Stumbled on a few of my words in the beginning and then the movie "the wolf of wall street" kicked into me head and I suddenly got a lot more confident talking to the agent.

I have been pretty happy with selling houses with financing, I get an initial return of 10 to 12 percent, and then depending on when it pays off the returns could be as high as 30 to 40 percent annualized.

That means you could buy now, experience 5-7.5% annual appreciation for the next couple years, sell at the peak of the market, and then sit on the money until it all comes back down and you can buy at the bottom of the market 5-7 years from now and get $150,000 of appreciation per property in the next few years after that. 

My insight is to run your numbers very carefully, multiply your anticipated annual expenses by 1.5, and don't forget capex.

To put into the chart perspective, a consistent 6% annual increase from 67.03 in 1988 would be worth 342.64 in 2015.

I manage hedge funds and local private investors and we are able to show you annual returns every year in the mid-teens.

Still, I recommend avoiding high monthly HOA's.An annual HOA on my SFH is $90 a year.  

Income and Costs (all numbers are annual)Nominal rent - 43.6kActual rent - 37.3k (14.5% vacancy.  33% turnover rate)Management - 4.5k (10.6% - could bring down with a PM switch)Maintenance - 5.0k (11.6% - ok, older building and a fair amount of tenant turnover)CapEx - 2.4k (5.4% - mostly plumbing costs: is that a worry?)

@Lisa Lanata are these annual or monthly numbers?  

And I highly doubt companies are going to start giving out 10% annual raises.