What is truly going on, is that people adapt strategies that simply do not work, or work extremely pourly, and then use metrics like these to quantify them and justify them.

You have to quantify for that return in your area what you will have to take on to achieve that.

The million dollar question is how much the upgrades are worth, because that is really hard to quantify, and think you are right that it helps get it rented and retain a tenant more than command significantly higher rent.Given your response, the next time I had a vacancy I would raise rent $25/mo.  

Some benefits aren't not the tangible and quantifiable type that can be easily captured on a spreadsheet.

Extremely hard to quantify this.

See if you can identify and quantify the issue.

Nobody I've seen either 1.) documents documents their ROI against risk or attempts to 2.) quantify the "alpha" of their systems.That said, what is more indicative of a "guru" designation is a self-promotion and advertising.

Math is math, and if you have good numbers and plug them in, the resulting figure will tell you all you need to know; nearly everything about a rental property is quantifiable, even if you have to use estimates rather than hard facts in some parts of the equation. 

Depends how they quantify the Dodd Frank "ability to repay"  knock on a lot of doors, you will get a lot of no's but you only need 1 yes

Start by defining and quantifying your objective.