This article originally appeared in the May 2025 edition of MortgagePoint magazine, online now.
Zach Lemaster is the Founder & CEO of Rent to Retirement, a turnkey investment company. Lemaster is a seasoned real estate investor and licensed broker with a large portfolio of rental properties across multiple markets, including single-family, multifamily, commercial, and new construction. Lemaster started investing in real estate while working as an Optometrist and captain for the U.S. Air Force. This eventually allowed him to retire early from his career in medicine to become a professional investor by strategically investing in markets that maximize cash flow, appreciation, and equity. Lemaster went on to build a successful wholesaling, flipping, and management business working across multiple markets, which led to the foundation of Rent to Retirement.
Q: What is the mission and focus of Rent to Retirement?
Lemaster: Our mission at Rent to Retirement is to make the best investment opportunities across the country accessible to everyone, and that was a function of my investing experience. When I started investing in real estate over 15 years ago, my wife and I started locally, but we quickly found out that we wanted to strategically invest in different locations throughout the country that fit our goals better, that had better return profiles, that were just better investment opportunities both for diversification and to achieve a better return on investment. We proactively sought out markets to invest in based on those criteria and then established local teams and systems in these areas to be able to scale our portfolio in the markets that offered the best returns.
What we quickly found is that there are a lot of people out there interested in investing in real estate that don’t have the time, don’t have the experience, don’t have the knowledge to build out their own teams on their own end. There were many people that approached us about investing with us, following the path that we did for ourselves, strategically investing in locations that offered us return profiles.
Q: What trends are you observing in the rental investment landscape right now?
Lemaster: It’s been a crazy market over the past five years, with COVID-19, post-COVID-19, and interest rates increasing, which we’ve dealt with for the past two and a half years. There have been tax structure changes, and we’re likely to see a lot of that in a positive way for investors this year as well. Obviously, with the new administration and questions around the economy, that’s still causing some question marks.
Ultimately, at the end of the day, we focused on the fundamentals of real estate investing, which is buying good properties in good locations that have an undersupply of housing, and we work with good teams in those areas to manage the properties. That doesn’t change. There’s still an affordability crisis in the United States. We try to benefit the community and the economy by providing affordable housing in locations that have a deficit of housing and that make sense for investors. This would be areas like Texas, Florida, and the Carolinas.
Since there’s also an affordability crisis, we try to focus on the average price point. A new construction house is $300,000 in our community. The average price point in the United States is around $400,000. We try to be below that median house price point to offer affordable housing solutions and make smart investments that we know will have tenants long term.
Q: What makes a rental property model attractive to investors, and what types of investors are most drawn to rentals?
Lemaster: I don’t think it’s changed. There’s a significant amount of people today who are interested in alternative asset investing outside of solely relying on their 401(k) to retire and who want to take some more control over their financial future, and that’s what real estate provides.
The average investor for us is someone who fits multiple profiles or a combination of these: they’re someone who is a busy professional, they like the idea of real estate investing, and they don’t want to be busy in their day-to-day job. They don’t want to buy themselves another job managing a property. Or maybe they’ve had experience with self-managing a rental that didn’t go well. But it’s someone who is busy and doesn’t want to buy themselves another job, but they like real estate as an asset class. We provide that opportunity where they can buy with us where they get the best returns, but our teams are managing everything for them, so they don’t have to self-manage, especially from a distance.
Some people live in expensive markets like the coastal areas, where the average house price may be a million dollars, and it’s just inaccessible for them, so then they’re forced to look at other locations that do make sense. We also have the newer investors that are getting started, whether this is their first investment property or their first investment property out of state, where they’re just looking to get started, scale, and diversify their portfolio in an efficient manner where they’re not making the mistakes and having the common pitfalls that so many people do.
Q: How have recent interest rate fluctuations affected investor behavior and property acquisition strategies?
Lemaster: We should separate interest rates from how that’s affecting the retail market, which is all the information we see on the news and the public stats that are put out versus the investor market.
It’s important to look at the microeconomic scale of each market, which is what we try to do. There are some markets we focus on where interest rates have virtually had no impact on properties, on the days on market. But as a whole, we’re all aware that the interest rate increase has made homes less affordable for people, it’s stagnated listings, and it’s caused days on the market to slow down. There are not a lot of new properties coming to the market because people don’t want to sell. However, with many investors focusing on build-to-rent communities and assets, interest rates have reduced cash-flow analysis on the properties because mortgage rates are higher.
We’ve also seen that parallel at the same time with many of the builders because we have partnerships to provide inventory from many of the national builders. D.R. Horton, LGI, Lennar, Toll Brothers, Sentry—these are all teams we’re working with that provide us with inventory. They also provide significant builder incentives exclusive to our community because we do volumes with them and we’re able to negotiate pricing that we pass on to the investor.
Because they have excess inventory right now, they’re providing additional builder incentives to buy down interest rates. That allows investors to still have positive cash flow, or they can also have price reductions on homes.
All that being said, we’ve seen a relatively small impact on the investor market because the builders are still motivated to provide unique buying opportunities that combat the higher interest rates that limit cash flow on these properties. Additionally, when we invest, we focus on the fundamentals of real estate investing. It’s all about planning appropriately.
Q: How can investors adapt to potential market downturns or regulatory changes affecting real estate investments?
Lemaster: I don’t think you could fully ever anticipate any changes if we don’t know what’s going to happen in the market, in the economy, in legislation. But one thing that has held true for many years is that people need a place to live. And if you adhere to the fundamentals of focusing on areas where the numbers make sense, where there’s a deficit of housing, where there’s a diversity of employers, where you have tax and legislative favorable scenarios for landlords, that can set you up for long-term success.
It’s about focusing on the fundamentals of real estate, which is to buy assets where the income from the asset covers all your expenses and debt service. Then if you have reserves for the property and you’re in an area that’s positioned for success based on all the criteria we just talked about, that is going to set you up for success.
Q: What role does technology play in your operations, and how do you see it shaping the future of real estate investing?
Lemaster: So much is changing. If you think of 10 years ago, pre-Zillow, it was difficult to research a new market online. Unless you were flying out to an area to develop a team on your own, it was very difficult to build a portfolio in different locations throughout the country. That’s changed a lot today, and that’s a large part of what we do, to make it accessible for people to buy properties in areas and feel educated, confident, and familiar with the market, regardless of where they’re located.
Things are becoming so expedited even with property inspections today, with leasing to tenants, sometimes you don’t even need the old-school process of walking someone through the house because you can have a virtual tour, or you can have cameras and lockboxes that you can remotely control. AI plays a significant role in the marketing aspect for leasing, for sales, for everything. A lot is changing, but today it’s significantly easier to buy properties sight-unseen and from a distance and feel confident.
