Caterpillar also announced HDQ move I believe from Chicago to Irving...maybe 300-400 people. 

In recent years though Dell, Ford, 3M, Caterpillar and many more large corporations have opened or moved their offices and/or call centers to Panama.)

There's a lot of big manufacturing companies here, Caterpillar, Harley-Davidson, BAE Systems to name a few. 

They own a huge Caterpillar dealership chain in the northwest.

The population grows every year, Downtown is growing, U of A is a great school, there's an Air-Force base and companies such as Raytheon and Caterpillar are bring in lots of job opportunities.

Noah,Not too sure about Atlanta, but you may want to take a look at Athens, GA, only 1.5 hours away.Athens has the lowest unemployment in the state of GA, opening brand new major manufacturing plants in the area (Caterpillar and Baxter nearby).

At a high level it has some good things going for it: 3-4 large corporations including Caterpillar and ARcher, a small private college (Milikin), a busy railway corridor, and lots of agriculture surrounding it.The population seemed to max out around 80,000 last decade and is now around 72,000 I believe.

I don't think too many families log in to AirBNB looking for a beach house or ski condo and end up booking a treehouse shaped like a giant caterpillar, although for some segment of the market I guess that could work. 

1) Properties are pretty much always available, Peoria proper is "mostly" C+ to D- neighborhoods.2) Economy is OK, Caterpillar, OSF Hospital and Komatsu are big employers here.

A great example would be Caterpillar building a new mining center just west of downtown.