I  agree with your point on viewing a property first hand, I think I'm just in the stages of trying to identity towns and areas that work with my price range and needs.

I’ve put 100’s if not 1000’s of hours in educating myself in both the market and REI.If both took equal effort and had identical returns I would choose the stock market, I find it more intellectually stimulating (when investing in single stocks) and I don’t have to deal with people, tire kickers can be exhausting!

We have an almost identical approach!

@Nathan Boyer Sounds almost identical to my situation!

If you wanted to pay an identical amount of principal each month and achieve a 30 year payoff that way, you could (again) mathematically determine a function for that....but then your payment amount would change every month and would initially be alot greater, though at the end would be much smaller.Here is a graph and tables of the two payments...hopefully it helps.

At a glance they have almost identical crime levels, personal incomes, sqft prices, and population trends.

Take the lighting for example: you could literally have two identical lighting fixtures and one would be a 27.5 year asset not eligible for bonus depreciation and the other one is a 5 year asset eligible for bonus depreciation.

A) List sizes are never identical B) open rates are never identical C) Reputation is never identical.

But i should point out that certain areas of the country have very different taxes for identically priced homes. 

@Lance Langenhoven - Honestly, I have mostly passed over the cap rate on all the deals I have looked at because -- without exception -- those rates were nearly identical.