My wife and I are pretty heavily involved within the community now and are actually ambassadors for the region's economic initiative to attract more people to the area.

I don't know about Maricopa county or your city, but we've seen a lot of jurisdictions severely restricting STRs or eliminating them all together so if you think you're going to pursue STR and you're not in a key vacation market that relies heavily on vacation rentals, then you want to make sure the numbers work for other strategies.

Two years ago there were over 47,000 homes for sale in January, now it is just over 25,000.There are pockets in the outlying areas where the demand is heavily weighted for buyers.

I only know about Soda because I used to work for Greystar in Chicago and Greystar relies on them heavily to lease up sometimes hundreds of units at a time. 

Condos in strong, low inventory areas are doing well but in areas that were heavily developed they are sitting on the market and prices dropping. 

I am heavily invested in PA and live in state.

These properties are best left for experts with lots of experience in these lower class areas and who have scale so that a bad tenant that heavily damages a unit is buffered by many other units that have positive cash flow.At your age and RE experience level, you need to educate before jumping in. 

I would encourage you not to rely too heavily on AirDNA forecasts which are often inflated.

I've been heavily searching for a home in a good area that will at least break even,  but I can't seem to find anything. 

It's better if they know who the property manager and maintenance manager are so if they have problems, they know who to talk with.If you want to know how I screwed up being a landlord and what I learned and how I went from losing a 36 unit apartment building to foreclosure and how I bought a 100+ unit apartment complex, listen to my podcast interview here on Biggerpockets by listening to http://Biggerpockets.com/show65.So you're saying that you were a heavily indebted previous owner of an apartment building, and you're a heavily indebted owner of an even bigger apartment complex today.Yeah right, I'll run to you for advice.