My perception: with more inventory, price reductions, insurance rates and taxes on a moon-shot trajectory, it's looking like the storm is on the way.

Trying to wholesale while it can work its like I said very tough to do and your going to have a ton of deals fall out because of the inherent marketing times for dirt.And when your talking about commercial property its even worse.. you will not sell it unless your basically giving it away UNTIL you find a user.. and buyers of commercial are far more sophisticated than buyers of a rural parcel looking to build a cabin or a builder looking to build on infill in a city.In northern CA we bought 72 acres of which consisted of 14 parcels of record. 4 of them 5 acres each were zoned industrial this was a small rural county.. we sold the 9 that were for resi purposes in the first few years.

The market/media perception of this is so skewed it boggles my mind. 

That’s a pretty good ROI.We consider ourselves pretty sophisticated (own over 500 units) but this is evidence that “you don’t know what you don’t know”.

It can get pretty complex versus long term rentals - I'd highly suggest using tools like AirDNA that has pretty sophisticated data and projections on STRS in every market before pulling the trigger

@Jesse Bennett, I have not, but Chris's experience aligns with my perception.  

It’s a fairly sophisticated operation, with an unusually long time lag between first identifying the unclaimed funds, tracking the beneficiaries, obtaining a contract from said beneficiaries, gathering all the documents needed for “proof”, dealing with numerous government agencies, and finally hopefully having your client receive the funds and you getting paid.

I would add that there may be (4) also, failure of investment strategy.some of these can be interlocked, for example if a investment fails due to its high risk nature, and the investment sponsor did not inform the investors of the risk, then some aspect of (5) would exist; if not fraud certainly misrepresentation.another example would be if the investment sponsor relates a history of experience, knowledge and success to entice you to invest, but for a large part his experience, knowledge and success are in reality not what he has stated, then we again arrive at (5) misrepresentation.Please understand that its easy and common for even very sophisticated investors to make bad investment, and even very sophisticated investors to get fooled and seduced by con artists.also please understand that with only a limited number of exceptions, the real estate guru industry is full of gurus who are not investment experts, they are in fact more likely to be marketing/sales experts, or front men for these marketing/sales organizations.  

3) Price is too high for prospect perception of property value--- Prospects are only willing to pay so much for what a property is.

There are obviously a lot more factors that go into it - real estate is always going to be a mix of the tangible property/market itself with a mix with the investor/operator including experience, risk appetite, financial situation etc.I would say however if you are just getting started in real estate - LTRs are probably (in a vacuum) the better bet as STRs are certainly more sophisticated and challenging from an investor perspective