It's much harder to find things that cash flow here than they might be in other segments of the country, but the underlying demographic changes (population and job growth) make it extremely appealing on a 10-20 year time scale, even if we don't see the gains (highly unlikely) that we've experienced over the last 7-10 years.

My partner and I were looking to scale up and found two 4-plexes right next to each other for sale by the same owner.

There are a number of strategies out there but one I often hear about doing well is the BRRRR method where you Buy Renovate Rent Refinance and Repeat it creates equity and cash flow for you at the same time while also allowing you to invest in better neighborhoods which have better tenants in which you can safely scale up and expand your portfolio But ultimately the deal is in the numbers so the better you are at analyzing deals the easier it will be for you know when you have found a good deal so practice analyzing as much as you can to sharpen your skills because even as a wholesaler your deal analyzing skills must be up to par because your selling your deals to investors who do this on a regular basis hope this helps 

I personally am scaling back on marketing and acquisition 

I'm not at the scale to afford the best, but something would be nice. 

Not only that, but lending to the poor also became a qualification for take overs and mergers, if you had not lent enough to the poor, then a take over would be blocked.So in one stroke, ability to repay took second place to other things.Mortgages were then made, packaged up into so called bonds and sold to investors (not re investors, but people like pensions companies etc).In 2006 a lot of these packaged mortgages were found to have deficiencies, eg people not repaying, and the investors holding these investments started disposing of them.Banks were asking accountancy firms in the City of London and Wall Street to start unpacking each one of these instruments to redo e paperwork and pull out the bad loans and then repackage them.The Banks were offering in London £50,000 to redo one of these bonds (for a better word) and offer insurance on the bond after it was repackaged, the auditing and accountancy firms asked for £250,000 per bond and no insurance. 

It really depends on your scale. 

Look at an amortization scale. 

“Access to housing—particularly affordable housing—is becoming more and more limited, and that’s going to be a real problem for our region” he continued, “we have major corporations and grand-scale economic investments taking place, but fewer and fewer options in terms of housing for the people who are going to take those jobs.

I think any place I'm going to buy and hold for long term, if there's no large scale technology jobs it's a dying city and I'm rolling the dice.