economic development?  

Comparing economic value of flipping to my longer term strategy is where my 25% annual return number comes from.  

So does that mean that those of us doing our economical and demographics homework may be buying at the right time in the Memphis market?

We're experiencing a pretty substantial economic boom (mostly in the oil and gas industry). 

If you are dead set in buying in a lower economic neighborhood, I'd experiment with an area that you can drive to in the SF East Bay Area or Sacramento. 

I agreed to pay a 2.5% commission as long as the deal worked for me economically, since I was looking forward to an off-market deal (most deals in the market are listed and have tons of competing buyers).

I am not sure if I should be more focused on economic indicators or social ones, age, race...  

The financial  side is the derivative of the value of the asset, or the economic benefit, the real side is simply a business decision as to execute the option to purchase or not, for example, the value goes down below the strike or purchase price, the real side is most likely to decline to purchase.

(What I mean by likely worst case is taking into consideration a possible recession but not economic collapse.)Third, with your lease option scenario, you would be putting down $30K to make $12K maximum per year--and it would likely be less than that.  

In such cases, no one will be living there, the zoning will be changed and economic development will be moving through.In the event of an insured loss where a home is destroyed, the loan may be paid off and that terminates the requirement, there is no requirement to rebuild.