I recorded a conversation with Troy Eckard this week, and halfway through he stopped and turned the question around on me.
He said when he stands in front of a room of 100 physicians, maybe 5 will talk to him. The other 95 find somewhere else to be. Four decades in oil and gas, and it still baffles him. He wanted to know why.
I told him what I actually think, which is that it’s an information problem.
There isn’t much reliable information out there about this space. Most of what you can find comes from people who have something to sell. So it feels like a black box, and when something feels like a black box, people back away from it. That’s not irrational. That’s what anyone does with uncertainty.
Physicians especially. You were trained to do the full workup before you act, and to want the evidence in front of you. When the information is thin, not acting is the correct call.
I’ll say it took me a long time here too. Getting comfortable with this space meant a lot of reading and a lot of conversations with a lot of different people, over a long stretch. It didn’t happen quickly for me, and I don’t think it should happen quickly for anyone.
But there’s a piece of this that has nothing to do with whether you ever buy an oil and gas interest. I think most physicians are missing it, because it isn’t about energy as an investment. It’s about energy already moving your portfolio, whether you own any or not.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, legal, or investment advice. Any investment involves risk, and you should consult your financial advisor, attorney, or CPA before making any investment decisions. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The author and associated entities disclaim any liability for loss incurred as a result of the use of this material or its content.
Start with what’s actually happening
Oil is up about fifty percent from a year ago. Diesel went from under four bucks a gallon to almost six.
That works into the price of everything, because diesel is how things get built and moved. Which keeps inflation warm. Which is why the Fed stopped cutting instead of continuing to cut. Three people at the July meeting actually wanted to raise.
So the ten-year Treasury is sitting just under five percent, the highest it’s been in about three years.
And the ten-year is what prices your real estate.
The number that got my attention
CBRE asked the market, in their mid-year survey, what it would take for deals to start moving again.
The answer was a ten-year Treasury around 3.75%.
We’re at 4.83%.
That gap is a lot of what you’re feeling right now. Deals sitting still. Refinances that hurt. Distributions getting trimmed. Operators pushing a sale out another year, and then another one after that.
And a good part of what’s keeping that number high is the price of oil. Not your operator’s business plan. Not your submarket. A commodity most physician real estate investors have no position in and no opinion about.
I invest heavily in real estate so I’m including myself in that.
That’s really the thing I’d want you to take from this. Energy isn’t a separate box off to the side of your portfolio. If you hold LP positions in multifamily or commercial, it’s connected to what you already own. You have that exposure either way. The only question is whether you have anything sitting on the other side of it.
Where I’d push back on my own argument
The obvious next move is to call energy a hedge against real estate. I won’t, because it isn’t one.
A hedge reliably moves opposite the thing you’re worried about. Energy doesn’t.
It only helps against one kind of trouble. When inflation pushes rates up and squeezes real estate, energy does counterbalance that. But in a recession where demand falls off, the two drop together. That’s 2008. That’s 2020, when oil traded below zero.
The size doesn’t work either. Troy described a portfolio that might be ten percent real estate and three percent energy. Three doesn’t cancel ten. It softens it.
This year makes the point on its own. Oil spiked in the spring, then gave almost all of it back by late June once tankers were moving through Hormuz again. There was a single session in there where it dropped more than fifteen percent, the worst day since April 2020. Anybody calling that a reliable counterweight is overselling it.
Here’s what I think is actually true, and it’s smaller. Energy doesn’t move with housing or with the stock market. It moves with something else entirely. And right now that something else happens to be the thing pressing on real estate values.
I’ll say where I sit, since it’s fair to ask. I’ve invested in this space for a while now. What I’ve appreciated isn’t a big number in any single year. It’s that it doesn’t move with everything else I own, and it’s given me something that keeps working when real estate is having a hard stretch. That’s it. That’s the whole case as I’d make it.
Troy would make a more specific one. His view is that capital left this sector years ago and moved into AI, and that this changed what these assets cost relative to the commodity itself. He’d also tell you where he thinks costs are heading, and he’s candid about the parts that could go against him. I’d rather you hear him make that case in full than take my compressed version of it.
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If you do look, here’s what to ask
This is the part I’d want you to keep regardless of what you decide.
The reason 95 people leave the room isn’t ignorance. It’s that this field has a lot of bad actors and physicians can tell they don’t have the tools to sort them out. The tax write-off is the bait. Most of them don’t know how to do the proper due diligence.
So here are four things you should ask for:
Ask for the AFE. Stands for Authorization for Expenditure. It’s the itemized cost breakdown for drilling a well. You wouldn’t let a consultant take your patient to the OR on “trust me,” you’d want to know what they’re seeing and why. Same idea. Troy told me about an investor who asked for one recently and got told that in 15 years no wealthy investor had ever asked. That’s the answer right there. You’re not trying to argue over somebody’s margin. You’re checking you’re not paying triple.
Ask for the track record in writing. Money in, money out, how long it took. Not a case study. Prior deals, real numbers.
Ask who’s actually on staff. Geologists, engineers, in-house accounting. A lot of firms selling these deals are capital-raising shops with nothing behind the curtain. Ask, then ask to talk to those people.
Ask how the person you’re talking to gets paid. Salary or commission. Fair question in any private deal.
If someone gets defensive at any of those, you learned what you needed to know and it cost you nothing.
Back to Troy’s question
I don’t think the 95 who walk out are wrong to be skeptical. I think they’re skipping a step.
You don’t have to buy anything to be better off here. What’s worth doing is knowing what you’re already exposed to, and being able to tell a real operator from a good deck.
If the answer after that is still no, that’s a real no. It beats the one most people have right now.
Troy’s team publishes their education library with no gate on it. No net worth question, no call, no follow-up sequence. If you want to understand how this asset class works, that’s a reasonable place to start reading. EckardEnterprises.com.
The full conversation is Episode 333 of the Passive Income MD podcast.
Disclosure: Eckard Enterprises is a Passive Income MD partner and sponsored this article. Peter Kim is personally invested in oil and gas assets. This article is educational and is not an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy any security, and it does not reference any specific investment offering. Views attributed to Troy Eckard are his own. Oil and gas investments carry risk of loss, including loss of principal. Consult your own tax and investment advisors.
Figures are as of September 9, 2026. WTI around $97/bbl; on-highway diesel $5.97/gal; 10-year Treasury 4.83%. Sources: EIA, BLS, Federal Reserve (July 2026 FOMC), CBRE US Cap Rate Survey H1 2026.
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Peter Kim, MD is the founder of Passive Income MD, the creator of Passive Real Estate Academy, and offers weekly education through his Monday podcast, the Passive Income MD Podcast. Join our community at the Passive Income Doc Facebook Group.
