You can calculate a cap rate on anything that produces NOI but it would not help much in determining whether it's a good investment.

By cost I mean properties that don't appreciate relative to the overall national market, expensive marketing to produce such deals or even increased risk by investing out of state.

Personally, I can get behind it, me and my partner prefer staying at homes since we like to cook our own food and eat healthy and frankly, we tried the hotel with kitchens and most are super sketchy.

However a different perspective of smart is one that produces the best ROI.  

I wish I had done this when I was looking for my first home, and if done correctly you can set yourself up with a producing asset that can help guide you along your overall real estate goals!

Based on the current prices you will have a hard time finding much that will produce cash flow.

Base the value on the actual rent that the property currently produces.

I quickly knew that I wanted to be on the investment side of real estate and my focus for 2018 is strictly producing income from my job as well as cash generated from fixing and flipping homes (goal of minimum 3 in 2018) in the Central Florida market, including Tampa.

Unfortunately, I found that the owner had lost his mortgage and real estate license in Minnesota for equity stripping, breach of fiduciary duty, incompetence, fraud, lack of disclosures to consumers, and violation of an order to produce records, other forms of misconduct, and is permanently barred from mortgage origination or servicing. 

Although they're right in that those will be the best deals, you can still find some marginal deals in the MLS with traditional financing that produce minimal cash flow, but those deals will depend more on appreciation in the long run.