Hello,I live in Los Angeles, CA and am strongly considering purchasing a rental property in Michigan, my home state, in a town ~3 hours away from my home town.A couple questions: 1) Does anyone own rental property in Grand Rapids Mi?

I'm based up in GR (Grand Rapids); however, cover the Kalamazoo area as well.

It (like all other property in Seattle) is appreciating rapidly, allowing us to tap the equity through refinances and HELOCS for other investments.

He's trying to do one of two things - probably BOTH things simultaneously:1 - Reprice the entire asset class - ie raise prices of mobile home parks as fast as possible.2 - Attract deep pocketed accredited investors to his private funds so that he can enlarge his portfolio as rapidly as possible while waiting for the stabilized caps to compress further.I'll lay out the remainder of my reasoning for this tomorrow.

Looking for "rapidly appreciating markets" is simply speculation.

At that point, it may not cash flow, but it's building equity at a rapid pace.

Of course, you may not be able to expand as rapidly, but I'd prefer both an equity buffer and solid income over balancing a bunch of debt that barely cash flows (relative to units that are paid off).

I live in Grand Rapids, MI and want to get into investing, and I want to start with wholesaling as well!

Congrats on the success and rapid growth, @James Johner!  

There are still a few areas of town that wouldn't make sense from an investment perspective (Brownsville BK as an example) but everywhere people were scared of 10 years ago (Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, etc.) are all either gentrified or rapidly gentrifying.