This analysis draws from a conversation with Jerry Garrison , a Keller Williams real estate agent and long-time Greater Cincinnati investor with two decades of experience across multifamily and single-family properties. His vantage point as both a working agent and an active landlord in Madisonville and Newport makes his neighborhood-level read unusually current.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The full episode also covers Garrison's take on Evanston, East Walnut Hills, and the Cincinnati west side, along with his advice for someone making their first real estate investment in 2026.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

Subscribe on Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Where Cincinnati Investors Are Finding Margin in 2026

Fairfax sits just west of Mariemont, close enough to the same school district to carry its price effect. Lots that trade around $120,000 are now targets for builders running a townhouse format: three bedroom, two and a half bath, with a finished lower level and a garage offset from the front entry where the lot allows it. The style fits parcels platted in 1884 or 1904, long and narrow, with living space stacked over three or four floors instead of spread across a yard.
Madisonville is where Garrison bought his first rental in 2017, a house on Britton Street for $105,000. He listed it for $1,200 a month and had 20 people show up to see it. Rent on that property and others like it now runs $2,000 and higher, and Garrison estimates some of his Madisonville homes have appreciated 60% since purchase. Madison Road itself has been reshaped by developers replacing single-story retail, the kind that once housed an auto body shop and an ice cream parlor, with three and four story mixed-use buildings: retail on the ground floor, class A apartments above.
Madison Place , bordering Mariemont on the other side from Fairfax, sat at $80,000 to $120,000 for years while comparable Mariemont homes traded near $350,000, despite both being the same distance from downtown. That gap is now closing as buyers push into Madison Place and Madisonville looking for the value Fairfax no longer offers.
Newport, Kentucky has become Garrison's cross-river play as Ohio-side margins tighten. Property taxes there run lower than Hamilton County even though owners pay both city and county tax. The tradeoff is a stricter inspection process and a contractor pool that mostly is not licensed in Kentucky, which drove up Garrison's early rehab costs while he built out a new set of trade relationships.
Covington , just past Newport, is earning a look for the same reason: lower cost of ownership and, in Garrison's words, a neighborhood with good vibe worth familiarizing himself with.
Old Milford , where Garrison lives, is a small walkable pocket distinct from the broader Milford footprint. It carries turn-of-the-century two-story retail buildings with a single apartment over each storefront, recently anchored by Little Miami Brewing. The wider Milford area, by contrast, is mostly 1950s ranch stock inside 275 and 1990s-to-current subdivisions and class B multifamily further out.

The Mariemont School District Effect

What's Working in Cincinnati

Garrison's approach comes down to a small number of repeatable principles.

Know your margin before anything else. Garrison defines this simply: what is left after your expenses and your mortgage are paid. Every acquisition decision runs through that number first.
Concentrate in one area before you scale. Early on, especially before hiring a property manager, working scattered properties across neighborhoods wastes time and misses deal flow. Garrison picked up an off-market Fairfax flip simply because he was already renovating next door when the neighbor listed her house.
Shift to value-add and fix-and-flip as a market tightens. In Madisonville, Garrison's read for 2026 is that the play is improving a property enough to force appreciation and resell it, rather than counting on a discount at purchase, since 6% interest rates and already-elevated prices have compressed that margin.
Expand across the river when the home market compresses. Newport and Covington offer a real cost of ownership advantage, even accounting for double taxation and a more expensive first year of learning who to hire.

What is not working: buying in Madisonville expecting a discount. Garrison is blunt that the neighborhood is fully discovered now, and margins there keep getting tighter as more buyers compete for the same data everyone can see on Zillow and BiggerPockets.

Lessons From the Field: Surviving a Recession When Your Funding Partner Walks

The experience reset his risk tolerance completely. Garrison describes spending roughly five years afterward deliberately risk averse before he started slowly building his investment portfolio back, this time as a disciplined single-family buy-and-hold and flip investor rather than a leveraged multifamily operator.

