Hi Max, a good rule of thumb is to start with your target market/ideal guest.

I’m not sure all of the regulations/rules to this in PA though.

It's just a rule of thumb, and only tells part of the story when buying a rental property.

You can make the mortgage Have a balloon payment in 2 1/2 years so that you don't miss out on the IRS tax exemption rule of living in your primary home two of the last five years.

I also saw a blog post by the Financial Samurai that said if he could sell a rental for more than 100x the monthly rent, he should... but I wasn't sure if others liked that as a general rule? 

The general rule of thumb when using debt is to ensure that whatever asset you buy with the debt should make more than the debt service.  

I needed to find a passive real estate income stream that would work within the IRS’ self-directed IRA (SDIRA) rules.

Guests rule and get away with murder.Right now we have about 75% of our 2025 bookings through VRBO.

Generally larger commercial properties and shopping centers are easier to classify with hard and fast rules, but to the points above the residential areas really move very quickly and have way more nuance than most people care to admit.zip codes are generally way too large for my liking at least in my market to provide any kind of insights other than macro level economics but even then highways or rivers that cut through a zip code can end up with totally different trade areas.we can get pretty granular with cellphone data and with grocery center data to understand the trade areas and their true boundaries, but that kind of data pull is generally only cost effective for investors doing larger scale projects or developments, and honestly we still just end up getting on the ground and feeling it out, so I generally tell people that the money is better spent on a plane ticket and weekend trip in the area you are looking rather than any kind of "trade area" level data studies.and generally B class in 1 area means something different than another. 

One golden rule I follow,if it takes a long time to fix/replace when it breaks, don't buy a cheap one.Imagine, this thing breaks in the middle of your peak season and the people who can come out to rebuild are 2 weeks out....It takes at least a day or two to build something like this even if you are super skilled.