High Interest Rates: Yikes or Yay!?

Commercial Real Estate Investing From A-Z

Today I will be talking about the recent interest rate hikes. How crazy is it that just the latest rate increase was a whopping .75%? But... is that actually good or bad? Have you done the math? I have, and I will let you know how does that look for us, awesome investors.

You can read this entire episode here: bit.ly/3Ja6yre

One super important thing that I want to talk about that I haven't heard anyone talk about yet is the fact that obviously, interest rates are going up, Oh, how terrible is going to be, a 6.5% interest rate after this latest increase on July 25th 2022. Some people are saying it's going to be in the eights by the end of this year. And guess what? I literally don't care. I did all the calculations and wanted to share it with you so that you understand that having high interest rates really do not matter. The cap rates go up as interest rates go up. I'll start by sharing some calculations that I did. Let's say you have a property that has a $300,000 NOI (net operating income) per year. And up until the beginning of this year, cap rates were for this kind of property were at around 5%. So the sales price for this property would be $6 million in January of 2022, and at that time, the interest rates were at about 4%. So we're going to do a calculation here at a 30% downpayment on a $6 million property at a beautiful interest rate of 4%. Your loan is going to be $4.2 million, and to keep things simple, we're going to do an interest only calculation, so $4.2 million at 4% interest only is $168,000 payment per year. That's a beautiful interest rate. That's a high price.

Today, we're getting a higher interest rate, and because of that the cap rates are going up. So that means that the price for these properties are starting to go down. It's pure math, unless people are buying this with 100% cash, they need to get a loan and the loan is directly tied with a debt service coverage ratio. The debt service coverage ratio for those of you who may not know exactly what that is, is the ratio of cash available after expenses to service the debt, in other words, it is the ratio of how much net operating income you have to make your mortgage payments. So this should be around 1.2 to 1.3 debt service coverage ratio, that's what the banks look for. And in order for people to be able to stay at that 1.2 to 1.3 debt service coverage ratio, the price has to go down on these properties. So now, let's look at a mortgage rate of 5.75%, which is more or less what is happening today.

Let's move this $300,000 NOI property to a 6% cap rate, and depending on the asset class, you may be a little bit higher, you may be a little bit lower, but let's average this cap rate at 6%. So at 6%, the sales price is going to be $5 million, you just got a $1 million discount because the interest rates went up. Now, I'm calculating from 4% interest rates to almost 2% more at 5.75%. The interest only payment with 30% down on a $5 million property is $201,250. Now, you are paying $168,000 a year at a 4% interest rate, and now you're paying $200,000. With this higher interest rate, as well as shaving off a million dollars, the price difference on your mortgage payment is an additional $33,250 per year. But let's not forget, we got a discount of a million dollars. To put it simply, you're going to be paying $33,000 more per year, and you got a $1 million discount! So let's calculate $1 million divided by $33,000, guess how many years is going to take for you to start being on the red? 30 years, it's going to take 30 years for you to get to that $1 million discount you got. If you're worried about the high interest rates, you should actually start celebrating!

Steffany Boldrini

linkedin.com/in/steffbold

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