Researching a city

[Eric P.]

I live in NYC, have a full-time job, and I'd like to start investing in real estate. I'm NOT looking to flip, NOT looking to rehab, NOT looking for appreciation - I just want buy and hold multi-family properties that are already in good shape, with current tenants and solid cashflow. And of course I would get a professional property management company to manage it for me.

I've done extensive research on properties all over the US, and come to these conclusions: 1) It's really tough to find good cashflow opportunities in the northeast and west coast, 2) if you look in the south and midwest, however, there's a lot of smaller cities (population 50,000 - 200,000) that have tremendous cashflow opportunities.

A couple of Qs:

1) Does anyone have experience in selecting a city 1,000+ miles away from their home just to buy investment properties there?

2) What kind of things should I look for when selecting the city to invest in? I mean, every city's chamber of commerce site makes it sound like it's "experiencing a renaissance, an amazing rebirth, has a burgeoning start-up scene of high-growth tech companies", etc etc

My biggest fear is that I'll choose some small city in the Midwest and a year after I buy a property, the local plant will close and now no one can pay their rent :-/