and these places are not luxury apartments but more older half of duplexes. 

The sales comparison approach is typically done for residential real estate and will be less appropriate and come in under value because there are no good comps, and even an appraisal using the income approach (unless the appraiser is trained to do more complex commercial appraisals) is probably not going to be the most accurate either because they typically use market cap rates and in this case you don’t have good comparable income properties to find the market cap for the analysis.  

Looking to get into some smaller apartment buildings in the near future.As far as the difficulties of investing in Japan, I of course agree with everything said, but in my case I'm at near-native fluency and own and manage my own business separate from anything real estate related so even without permanent residency I've never had trouble getting a loan (except of course I can't get some govt backed ones like a primary residence mortgage) for business or investing.I'll try to get in touch with everyone local to よろしくお願いします。

I manage almost 400 apartments in Cook County at this point.

No way lights are running up a bill by $250 in an apartment.

They will put it in your bank account. at a higher price, Airbnb is mostly crickets and booking.com continues to bring in good traffic booking.com has been very smooth and the whole review mantra with Airbnb is almost non-existent yes somewhat complex to set up.

Find a home with an ADU, garage apartment, or a spare room that can be Airbnb' ed. 

For costs, you’ll typically need to budget for title insurance (usually around 0.5%-1% of the purchase price), attorney fees (varies but can range from $500-$2,000 depending on the complexity), and closing costs (might include recording fees, escrow fees, and other admin costs—generally $500-$2,000).

I currently am living in an apartment in Philadelphia and I would like to put my money to better use.

However I've seen 1 bedrooms go for $1800 in the nicer part of the city, so this is for the majority of the C+ / B- apartment houses in the area.