But that just creates more buying opportunities.The fact is almost no one can predict the peak of any investment cycle for any asset.

If this is your strategy, you will need a very reliable local team that should include a real estate agent, attorney, and property manager to start.In other words, are you looking at market data to start building a portfolio now or trying to predict what a market will look like sometime in the future to help you make personal life decisions?

You can predict what the entire market will do in a particular time since every local market is so different.

If you live in a neighborhood with a good school, that is where your kid will go.Hard to predict the market and it can't keep going like this forever, but I'm in tech and the venture capital investors I know don't think there will be a crash.

I predict the average price per square ft will be up $5 in my target area next February / March and $10/ft by the end of 2016.  

One of the problems with insurance is that you can not predict the nature of everything someone may sue you for. 

I do wonder though, because no one can predict the future (whether or not payments are made, a foreclosure can go through, a property can withstand a natural, or non, disaster) - aren't there assumptions made in every statistical model made for notes (any real estate investment)? 

Especially for people like me who have several businesses, and who use different types of tax shelters to that can have hard-to-predict tax implications (at least early on in the year).For those reasons, I like to ignore tax implications in all my analysis, and assume worst case -- that I'll lose about half of my income to taxes. 

The overall area is predicted to appreciate at a rate of 4.2% in 2016 and this property may appreciate above the market prediction. 

That would take 20-20 hindsight to predict.