yes, its declining in all educated areas. but housing costs will continue to go up. in our Multifamily rentals, we will be upgrading everyone's living standards to assure we have upper-income earners as tenants, will be adding separate Electic Vehicles charging and 1st $100 of electricity for free included in the rent with Solar panels offsetting the cost producing the electric we sell to tenants. also adding Smart building ready FOG network for security and looking at new Smart Toilets the five-star hotels have been installing.

Is there any assurance to help ease the stress of making sure someone rents the unit out?

If someone answers questions in a thoughtful, respectful and intelligent manner with strong subject matter expertise, you can be somewhat assured that person or company takes their business, their reputation and career seriously and won't be a fly by night scam artist. 

@Matt BishopW O W.As a former listing agent with FNMA, I can assure you that people are caught & charged with mortgage fraud.

That is real assuring.

Rest assured he cannot kick you out in 3 days.

The city inspectors will look over their work and make sure they did everything correctly thus giving you the assurance you got the job done correctly without having to know anything about plumbing.

In reality, if you find someone on BP that has thousands of posts and a boatload of votes, I can assure you that person knows what they're talking about and can guide your loan to close. 

If the rehab was 40K and divided into 4 stages of 10K each, then you'd front the first 10K of the rehab, the lender would inspect and if satisfied, would reimburse you with a 10K draw, which you'd then use to do the next 10K phase of the project, rinse and repeat until the project is complete.Like I said, it's possible to find inexperienced lenders who will loan you based on the purchase price + rehab project cost or (worse) the ARV, but that's naive/risky to the lender as s/he has no assurance the funds will actually be used on the rehab.I hope that makes sense and helps with your analysis!

It's not always possible, like in dealing with older tenants for example, but usually it's the best way to assure rent is coming in each month on time.