I don't want to bank on appreciation so I am not considering it but I guess technically I should mention that it's a growing city.

You can set up keyword alerts here for areas you are interested in (or any other term) and you will get notified when a post mentions it.

You mention Duplexes, Muti family of all sizes seems to be particularly overpriced.

Hi, I did private lending to one of my friend , he mortgaged his investment property as first lien with me.agreement was that he will pay interest monthly, and he was almost regular on that.in July that property got deadly fire, in August beginning he paid my interest for July and didn't mention anything about fire.today, he called me and told that he wants of pay off(but he didn't pay last month's interest).I said OK start processing for payoff, but pay me last month's interest asap, then he told me that house went on fire and he is hoping to get insurance money and then he will pay, he has no money to pay interest .Now, my concern is should I wait and watch or I need to take some pre-action to make sure that I get insurance money since I am on first lien.

There is an "insured" and an "additional insured", and someone mentioned that you can only name one of each on the policy for insurance company he use.

I can drive further, but with my work hours - did I mention i work in La Porte:/ - it would be better to meet some local....very local, folks to jump in with.

As Richard mentioned, it's not really the area people are looking to move to.

You can always just throw it on airbnb, but you risk $5,000 per night fines.....not to mention the costs to furnish, manage and operate the unit.In my opinion, airbnb from an ownership standpoint isn't much better than just a good old normal long term rental, unless there are unique/niche like features that allow your building to stand apart from all of the other (and we're talking thousands) airbnb units on the market. 

To use the VA loan to purchase a single family home would require us to move once again which is costly, not to mention it would be the sixth time in 3 years for out family.

All of the negatives you mention are red lines for me.