When it is that street by street you're a couple bad lease ups in the neighborhood from your house ending up being on the 'bad' street.

Competition sounds really bad.

If you try to get in with some upside down project with thin margins you won't be able to do it.The midwest from Pittsburgh out through Ohio and into Indiana, you have markets in that belt that offer beginners with little capital and no experience a chance to play.That's fine and dandy but setting up a network full of Agents, Wholesalers, and GCs that aren't gonna over sell you, talk you into a bad project, or plain rip you off is the hard part.

If you just hire the cheapest or first PMC you speak with and it turns into a bad experience, please don’t assume ALL PMC’s are bad and start trashing PMC’s in general.

We don’t know any PMCs to recommend in the area mentioned, but since selecting the wrong PMC is usually more harmful than selecting a bad tenant, you might want to read our series about “How to Screen a PMC Better than a Tenant”:https://www.biggerpockets.com/member-blogs/3094/91877-how-to-screen-a-pmc-better-than-a-tenant-part-1-services-and-processesWe recommend you get management contracts from several PMCs and compare the services they cover and, more importantly, what they each DO NOT cover.

I imagine some bad apples will do this and charge by the page rather than the complexity, but I'd like to think that the majority operate in good faith.

We don’t know any PMCs to recommend in the area mentioned, but since selecting the wrong PMC is usually more harmful than selecting a bad tenant, you might want to read our series about “How to Screen a PMC Better than a Tenant”:https://www.biggerpockets.com/member-blogs/3094/91877-how-to-screen-a-pmc-better-than-a-tenant-part-1-services-and-processesWe recommend you get management contracts from several PMCs and compare the services they cover and, more importantly, what they each DO NOT cover.

It's probably worth doing a cost/benefit analysis to see what makes the most sense to do in this case but I don't think buying rentals while renting is necessarily bad. 

@Noam KorenThe historic northeast is like any C area, with good PM you can have great cash flow and with bad PM you can have very bad results (trashed units, non-paying tenants, evictions).

I would appreciate anyone’s comments on this type strategy good or bad and your opinion of these indexes.