Cleveland of course, It has been and IMO still the best overall rental market in America.

I ended up going through a broker, Mark Robbins, who got my 3-property deal bundled at First National Bank of America in Grand Rapids (individually, the houses were too inexpensive to qualify for a non-recourse loan, since they all wanted a minimum loan of $75k to make it worthwhile and my most expensive property was $75k).

Be careful of Short Sale realtors, some are good, some are not good, and if you make a mistake and send them to nonperforming short sale realtor, you Will have a problemfor example Bank of America is very different from Wells Fargo which is very different from ChaseAn idea is to have the seller participate in the negative cash flow.Let's say that we have a house that has a value of 100,000, and they bought at the top of the market, and they owe 101,000, and you want at least $10,000 position in the property.Let's say that the market rent is 1000, and the P I T I is $800, not including maintenance.I would talk to the seller about the danger of buying a property that's over leveraged, and tell him it would cost about 10% to sell, including the commissions, closing costs, sellers concessions, etcAnother words it's very expensive to sell a house, or to liquidate your position.Their choices are to bring cash to closing, rented out and deal with tenants or property managers or both, damage, evictions, etcWhen I would consider doing is to buy the property subject to existing financing, if they would sign a note for $10,000 and pay 500 a month, with no interest as long as the payment was on time, and if it's late payment interest might be 8% or so.Is that a good deal for them?

I wish I could started yrs ago, However I just purchased my first rental property not to long ago.Recently I went to real estate wealth expo and saw and met alot of re gurus, Do you believe they are now selling these products bc the Real estate market is drying up in North america?

America is also car poor, credit card poor, and student loan poor.

America!

I worked with HomeVestors of America and there are PLENTY of franchises that have perfected this technique in one city and use the funds to open up shop in another location.

@Gail Greenberg  your talking about sub prime owner occ  have we not already gone down that road and it just about took America down.. ??? 

Very savvy political leadership.The secured and pumped up the Military BasesEnticed Defense Contractors with cheap land and low taxesCut education/public sector wagesAllowed in cheap undocumented workers from Latin America. 

I grew up around real estate with my Dad being a custom home builder, so when I got laid off from my corp america job 4 years ago I got my license and started helping people buy and sell homes.