My motivation to start out buying and renting out properties is growing day by day but I am looking for any guidance and advice on how to move forward with a few properties that I predict with not only grow in value in the near future to sell but to provide consistent cash flow month to month. 

Oil is predicted to continue to rise.2.

This is similar(ish) to trying to predict gentrification trends with new Starbucks locations.

No one can 100% predict if a value of a property will go up.

What is past and predicted appreciation rate? 

So here's my question:  Do rents tend to act more "rationally" (for lack of a better word) than home price appreciation and therefore rental markets are in general more stable and predictable?  

(obvious declaimers about predicting the future are assumed :-)) This would likely be used for new development and be of most interest to a developer building from the ground up.2) Assuming the family is looking to sell in the next few years, what is the best way to execute on a property this size?

Funny thing is, they are usually right, but in a lottery winning sort of way...if you don't count all the other years they predicted it...and nothing happened.

it seems most use Excel....Personally the last few years i have been extremely hands off on my rentals, i have all my rentals managed professionally and have had so little problems that i can go an entire year without hearing from them and print out my tax info for tax season....Since im actually studying to invest in real estate better and make better ROI, i am looking to setup tracking on my properties so i can understand my numbers better and predict things in the future...I was curious if someone would share an example of how they are tracking their properties and expenses so i can format my own correctly from the start. 

The upside to them is that they would get regular, predictable payments at a decent interest rate.