A small debt does not usually lend itself economically to doing anything other than perfecting the debt in court and filing a lien in the county the property is located in.

My bigger problems with vacancies resulted from outside economic forces that affected all properties at the same time.

Investors that understand the market and understand the economic playing field they are working in can do very well I'm sure.

In fact, for my first deal, he advised against it based on what he thought about the market economics of the neighborhood.

Population growth, socio-economic trends, education, traffic control, fire and police protection, financial leveraging between public and private sectors as well as health and welfare issues.

I think we are in for a long haul of poor economic growth.

You can't really get tied up in attempting to assign a cap rate to a class of property, the cap rate is a function of the use of money, your economic considerations and expected income from the investment.

Run the numbers and see which option makes most economical sense.

I would think that the census site would not be as current as these other sites Both of these sites use the census data directly as their core/primary data source, so the census is more up to date, but realistically that would only be for a short period of time as these sites are probably pretty well-versed in accessing and updating their data when the new census information is released.As a side note, census data is actually updated/corrected every year but large census intakes are only done every 10 years, so this creates the misconception that census data is not accurate/up-to-date the farther it gets from the last large intake.  

Texas is the economic frontier California was 30-40 years ago.