A partner's personal life is part of your deal risk. Garrison's funding disappeared because of a divorce, not a market event. Structure partnerships assuming the other side's circumstances can change without warning.
Under-capitalization does not show up until conditions turn. The portfolio performed fine until 2008 exposed how thin the reserves actually were.
A forced sale is still a skill worth having. Selling around 100 units during a recession, out of necessity, built the sales ability Garrison now relies on as a full-time agent.
Reputation outlasts a credit score. Keeping commitments through the wind-down bought him grace from people who had no obligation to extend it.
Risk tolerance needs a real reset period after a crisis. Five years passed before Garrison was ready to invest again, and he treated that timeline as necessary rather than something to rush.

Flip vs. BRRR in Greater Cincinnati: A Hard Money Lender's Map

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 09:52:51 GMT

What 300+ Transactions Reveal About Cincinnati’s Best Investment Strategies

Grant Smith, founding partner of Sharper Capital Partners , is lending on 65 to 75 active projects at any given time across Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, roughly $15 million outstanding. Add in the 10 active flips running through his off-market buying company, Rowling Homes, and Smith is watching close to 80 deals move through the pipeline at once, giving him one of the more complete real-time pictures of where Cincinnati real estate investing strategies are actually working.

About This Post

This analysis draws from a conversation with Grant Smith , founding partner of Sharper Capital Partners and co-owner of Rowling Homes, both active across Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. Smith's vantage point as a hard money lender tracking roughly 300 transactions, combined with his own flipping activity through Rowling Homes, gives him visibility into deal performance that most single-market investors do not have.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The full episode also covers Smith's background moving from medical device sales into private lending, and more detail on how Rowling Homes sources and dispositions off-market deals.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

Subscribe on Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube

Mapping Greater Cincinnati: Where Flips Work and Where BRRR Wins

Middletown skews heavily toward the rental side. About 80% of Smith's loan volume there exits via refinance, meaning investors are running the BRRR model and holding rather than flipping.
The City of Hamilton runs closer to even, with roughly a 50-50 split between properties that refinance into rentals and properties that sell on market as flips.
The corridor between I-75 and I-71 , stretching from Avondale up through Kennedy Heights and Deer Park , is mostly flip activity in Smith's portfolio, as is most territory further east.
Kennedy Heights and Pleasant Ridge have been the most active flip markets in the last six months specifically. Smith attributes this to appreciation spillover: buyers priced out of Oakley and Pleasant Ridge are moving to Kennedy Heights next, with Deer Park and Silverton picking up overflow demand from the other direction. Madisonville , just southeast, has already been through a similar overhaul.
Cheviot and Westwood on the west side still see a decent amount of flip activity, but once you move further south into Price Hill , the market is almost entirely rentals until you reach Delhi , where flips reappear.
Springfield Township , near Winton Woods, is where Smith is currently lending on Ian's own deal. Originally underwritten to a $225,000 ARV for a BRRR exit, the property may be worth $250,000 to $275,000, which changes the math enough that leaving that equity in a refinance stops making sense compared to selling.
Hamilton's west side , particularly around the Rossville Historic District, has seen a wave of activity tied to the Spooky Nook Sportsplex development. That includes Airbnb conversions, some of which saturated the short-term rental supply, alongside straightforward flips along the Main Street and High Street corridor.
Norwood was a hot BRRR and flip market when Smith's portfolio was scaling in 2022, though activity there has cooled since.
Harrison is a narrow but real opportunity. Smith knows operators clearing $40,000 to $60,000 on individual flips there, but says he knows only a handful of buyers willing to work that market at all.
Hyde Park still sees flip and renovation activity despite ARVs running $600,000 and higher. At that price point, cost of capital becomes the deciding factor, which favors investors using private money or cash over standard hard money.
Covedale , further west, sees less lending interest specifically because property values run low enough that a stuck deal leaves little room to hedge the downside from a lender's perspective, even though Smith notes real activity still happens there outside his loan data.
East Price Hill shows a different pattern entirely: heavily Section 8, dominated by a small number of operators with large portfolios and specific expertise in that model.
Clermont County properties carry their own diligence risk. Many run on septic systems, and Smith flags this as a common blind spot for investors buying off-market or without inspections.

