I am not going to argue with the alphabet or 20 years looking back how A properties consistantly ultimately out perform b, c2%, d props and especially longterm.

That will out perform all other investments that I have.One suggestion is to keep really accurate records and account for things correctly.

RE is the only investment vehicle whereby knowledge outperforms money each and every time.  

It does change the cash that goes into (or gets deducted from) your bank account, but it doesn't change the fundamentals of the property.Circling back to the main point of your post- you can find markets in CA that generate decent yields, and if you do your homework, you can buy properties that outperform those markets.

I have not purchased a MFR yet but have run numbers on numerous MFR listings over the last couple years and in my humble opinion, returns on SFRs still greatly outperform MFRs in this area when vacancy, utilities, maint.

In most cases, when real estate outperforms other investments it's a result of significantly above-average appreciation (the best case of that is of course when you're able to buy a property significantly under market value).Let's use a super-simple example.

Senior care as a sector simply outperforms other sectors of real estate and the higher returns are more of an indicator that the investor chose the right sector to invest in rather than a higher risk assumed.  

outperform the rest.

I've tested this approach vs. the traditional route of yellow letters and they outperformed yellow letters by 26.7%.

Here's a fairly detailed academic paper on the subject:http://www.reri.org/research/article_pdf/wp171.pdfThe abstract kinda sums it up nicely -- in short, outperformance is all about timing and leverage:"Results demonstrate that while value-added and opportunistic private equity real estate investments have higher returns than core investments, their superior returns are driven by beleaguered market conditions as well as by the use of cheap debt."