Investing in Small Towns

[Aaron Macken]

Hey everyone, hoping to get some feed back on anyone's experience on this. 

I was browsing through zillow and started looking in some pretty random small towns. (Marion, IN for example). The rent is fairly cheap, but the home prices are even cheaper. After doing the math, on paper some of these small town homes look like they could be great deals. 

I talked to my Mom's landlord and he said he gets scared of buying in non metropolitan areas where the demand for housing is not very high. It's also hard to have faith in an area that I can't actually see. Has anyone had experience in buying in a smaller town like this? What has your experience been? Would you recommend it?