It's in a very desirable area: 1 block from "restaurant row", 1.5 blocks from train stop (BART), 2 blocks from freeway entrance, and 3 miles (15min car ride) from UC Berkeley. 

I know because I've been hosting on Airbnb for almost 4 years, so I get all the insights.My listing was high occupancy (summer months), across the street from public transit, great neighborhood, private room with private bath with jetted tub, one block from the beach, and I struggled to get $10K per year.I don't want people to get the wrong impression about how much they can make only to invest money and be disappointed.

@Aaron Klatt, @ @Wes Short, @Gabriel De AlmeidaThank you guys, This makes a lot of sense.Above anything the motivation needs to be there for this to work .This gives me some more concrete criteria to go off of.

I've been searching non stop for an answer to my first question and can't seem to get a concrete answer.

This property is certainly the ugliest girl on the block which caught my interest the first day it hit the market.

As one extreme example of newer homes not being better, in Connecticut there are 15,000 houses less than 10 years old that were recently condemned because the builders used bad concrete on the foundations.

I'm branching out into commercial real estate and running into a road block: running the numbers.

It's a great neighborhood and the best school in the county is just down the block, so it's primarily a family neighborhood and I prefer to keep turnover dates on the school schedule.  

The area seems block by block but nice and stable in general with lots of block clubs.

Google Earth down to all the commercial shopping 1-6 block radius, look for boarded up windows, broken windows, Grafitti, types of cars, types of people, trash etc... if you see all of the above.