Dollar-Cost Averaging Applied to Rental Property Acquisition

[Steve Smith]

I've been listening to @Scott Trench's new book, Set for Life, recently. Scott discusses the concept of dollar-cost averaging a bit as it relates to investing in index funds. This makes a lot of sense to me and I've been doing this for years through the traditional routes of 401(K) and Roth IRA. However, now I am considering how this applies to purchasing rental properties. Here's an example: If an investor plans to purchase 30 rental units over the next several years, would it make sense to just systematically (as mush as possible) purchase 3 or 4 units per year? Similar to dollar-cost averaging with index funds, sometimes units would be purchased at higher prices and sometimes units would be purchased at lower prices (depending on where the market was at the time). In theory, the investor could then spend less time attempted to time the market, trusting in dollar-cost averaging to end up in a good position 10 years down the road. I'm still kicking this around in my head, but wanted to see what others thought of this. Thanks!!