If you absolutely need to dial-in the numbers and find a reasonable ARV on this one, be extremely conservative with your valuations as the impact that each improvement you make will be decreased simply due to the rule of averages across the properties in the immediate vicinity.

While I agree that customer staples are somewhat recession resistant as well, I definitely concur with this ranking that RE beats it out, since typically during recessions people do still need to buy staples but will still usually decrease the AMOUNT they're buying (cutting down their consumption, making things stretch further, and not "stocking up" as much as they would in non-recessionary times such as only buying 1 stick of deodorant at a time instead of buying 10 at a time), so demand and gross revenue for these products will see a temporary decline during recessionary times moreso than RE historically does.

It is winter, and there are supposed to be seasonal adjustments for this type of thing.Additionally, it’s been very mild in most of the country.Mortgage ApplicationsThe MBA released their Mortgage Application data for last week, showing that purchases fell 10% last week after rising 28% over the previous two weeks and are now down 41% year over year.Interest rates decreased ever so slightly to 6.19% from 6.2%.

This can result in lower demand for homes and a decrease in home prices.

Why does the annualized total return % decrease every year when the property increases in cash flow and appreciation 

I see people either spending it all or saving it forever as I see the value of it decrease. 

We live in NY and unfortunately cannot leave the area due to work + family/child care availability.Right now we are at a crossroads - we are deciding whether we want to purchase a primary home to house hack (while understanding that in NY, we would NOT cash flow from house hacking, but simply decrease the burden of our monthly mortgage payment), or if we want to continue to rent and invest our money towards buying our first out of state rental property.Buying our primary home obviously has some benefits; the most important being that we would be putting money that we would otherwise be paying for rent towards equity on a home.

Your cash flow will be slightly decreased, but your ROI will be a lot higher, and you'll have more funds available for subsequent purchases.

There is something wrong - it's too much for such low value.It might be that you bought property cheap and MV is much higher - then you can decrease the tax (end of December apply online), or you're looking at taxes with delinquencies, which is one time payment, not incurring.If you PM me the address, I'll tell you what's up with these numbers.Even in Shaker Hts with notoriously high taxes, it's not that high.Cleveland as city has very low property taxes, it's just certain suburban cities without much industry to tax get the burden on the homeowners 

As the neighborhood value decreases, it keeps attracting lower income and more renters.