Normal W2 employees get into this business hoping to make thousands in one phone call after receiving some courses from these wholesale "GURUS". 

Force you to pay  a couple thousand extra in housing expenses and then moved back there is zero chance you would do it.

One San Leandro landlord is owed $132,000 in back rent and in Oakland you can't discriminate against rental applicants with a criminal back ground (except sex offenders) and several stories of non-paying tenants which took thousands in legal fees to evict in Oakland. 

my father has been investing in detroit for 22 years over 100 different properties i am not sure which is the better choice but we always have the tenants fill out an affidavitwater bills in detroit can come in extremely high at times and if the tenant decides to skip out on paying rent and bills, it can cost you thousands if it is under your name and not theirs.

I look forward to continuing to learn from the BiggerPockets community as I navigate my real estate investing journey.I’ve had some success on the eastern shore of Maryland, though even that market has started to frankly become expensive, there are still pockets of potential growth both rent & appreciation, thoigh it’s becoming harder to find, also there is a massive rental shortage out there, a county I just put a property contract on, literally has 3 properties for rent right now, but it does make rental comps quite difficult, outside of that I’ve started looking a little more into western Md and some southern pa markets but still trying to get a feel for them, overall I think in this market places that are affordableish and have some draw will do well with the continued wfh + affordability crisis but keep in mind while I think the eastern shore is actually fairly safe market for the most part a lot of rural areas definitely have boom bust potential and in theory more risk than dc metro, though the low price points do by definition tend to mitigate some of those risks. 

Literally every week I get multiple inquiries on the size of our pool as the last time they made the mistake of booking a place with a such a small pool. 

Sorry to be so blunt about it but there is no way around it. '23'/'24' are CASH-COW years for hundreds of thousands of landlords.

Boosting consumer spending is literally rowing in the opposite direction.

Ca And in Santa Rosa thousands of homes were burnt down.. but CA being CA and massive was able to absorb those folks.  

Otherwise if it's a few thousand of lost damages, keep it moving