Is Cash Flow King? Price to Rent and 1% in different OOS markets.

[Account Closed]

Over the past year, I've been educating myself so as to get my investing start, most like with single family buy and hold. I live in San Diego county, so I've tended to focus on starting OOS. Initially, I was looking closely at a few midwest areas that seemed to easily meet the 1% rule and have low entry price points on sfh's. 

After coming close on a few deals, I stepped back to re-examine my desired focus including what areas to invest. I'm still primarily considering OOS, but am now looking at some areas that have higher entry price points and where a newer investor might be hard pressed to achieve the 1% rule. Partly, I was having a hard time getting as excited about owning long term in some of the markets I first looked at as compared to some I'm looking at now.

Some questions I'd love to hear people chime in on:

 Is cash flow always a primary driving factor? I know there are people actively investing in areas outside the midwest that don't meet the 1% rule, so what is the mindset investing there?

Is having a net zero cash flow acceptable in some areas? I suppose I'm referring to areas that can reasonably be expected to have stable appreciation over the long term and increases to rent. In that case, is having someone else pay your mortgage on a sfh you'll eventually own good enough?

What is the perspective from an investor that might prefer owning one $240,000 dollar sfh vs. three $80,000 sfh's? Does that perspective change significantly if the $80k homes would cash flow out of the gate and the 240k would not?

Any other related thoughts are welcome.

[Russell Brazil]

Yield, in any asset class, whether real estate, bonds, dividends....is a function of risk.  This is an incredibly important concept that people on the site often ignore.  High yield = high risk. Low yield = low risk.  Now there is nothing wrong with high or low yields, you just have to understand that it is a function that the market uses for pricing in the risk of the underlying asset and/or market. Yield measures risk, yield does not measure return.  It is one, of many components of the return, but it is not the total return of the asset.