When I look at a deal I am paying attention to what rents where 3 years ago and what the historical vacancy is.

If you want to hear all the advantages of San Diego RE you can PM me but suffice to say it has historically produced very good returns and this is verifiable fact (anyone can verify this).However, you do not know whether you plan to stay in San Diego. 

You will see they are investing in the strongest markets, have great broker networks / access to deals which is critical in a highly competitive market, can raise significant capital to take advantage of scale, more disciplined / conservative underwriting models, have simple well thought out business plans to increase the properties value, using fixed rate 10yr loans to take advantage of still incredibly low rates historically speaking and use more sophisticated tool sets to help understand how fluctuations in occupancy, rents, etc may impact their models.  

We found a hard money lender who has historically given both 5 year notes with a 25 year amortization as well as 25 year fixed.

The article does not specify the latter.As of Q1 2020 based on historical price income-ratios, I see only 11 out of 50 largest cities (by population, not inventory) overvalued > 10%.

But you can get look at the historical utility costs to get a good idea of that.

But 10 years is a pretty long timeframe, per historical chart below.

To figure out what places have rented for in the past I use rentometer.com and for current rentals I use Craigslist/zillow/apartments.com etc to find as many comps as I can.I use the historical to understand what things are actually renting for and the currently available to understand what my competition looks like in order to land somewhere just above the average.

Ideally they should be able to provide / generate reports; 3 year T12 P & L, 3 year historical occupancy, 3 year Capex, and so on.Good luck,Oren

Basically, it's as if she and you are both starting at the beginning of your RE journeys, to find out whether she/you would be better off investing for appreciation (eg. buying property that should be ALREADY worth more than you pay for it, AND it's due to keep going up in value too, but, won't generate much net cash flow), or, buying for cash flow (in areas where appreciation has not happened historically, but are still golden egg locations for double digit net rent returns).