Cap Rate Estimate in Anytown, USA

[John Smith]

I'm looking at a personal investment in a 17 unit residential property (~150k NOI) in a medium sized town on the east coast (population ~11k) about 2 hours outside of a major city. Call is Class B-ish. What's the right way to go about generating the appropriate cap rate for something like that? It seems like most published cap-rate data is for bigger metropolitan areas and is all over the map (2.5% for class A in NYC vs like 16% for class C in Memphis). The most natural thing to do would be to put together a comp sheet on competing opportunities in the area, but the number of competing opportunities is small and highly variable both in terms of characteristics and cap rate (an inn/bar/restaurant with some residential units attached, a mobile home park, a couple run-down 4 unit multi-families, etc.). I had a friend do a REIS search for historical transactions which was also not particularly illuminating. I asked a couple local real estate agents who also didn't have a great idea.

I understand that there will be a lot of case-by-case variation based on things like deferred maintenance, tenant quality, rental trends, financibility, etc. But if you had to make an offer on a property like this "in a vacuum" what's the best way to establish a starting point? Should I just compute an average class-b cap rate across the US and then make adjustments for perceived features of deficiencies of this property in particular vs "the average". Price tends to be very location dependent, but if the location lacks much data, how do I establish guide-posts?

I appreciate the advice!