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I was talking to an old friend on the West Coast the other day. His business is located in Sacramento, but most of his customer base is in the Bay Area, so he was looking for an apartment and a small office space in San Francisco.
His search turned up rents that were, as he put it, "more than the cost of [his] first three cars combined, each month."
Office space was even worse. The deciding factor for him was that his price range put him soundly in the middle of what can charitably be called "urban war zones," where a trip around the corner for a bite to eat could turn into something like a bad day in Baghdad - a real bullet festival.
So there was no way my friend wanted to - regularly, each month - fork over exorbitant sums for digs like this. He said he'll continue to make the drive in and stay in a nicer, less hectic, and far more reasonably priced smaller city.
It is the same story I am hearing about other hot spots like New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and other big-city markets.
The economy is booming for the moment, and with a red-hot labor market in play, pricing in markets like Washington and New York, already on the steep side, is probably going quickly worsen (or "improve," depending on how you're invested).
There's no way around it: If you want to live downtown in the big city today, you will have to pay through the nose.
Increasingly, we are finding there are a lot of people who do not wish to do so - and that's the key to the shares I'm going to tell you about right now.
About the Author
Tim Melvin is an unlikely investment expert by any measure. Raised in the "projects" of Baltimore by a single mother, he never attended college and started out as a door-to-door vacuum salesman. But he knew the real money was in the stock market, so he set sights on investing - and by sheer force of determination, he eventually became a financial advisor to millionaires. Today, after 30 years of managing money for some of the wealthiest people in the world, he draws on his experience to help investors find "unreasonably good" bargain stocks, multiply profits, and build their nest eggs. Tim tirelessly works to find overlooked "hidden gems" in the stock market, drawing on the research of legendary investors like Benjamin Graham, Walter Schloss, and Marty Whitman. He has written and lectured extensively on the markets, with work appearing on Benzinga, Real Money, Daily Speculations, and more. He has published several books in the "Little Book of" Investment Series and a "Junior Chamber Course" geared towards young adults that teaches Graham's principles and techniques to a new generation of investors. Today, he serves as the Special Situations Strategist at Money Morning and the editor of "Max Wealth."