Having lived all over the country in hot spots such as Phoenix, and Denver as well as secondary hotspots such as Savannah, Cape Cod, and Park City, I can understand the value of stability and the demand of schools.

It is ture no one can predict the future so it is good advice to reflect on what the properties are like now when it comes to income. After all, you can always sell if the neighborhood starts to decline, right?

Gracias.

Let me tell you how I look at it. The rents, high or low, don’t matter as much as the rent/cost ratio with consideration of stability. Rob and I are buying in two particular suburban areas for several reasons, but the primary one is that they are areas where we can find deals on purchases of single-family homes while todays’ rents in the area make the deal profitable. Although I wrote about rent trends in this article, I try not to rely much on the trends or my (or especially Rob’s) ability to predict the future. I rely more on today’s comparable rents and evaluate a potential purchase based on that. I do try to be cognizant of whether the area is declining–this is a risk factor. But rather than try to predict the future of rents, I try to evaluate whether an area that already has opportunities to purchase is relatively stable. This means that I’ll stick with areas where the schools are decent, neighborhoods are decent. Conversely, I tend not to spend much time in trying to find investments in the hottest areas. Generally, in those areas there will be fewer opportunities to purchase a discount property and higher appreciating prices in hot areas often out pace rent growth, making it difficult to make a reasonable return on the investment. I’ll stop now with this: other factors include the type of investment, whether you’re looking for income or growth, and the proximity to where you live/work considering self-managing the property. Hope this helps.

Obviously a rental in the boonies will not be in high demand versus a rental in an area with a lot of labor opportunities.

For example, I lived in Denver for a couple years and it seems to me the rent were more higher toards west Denver than elsewhere which was pretty comparable. The east area of Denver was the lowest rent area. But all the jobs were either smack dab in the middle of downtown Denver or south of Denver in the Tech Center.

What struck me odd was the west Denver area did not offer as much in terms of employment opportunities but did offer quality schools, if not quality neighborhoods.

I am gathering information on how to determine where in my purchase zone of York, PA would be more ideal, whether it would be downtown or out near the high employment areas.

Does this question make sense?