Why Cincinnati's Sub-$250K Housing Stock Keeps Producing Deals

The larger pattern Smith points to is a nationwide housing shortage that has been building since 2010. Building new affordable housing at scale has not kept pace, so renovating existing 80-to-100-plus-year-old housing stock has become the faster path to adding usable inventory back into the market, even with the added complexity those older homes carry.

What's Working in Cincinnati

Smith frames investor success around four competitive advantages, and in his experience, most successful operators are strong in at least one.

Deal-finding skill. Some investors simply have a sharper ability to source good deals, whatever channel they use to find them.
Construction advantage. This does not require doing the labor yourself. It means managing a reliable crew of subcontractors directly, which keeps renovation costs down.
Capital advantage. Buying with private money or cash instead of hard money, or hard money instead of conventional financing, changes what a deal can support, especially at higher price points like Hyde Park.
Management advantage. For buy-and-hold investors, operational efficiency after acquisition, from leasing to maintenance, drives the return as much as the purchase price does.

Smith is clear that area matters less than operator expertise matched to that specific area. He describes investors who dominate a single neighborhood, like Harrison or East Price Hill, simply because they know that street and that tenant base better than anyone else competing there.

Underwriting is where Smith sees the most consistent mistakes. His rule: underwrite for what you cannot see, not just what is visible during a walkthrough, and calibrate your risk tolerance to the home's actual age. A house built after 1970 carries a different risk profile than one built in 1940 or earlier. Ian's own Northside rehab illustrated this directly. Once the plaster came down, a load-bearing wall that had been rotting for over a century was fully exposed, on a house whose true build date is uncertain because a labor strike destroyed the original property records.

Zoning and code nuance is the other recurring trap. Smith and his partner have twice used Ohio Revised Code provisions to recombine adjacent parcels into a single legal duplex rather than pay to separate shared sewer and water lines under newer plumbing codes, a workaround that required real convincing with city inspectors both times.

Lessons From the Field: When a Zoning Fix Leads to Frozen Pipes

Smith and his Rowling Homes partner picked up a three-parcel property in Butler County built as a garage house and a smaller adjoining house. The two structures shared common sewer and water lines but had separate electric, and zoning allowed the property to be treated either as two separate single-family homes or as a duplex.

Code changes can override your original business plan mid-renovation. The sewer separation requirement only surfaced once plumbing work was underway, not during due diligence.
A zoning workaround is not free, even when it works. Recombining the parcels avoided a costly sewer separation, but it added its own time and approval cost.
A paused renovation carries its own risk. Leaving plumbing incomplete during a cold spell directly caused the frozen pipe failure.
Multi-parcel and shared-utility properties need extra scrutiny before close. The same Ohio Revised Code issue had already shown up once, in Middletown, and still caught the team again in Hamilton.
Treat expensive lessons as tuition, not a reason to stop. Smith's framing: investors who quit after one hard deal are walking away from the exact experience that makes the next deal profitable.

Madisonville, Fairfax, and Newport: Where Cincinnati Investors Are Finding Margin in 2026

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 16:27:17 GMT

Madisonville, Fairfax, and Newport: Where Cincinnati Investors Are Finding Margin in 2026

By Slocomb Reed & Ian Cruz, CPA | The Cincy REI Show

A veteran Cincinnati realtor and investor breaks down which neighborhoods are still producing deals in 2026, where margins have compressed, and why Northern Kentucky is drawing serious attention from Ohio-side flippers.

A Madisonville buy-and-hold purchased for $105,000 in 2017 with a $1,200 rent target now commands $2,000 or more per month, and the underlying asset has appreciated roughly 60% in value. That is the before-and-after summary of Cincinnati's most investor-active neighborhood over the past decade. The Cincy REI Show, hosted by Slocomb Reed and Ian Cruz, CPA, dug into that trajectory with a longtime local investor and realtor who has owned rental property in Madisonville long enough to watch a major mixed-use corridor get built on Madison Road while he still held houses on nearby streets.

