You did three months of work on an Orlando rental. The job base checked out. The population trend checked out. The rent history checked out. You were two days from writing the offer — and then the headlines hit. "Orlando home prices are falling." "Sun Belt correction deepens."

So you check the number, and the number backs the headline. That same house was worth about $398,000 a year ago. Today it's $387,000. Eleven thousand dollars of value, gone.

Then there's the second number, the one the headline never prints beside the first: the rent didn't fall. It went up about seven-tenths of a percent.

In this episode of the 5-Minute PRIME Podcast, host Martin Maxwell runs both numbers on the same house and shows why the price-to-rent ratio moved from 16.7 to 16.1 — and why a "crash" of 3% left the yield higher than it started.

Tune in to learn:

• Why a falling price is not a falling market — the correction hits what you pay and spares what you collect
• The three options — buy now on the better basis, wait for the bottom, or cross the metro off — and which one survives its own math
• Margin of safety, not awaited appreciation — the $11,000 discount is the part you control; "the price recovers" is the part you don't
• The Powell Spread — why the gap over the 10-year, not the Fed, is the number between you and a cheaper mortgage

Would you still write that offer? And if you walked, what exactly were you walking away from — the deal, or the headline?

Martin walks all three options with the numbers in front of him, and you can read the full write-up and decide for yourself. Run your own metro's two numbers through the deal math at the rate you can actually get today.

Subscribe now to stop letting one number make a two-number decision.

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