Choosing which neighborhood to invest

[Laura Graves]

This is my first post, new to BP here. I am an accountant and have always been interested in fixing up houses and in building a business one day. My husband is an electrician now and use to lay carpet when we first met. We liked the idea of rehabbing, but like the idea of stable passive income more. We have finally decided to go for it and are waiting for the sale of our primary residence in Portland to finalize and we are going to be purchasing back in our hometown of Spokane, WA. We have two little girls and want to get them started in the Mead school district. We want to start off with a duplex and I have been trying to learn how to analyze deals, but from what I can see I'm not sure if the numbers will make sense.

How do you each pick the area you will invest in? Are you picking the best area of town, or do you just run the numbers on each deal in any part of town? Spokane is a smaller town (550K people in the metro area).