Madisonville, Fairfax, and Newport: Which Neighborhoods Are Still Producing in 2026

The three neighborhoods that dominated this conversation each represent a different stage of the Cincinnati investor lifecycle: one that has repriced and narrowed, one that has gentrified and shifted to new construction, and one across the river that is drawing attention specifically because of lower carrying costs.

Madisonville has been the most investor-transformed neighborhood in Greater Cincinnati over the past decade. In 2017, a knowledgeable buyer could acquire a solid housing stock property for under $100,000, rent it at $1,200, and face minimal competition. That playbook has compressed significantly. Rents have moved to $2,000 and higher. Property values have followed. The investors and agents who drove that repricing are now the reason margins are thinner for new entrants. The opportunity that remains is in distressed situations: long-term homeowners who have been there 30 to 40 years and whose tax reassessments have made ownership unsustainable. These sellers are motivated and sometimes under-priced relative to current market. Value-add acquisitions with room to improve the asset and reposition rents remain viable, though the margin for error is narrower than it was in 2017.

Fairfax has followed a similar arc, but the strategy mix has shifted almost entirely toward new construction. The neighborhood sits west of Mariemont and benefits from the Mariemont school district, which has driven demand so aggressively that empty lots are selling for $120,000 to $150,000. The investor play that worked five to seven years ago, buying a two-bedroom, one-bath ranch, popping the top, and converting it to a four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath, has largely run out of viable inventory. The current opportunity is lot acquisition for new construction. Builders who can source a lot around $120,000 are building three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath homes with finished lower levels. Lot geometry in Fairfax tends to run narrow, which is pushing some builders toward townhouse-style layouts: garage and entry at grade, main living on the second floor, bedrooms above. That format is meeting buyer demand in a neighborhood where lot widths do not support traditional footprints.

Newport, Kentucky is the emerging flip market for Ohio-based investors who have been priced out of their home turf. Property taxes run lower than Hamilton County even accounting for the double-tax structure (city plus county). The cost of ownership is meaningfully lower. The trade-off is a steeper operational learning curve. Newport's building department runs strict inspections and maintains close oversight of contractor licensing. Ohio-licensed contractors who have not established a Kentucky license will be flagged. The practical implication: expect an expensive first rehab in Newport while you build your contractor network. Once those relationships are established, the economics sharpen significantly.

Evanston and the west side of Cincinnati also surfaced as neighborhoods where deal flow still exists. They were described as directional signals rather than fully developed plays, but both were named as areas worth monitoring for investors who have been crowded out of Madisonville.

Rising Rates, Higher Taxes, and Better Information Have Compressed Cincinnati Margins

The structural shift in Greater Cincinnati real estate over the past five years comes down to three compounding pressures.

Interest rates moved from 3% to 6%. Every underwrite that worked at 3% has to be rebuilt from scratch at 6%. Deals that produced solid cash-on-cash returns under the old rate environment require either a lower acquisition price, a higher rent ceiling, or both. The deals that still work are the ones where the basis is low enough that the carry cost does not kill the return.
Property tax reassessments have reset the operating cost baseline. This is a particularly acute issue in Madisonville, where decades-long homeowners are now carrying tax bills that make continued ownership difficult. That is a pain point for sellers and an opportunity for buyers, but it also means that any buy-and-hold underwrite in appreciating Cincinnati neighborhoods needs to stress-test taxes at the current assessed value, not prior-year basis.
Information availability has equalized the buyer pool. A decade ago, Cincinnati's most productive investor neighborhoods were effectively word-of-mouth markets. Agents covered their research. Investors operated quietly. That era is over. BiggerPockets, Zillow, and broader investor education have brought more capital into every neighborhood that was once underfollowed. Madisonville's repricing from the mid-$80,000s to current values is partly a function of that information democratization. The investors who got rich in Madisonville got in before the neighborhood was indexed. That window has closed.

“The investors who got rich in Madisonville got in before the neighborhood was indexed. That window has closed.”

The directional read from an operator who has watched this cycle from inside: the next wave of Cincinnati deals will come from neighborhoods adjacent to gentrified corridors, distressed sellers in recently repriced markets, and cross-river opportunities in Northern Kentucky where the tax and cost structure still offers room.

