I’ve never dealt with rentals or being a landlord, but I do want to keep the house as opposed to sell it since it’s in a high-growth area.

But generally, you want to look for job growth and/or population growth/stability and a variety of employers.

@Justin Pierce that makes sense, I am most favoring Austin, TX right now with an estimated population growth of roughly 11% by 2020 among other factors.

I will be in GR next weekend to look at some multi-family units, but have no experience in that market and am overall new to real estate investing.Grand Rapids is an intriguing market for me, because the property values are not too inflated yet (like they are near me in the royal oak/berkley/clawson areas of Metro Detroit), the job/population growth is fairly strong there, and i think there will be some appreciation opportunity as well.

Digging into Data about the Bloomington and Monroe County growth would be a great topic for an RE meetup.  

Anywhere that is damp and cool can support the growth of black mold.

And as I said before your Realtor and Property Manager are excellent sources.I want to know what class of neighborhoods are there, Property types, average sell prices, crime, schools, economic growth,  rent rates, etc., etc.  

I suppose you might be able to get what the seller’s expenses were back when he owned it the first time and apply a growth factor.  

Helotes is more established with continued growth, whereas the area around Laurel Mountain is still pretty fresh and under development. 

Similar to the stock market being developed in the early 1900s, it is  still the wild Wild West in this space and many believe in the immense potential of this technology to improve the world.