It will not prevent abuse, but will still recover most of the expense.The cost to individually meter can be expensive.

Stick to the newer well located neighborhoods where you're likely to see better appreciation when the market recovers.

However there is opportunity for quite a bit of appreciation if the economy recovers in the inner city.We already see neighborhoods reviving locally in Dayton but not enough to count on any great increases in the short run (2-5 years).

But stray to far to the North or to the East by a block or two, and you are out of the ‘strike’ zone for higher values and into an area that is still suffering.Because every neighborhood can be it’s own little micro real estate market, has the market recovered in your little part of the world?

We just have less property value to recover those costs from.  

The rest of the country is just recovering from the last crisis still!

One thing that worries me is my current house never recovered from the recession, and we are still 30k under what we paid for it.

Persistence is key across any strategy that you use.For example:  I've been told "no" by 8 banks, had 2 break in's at the same property, experienced a bank cut me off because they were bought out, and their new rules said they couldn't loan to out of state investors, had my "worth his weight in gold" property manager get cancer, recover, and move to a property management company that doesn't work with small investors like myself, ran close to out of money a few times, been jerked around by US Bank a few times, had to pay $2,000 for a CPA to do my taxes last year, etc, etc.Any one of these events could have easily discouraged me towards getting out of the rental business.  

I think that the local market has not fully recovered so I would say a 5% or better appreciation rate is typical of Cincy.Now that same $16,000 purchase in a 9% appreciation area would have a market value of about $843,000!

So, I think if it is a neighborhood with high rental demand and limited supply, there's no problem, at least there was not for me personally.BTW, prices in class B held up much better than class C in my market also ... so naturally being the opportunist that I am I picked up more class C rentals at fire sale prices, and then sold out of them when things recovered for a nice payday ...