What's Working in Cincinnati

A few principles that are consistently separating productive Cincinnati investors from those who are spinning their wheels:

Geographic concentration compounds. An investor who focuses on five to ten properties in a single neighborhood builds deal flow faster than one who scatters. Sellers talk to neighbors. Contractors know the block. An investor who is consistently present in a neighborhood hears about opportunities before they hit Zillow.
The margin is the filter. Deals in every Cincinnati neighborhood get evaluated the same way: does the margin work at current purchase price, current rates, and current operating costs? If yes, move forward. If the margin is thin, the deal requires a specific catalyst (rent growth, forced appreciation, cost reduction) that has to be clearly identified before closing, not assumed.
Contractor access determines flip economics. In Newport specifically, going in without an established Kentucky-licensed contractor network means absorbing the learning curve cost on the first deal. That cost is real. Investors who have built those relationships are running better numbers on subsequent deals.

What does not work: entering any Greater Cincinnati neighborhood with an assumption that appreciation will bail out a deal with weak fundamentals at acquisition. The appreciation era in Madisonville rewarded everyone who owned. The next cycle will be more selective.

Lessons From the Field: How Margin Discipline Prevented a Second 2008

The investor who joined this episode came up the hard way. His first partnership worked well until it did not. In 2005, he teamed with a capital partner on a simple arrangement: find the deals, run the rehabs, the partner handles the financing. It grew. It accelerated. And it was under-capitalized the entire time.

When 2008 arrived, the model collapsed. The capital partner, a salaried employee with a stable income, made the decision to stop funding. He came in person to deliver the news. The portfolio had to be liquidated quickly. In a recession. Without the option of bankruptcy. The credit score took the hit. The path out was grinding through property sales one by one, keeping his word to every counterparty who gave him an extra day, and eventually coming out the other side with his reputation intact even if his balance sheet was not.

The recovery took years and a significant shift in risk tolerance. He spent roughly five years as a risk-averse operator, slowly re-entering the market. When he did come back, he came back smaller, more disciplined, and with a different framework. Single family. Concentrated geography. Margin as the first filter, not the last.

The outcome, held Madisonville properties bought in 2017 at under $105,000 have appreciated approximately 60% in value. Rents on those same houses have moved from a $1,200 target to $2,000 and above.

Four takeaways that apply to any Cincinnati investor entering the market now:

Capitalization is a prerequisite, not a variable. A deal that requires a partner's capital to remain stable is only as solid as that relationship. Stress-test the capital structure before closing anything.
Geographic focus accelerates deal flow. Concentrated ownership in one neighborhood creates organic opportunities: neighbors who know you, off-market conversations that come to you because you are visible and consistent.
Know your numbers before you know your neighborhood. Margin first, location second. An attractive neighborhood with a deal that does not pencil is still a deal that does not pencil.
The first deal does not have to be a home run. The goal of the first acquisition is to complete the learning cycle, evaluate whether the asset class fits your operating style, and preserve the option to do a second one. Buying right gives you an exit if the answer is no.

Final Takeaway

Greater Cincinnati is not a uniform market, and 2026 is not 2017. The neighborhoods that made early investors wealthy have repriced. The margins that made buy-and-hold obvious have narrowed. The operators who are still finding deals are doing it through geographic discipline, cost structure awareness, and willingness to look at markets that are one step removed from the obvious ones: Northern Kentucky, Evanston, the west side.

If you are evaluating Cincinnati real estate investing right now, the most useful thing you can take from this episode is a framework that has survived two market cycles: define your margin before you pick your market, concentrate your operations, and build relationships that bring you deals before they are widely visible.

�� Subscribe to the Cincy REI Show on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , or YouTube to follow neighborhood-level analysis from local operators who are active in the market.

Flip vs. BRRR in Greater Cincinnati: A Neighborhood-by-Neighborhood Strategy Guide

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:25:30 GMT

Flip vs. BRRR: Which Cincinnati Neighborhoods Favor Which Strategy

Cincinnati's flip vs. BRRR split is not random. It follows a pattern tied to one core question: do the rents support the hold?

