My general thoughts would be that you’d be buying at extreme peak highs now, but that more premium locations may be less volatile.

The other way to improve cash flow is how you rent it out, you can furnish the common areas and rent it out by the room, this will be a little more work than a traditional rental, but if you can get 3 bedrooms this might 1.5x your rental rate, or you can fully furnish and rent by the month, this will also be a little more work, but also might 1.5x the rent, or airbnb which is a lot more work and more volatile, but might 2x the rent. 

Very liquid as well, but very volatile too.

Since buying a "second" home is formally 10% down at least (I will say there are some lenders who are not doing 10% down right now due to volatility of the market).  

Higher risk market may have stagnation on those fronts or more volatility in asset price.The proper strategy in DC is to hold long term, and if one does they will be handsomely rewarded with asset and rent growth.

But with that, we must consider volatility and evolving regulations.

Its not real lucrative but its conservative an does not have the same volatility and risk as the larger city's wide market swings.  

We generally convert our data to a series of indices or percentile rankings relative to the MSA we are analyzing (or to the country as a whole if we are looking more broadly for promising markets) so we can identify which markets and submarkets are most compelling on a relative basis.We've found that the following market variables (at census tract level granularity) are most able to explain investment potential:- Crime index- Education index- Unemployment rate- Cost of Living index- Household Income- Median Age- Population Density- Median Home Value- Educational Attainment- Percent Owners vs Renters- Percent Workers vs Residents- WalkScore- TransitScore- Sound Level (noise pollution)- 1,3 and 5 year Rent Growth- Derivative of 1,3 and 5 year Rent Growth- Monthly Rent Volatility- Distribution of unit sizes in the market- Percentage of 0,1,2,3,4 beds in the market- Skewness of Household income- Number of Negative Externalities (e.g. garbage dump, firestation, prison, train tracks, highway) - We typically use this more for comparison of properties within a few blocks in the same submarket, but if there are a ton of them it is influential at the submarket levelHopefully this helps.

There has been a lot of rate volatility this past year and we've seen many lenders have some difficulty servicing their market.

I also worry that having a new Airbnb/Vrbo account could lead to review-volatility as opposed to using a PM’s established account.Anyone have advice on the above?