Once BART extends from Dublin to Livermore (7 more miles down highway 580), I'm predicting the house will be over 1 million. 

No one can tell you how to choose appreciating properties or avoid areas posed for a downturn because that is a prediction...but jobs play a key role.  

But on top of that do your own comps then who knows your comps might match up with your realtorsAs for you being worried about having to lower your ARV even more because of the market I would try my best to predict what could happen by using months of supply and the days on market formula... 

If the commercial real estate market causes some banks to fail as predicted by Powell (see yahoo finance article attached) what correlation will we see in the economy as a whole?

Bottom line is you can't predict what the market will do.

Well its hard to predict the market will do between now and 5 years from now right ? 

Cashflow is more predictable.

If the predictions of interest rates continuing to go down are true, then we will likely see another big uptick in property prices as interest rates get down into the 5% range and buyer activity increases.

I predict there will be criminal and SEC civil prosecutions of some of these syndicators.

But that doesn't mean it's still not a viable investment at 20% CoC.  20% is still pretty great even with the extra work involved.Of course the big elephant still lingering out there is that short term rental revenue isn't as reliably predictable moving forward as long term rental revenue, so when you're putting in that revenue number to get 20% CoC you need to be sure it is a number that you can hit moving forward, and not something that was just a result of a large outlier travel year like we're looking back at now.