When ARVs rise faster than rents, the math points toward selling. When rents produce a strong yield relative to all-in cost, holding wins. That ratio varies street by street across Greater Cincinnati. Here is where each strategy is producing results right now.

Neighborhoods trending toward BRRR:

Middletown: Roughly 80% of investor exits here are refinances, not sales. Investors are buying, rehabbing, pulling cash out, and holding. The rent-to-price relationship in Middletown makes the hold strategy the obvious move for most operators entering the market.
Price Hill corridor (west side): Primarily rental activity. Investors running Section 8 and long-term hold strategies dominate this pocket. Few flips pencil here.
East Price Hill: Operators with deep market knowledge are building large Section 8 portfolios here. Not the easiest market to break into, but producing strong results for those who know the streets.

Neighborhoods trending toward flips:

Kennedy Heights: The most active flip pocket in Greater Cincinnati right now. Six months ago, that was not the case. Kennedy Heights hit its inflection point when a fully renovated home set a new ARV ceiling. Other investors followed that comp. Activity has been concentrated here ever since.
The I-75/I-71 corridor (Avondale north through Deer Park): Almost entirely fix-and-flip from a lending perspective. ARVs land in the median household price range, but rents top out around $2,000 to $2,500 for a single-family or duplex. That ceiling makes the hold case hard to justify.
Cheviot and Westwood: Meaningful flip activity. Active market. Shifts back toward rentals as you move further south toward Price Hill.
Delhi: Flip activity resurfaces here after the Price Hill rental corridor.

Neighborhoods running both strategies:

City of Hamilton: Running roughly 50/50. Half of investor exits are refinances, half are on-market sales. Hamilton is one of the most nuanced markets in the MSA and is worth its own breakdown below.
Norwood and Pleasant Ridge: Still active on both sides, but showing signs of maturity. Kennedy Heights is next in line precisely because investors are getting priced out of these two pockets.

3 early signals a neighborhood is shifting from BRRR to flip territory:

A fully renovated comp sets a new ARV ceiling that did not exist 12 months ago.
Surrounding neighborhoods have appreciated and are pricing investors out, pushing activity north or east.
Rent growth is lagging behind price appreciation, compressing yield on holds.

Kennedy Heights showed all three. Watch Silverton next.

Why Cincinnati's Sub-$300K Market Keeps Producing Deals

The arithmetic behind Cincinnati real estate is straightforward and it does not get discussed enough.

You cannot build a house for $200,000. In Cincinnati, this matters more than almost anywhere because such a large share of the housing stock sits at or below that threshold. That creates a durable opportunity for investors who understand it.

The supply and demand picture:

The number of single-family homes in Greater Cincinnati worth less than $250,000 is fixed. In fact, it is shrinking. As investors renovate and reposition properties, some of those homes cross above the affordability threshold permanently and never come back.

Cincinnati has posted roughly 2% year-over-year population growth. Not a headline number, but it is steady directional demand against a supply that only moves one way.

At least 50% of active rehab deals in Greater Cincinnati right now carry an ARV under $300,000. This is not a niche corner of the market. It is the core.

Why this keeps producing returns:

Renovating distressed homes remains the fastest path to returning good inventory to the market. Most of Cincinnati's housing stock is 80 to 100 years old. New construction at affordable price points is slow, expensive, and nowhere near demand. Rehab fills the gap and has continued producing deals through rate cycles and market shifts going back at least to 2010.

The long-term hold thesis in three points:

Limited supply in the sub-$250K single-family segment is structural, not cyclical.
Steady population growth creates consistent rental demand across Middletown, Hamilton, and the west side corridors where new construction is essentially nonexistent.
Every property that gets renovated past the affordability threshold reduces the available inventory, making the remaining stock more valuable over time.
Investors who are buying and holding in this segment are not making a speculative bet. They are making a supply-and-demand bet with fixed inputs on one side.

