It's a great market for both rental income and capital appreciation, as tourism is booming and hotel occupancy is very high I started last year.

It is too far from Chattanooga to work for you (90 miles east, in the Copperhill, TN tourism area), but my point is there are Mom and Pop owners out there who are aging out of their properties and need to sell.

We already pay $900 a month for her shared apartment and this college town (Flagstaff, AZ) is a good STR market with a lot of tourism in the summer and winter months. 

Tourism is the main economy so people love my place cause it's affordable.

Because I love managing vacation rentals (and that's of course a personal choice), I am currently looking at countries with high potential for tourism in the coming years still having very low real estate prices.

BTW, Raleigh tourism numbers include primarily food and lodging tax receipts and (I believe) do not include residential STR at all, mainly because they are too small to count.

It has gone up a little bit and some smaller businesses have been moving here or sprouting up, but tourism and the hospital are still our main employment base.

If you find a STR deal, in Seattle or otherwise, you should pounce on it IF you have a solid contingency plan for what to do if tourism is frozen for 6 months... a year... or even a few years.

Tourism saw nearly 1 million visitors last year.

In 2008 tourism went down 13% or so.