Personally, if your market tends toward the former condition (better/normal appreciation) I think it's a fairly safe deal looking at the long term, assuming infrastructure around you continues to support the idea of renting it.

Quote from @Richard Kim: I'm a fairly new small time out of state investor who owns a couple multi-family properties in Cleveland.

@Jeff G. not aware of that, but sure it's available for a price from Fair Isaac Co or one of the credit repositories.

It's hard to harvest equity on these plays, unless you commit, long-term, towards very light leverage, as the only practical ways to benefit from the equity in your portfolio, if you plan to never sell it, only exchange it, for a lifetime, are to spend the cash flow, or cash out refi.

But what you will find is that most repairs are pretty easy - and if we don't want to mess with it we will call someone ourselves... but someone we know is going to shoot us a fair deal.

Fair warning, it might hurt.

If the water bill is $100 a month, increase the price by 20% (or whatever you decide is fair) to compensate you for the time required to split and bill and to cover additional use when tenants squander the utility.

I give it ten or so years before we start seeing this play out. 

They are too close for comfortable game play.

Totally fair.