There are some fringe areas where you can achieve 6-8% annualized return, but with that comes risk of unreliable tenants, stagnant property value growth, etc. 

There are a few fringe approaches you could try that require less money… Using arbitrage to find a cheap rental to rent and then renting it out for more than you pay.You could attempt wholesaling.

So far the touristy areas have held up much better than the fringe areas that got popular during post-covid revenge travel.Houses in the Smokies and Destin are still selling for close to what they were in the peak. 

There are so many fringe benefits that go along with owning and operating your own business, you can't leverage/sell a umbrella policy; additionally, and imho, the explicit intent of the insurance company is to not payout; so, if they discover malicious negligence then the policy is void anyway.If you run your business, LLC or otherwise, correctly you will not have anything to worry about and will have flow through deductions, access to twice as much capital etc... 

The house is on a nice, quiet street, but never the less, on the "fringe".  

So if you want to make it in this industry get into the freakin industry don't play around on the fringes doing semi illegal deals. or in many states totally illegal..

I like to call this fringe investing. 

An outside investor looks at amount of capital deployed, exit strategies,risk, and return.We have some investors here on BP who also invest on the fringes of areas hoping they can turn around.

Maybe I could get better deals if I wanted to beat around the fringes and find off-market or under-the-table type deals, but I just don't want to deal with that kind of thing.

This allows you to have retained earnings in the LLC and issue things like fringe benefits.