Talk to almost any self-managing landlord about the next few years, and the plan is rarely "stay exactly where I am." A recent investor survey found that 81% of real estate investors plan to grow their portfolios over the next two years — only 17% plan to hold steady, and just 2% plan to shrink. Ambition isn't the bottleneck for most landlords in this position. Something else is.
| Category | Value |
|---|---|
| Plan to grow | 81% |
| Plan to hold steady | 17% |
| Plan to shrink | 2% |
Data: 2024 real estate investor survey, n≈2,116.
What's actually holding growth back
A separate landlord sentiment survey found more than half of landlords cite property prices as the single biggest barrier to buying more, with roughly a quarter citing elevated interest rates. Put plainly: it's not a lack of desire to grow. It's that the deal math is harder right now than it was, and that's largely outside any individual landlord's control.
Data: 2025 landlord sentiment survey, n=1,623.
That's an uncomfortable thing to hear if you're waiting for prices or rates to move before you can act again. But it also means the thing that is within your control matters more, not less, while the external environment stays difficult: being ready to move the moment a deal actually pencils out.
Readiness is the lever you actually control
When a good deal does show up — a motivated seller, a rate dip, a property priced below where it should be — the landlords who move on it aren't necessarily the ones with the most capital. They're often the ones who can produce clean, current financials on short notice: a trailing-twelve P&L per property, a rent roll that reflects reality, documentation that holds up to a lender's underwriting instead of needing to be reconstructed first (a gap covered in more detail in What Lenders Actually Check).
Financing friction shows up twice for a growing landlord — once in the macro environment nobody controls, and again in whether your own numbers are ready when a window briefly opens. The first one, you wait out. The second one, you can fix well before you need to.
Being ready before the window opens
Waiting for prices or rates to improve is a reasonable strategy. Waiting and having unready financials when they finally do is the version that actually costs a deal — because by the time the reconstruction is done, the window that made the deal worth taking has usually closed.
If you're planning to grow once the market cooperates, it's worth knowing today whether your financial documentation could support that move, not scrambling to build it after you've already found the property. Take the free Portfolio Health Check — see where your whole portfolio's readiness actually stands right now.