If the kitchen cabinets are in good shape, keep them and use those and the countertops to help pick the wall colour and flooring, keeping in mind you may change the kitchen cabinets down the road and not change the flooring and wall colour.

Even if the house was in bad shape, the land lot was worth more than my offer.That was my experience.  

If were able to sell for anything north of $600 we would be in good shape.

If they're all in rough shape, then you need to be budgeting $10K/unit to turn them over in addition to all exterior work/systems work needed. 

Some of the cities mentioned have a secular trend of population decline, which does not bode well for the long term.

House is in great shape with upgrades. 

We do not expect this trend to stop any time soon. 

Instead of media narratives, I'd focus on measurable population shifts and trends.

Find or pay to have a theme built (hope it converts visitors into leads well... most don't)Get hosting (most use really low grade sub $10/mo shared hosting)Come up w/ the proper content strategy (most don't have the experience to structure the content correctly to perform well or be a benefit for SEO)Write that contentAdd a bunch of plugins (which often times increase chance of vulnerability by hackers or slow things down... but all require the site owner to maintain the plugins)Dial the site in on mobile (most WP themes don't perform well converting visitors to leads on mobile, at any given time we're running 10-20 split tests across dozens of sites improving performance on our platform)Run split tests to continually increase performanceSetup your analytics correctly (we make it easy or use our built in analytics)Continue to update themes, plugins, WP (which isn't hard, it's very easy as you know... but many people don't want to do that)Keep up on the SEO trends / market trends (which we help our clients stay ahead of)etc. etc. etc.  100% anyone can use free or cheap tools to rank well in Google and in the case of a WP site... the simple fact of it being WP doesn't contribute to it ranking well at all.  

It'll be interesting to see how this trend continues over time!