What's Working in Cincinnati

The investors producing the most consistent results in Greater Cincinnati right now are not winning on market timing. They are winning on edge. Four specific competitive advantages keep appearing across hundreds of deals.

The 4 edges separating winning Cincinnati investors from the rest:

Deal-sourcing advantage. The ability to find properties before they hit the market or before other buyers recognize the value. Off-market relationships, direct mail, wholesale networks. In a market this local and relationship-driven, knowing the right people compounds faster than any other single advantage.
Construction cost advantage. This does not mean doing the work yourself. It means managing subs directly, knowing what things actually cost, and not paying retail on labor. Investors who have spent years building sub relationships in Cincinnati operate at a cost structure that newcomers cannot immediately match.
Capital cost advantage. Hard money has a cost. Conventional financing has a cost. Private money and cash cost less. In the sub-$200K range, cheaper capital is often the difference between a deal that works and one that does not. The same is true at $500K+ for opposite reasons.
Operational advantage. For investors holding rentals, this is what you do with the asset after you own it: occupancy management, rent growth, Section 8 optimization. Knowing voucher rates by zip code is a small thing. It makes operators move faster and underwrite more accurately on every deal.

3 markets where the playbook is well-defined for intermediate investors:

Hamilton (Butler County): Strong deal flow, active investor community, both flip and BRRR strategies producing results. The Spooky Nook Sports Complex has been reshaping the west side of downtown for several years. Get specific on which streets before committing to a strategy.
Kennedy Heights: Active flip market right now. New ARV comps are being set. Concentration of activity is high. Move with a clear business plan or wait for the next neighborhood to unlock.
Middletown: Primarily BRRR. Consistent rental demand. Lower price points and a forgiving entry for investors building their first buy-and-hold portfolio in the Cincinnati MSA.

What does not work: Buying in a market you do not know well, running a playbook designed for a different neighborhood, or underwriting only what you can see in a city where most homes are 80 to 100 years old.

Lessons From the Field: What Older Cincinnati Homes Actually Cost You

The most consistent mistake investors make in Greater Cincinnati is underwriting only what they can see.

Most of Cincinnati's housing stock was built before 1950. When you open those walls, you find what three or four previous renovations left behind. Outdated systems brought up to code on each pass but never fully resolved. Plumbing that held until someone touched it. Structural elements that have been load-bearing for a century and finally cannot anymore.

A real example from Hamilton:

An investor acquired a property spread across three parcels: two homes and a garage. The plan was to hold it as a rental. Rehab started. City inspectors arrived.

Because the investor was touching the plumbing, Hamilton's building code required the shared sewer lines across the parcels to be separated. That work was not in the budget and not in the business plan.

The solution was to recombine all three parcels into one so the property could be treated as a legal duplex under a single parcel. Ohio Revised Code allowed it. The city approved it after some convincing. Then a cold snap hit while the plumbing work was paused. Pipes froze. When the water came back on, the freshly repaired lines burst. The same pipes were repaired twice.

Splitting the water lines at the start and moving on would have been cheaper. You do not always know that until you are already in it.

5 things Cincinnati investors consistently underestimate in older housing stock:

Structural walls that have failed quietly behind plaster and drywall, with no visible exterior sign
Shared utilities across parcels that trigger code separation requirements the moment you pull a permit
Septic systems in Clermont County and other suburban areas (always inspect before waiving one)
Pre-1950 electrical and plumbing that is technically functional but will need to be addressed once walls are open
Local municipal code variations county to county that can change your business plan mid-rehab

The lesson is not to avoid older homes. It is to price them correctly. Build a contingency that assumes you will find something behind the walls. In Cincinnati, you will.

About This Post

This analysis draws from a conversation with Grant Smith, founding partner of Sharper Capital Partners and co-owner of Rowling Homes . Grant has funded 300+ deals across Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. His lending portfolio provides a real-time view of investor activity across every neighborhood in the MSA that almost no individual operator can match.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and YouTube . The episode includes Grant's live deal map walkthrough, his breakdown of the Spooky Nook effect on Hamilton, and a deeper discussion of how Rowling Homes operates as an off-market buyer.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.