As others mentioned you can also look at the average day on market but for the sake of answering your question, you would have to pull up the number of listings in a neighborhood and divide it by the average number of sales in the last few months.They both will lead you to the same conclusions as to which neighborhoods are hot except that neither of them takes seasonality into account (slower winter months will affect your calculations and won't reflect what's going to happen this spring).

By the way, units in foreclosure are considered non owner occupied ( think financing for a new buyer) BUT I dont think they affect renting.

I thought (because I have successfully flipped several homes and I am a licensed contractor) that I would be safe in investing my money, but I was repeatedly lied to and got sold a bunch of nothing.

If you would like to repeat something anyone here has said in public, adapting it to a conversation as a comment, that's one thing, using common knowledge to express your position or point of view, to some extent.

I am going to call other banks as this was only the first one I reached out to but was wondering if this was the norm or if it was somehow based on my financials.On the other hand, my strategy is to buy my first property, live in it while renting the other units out and do that again within ~5 years and repeat again.

2 - Going FHA with 3.5% down and essentially repeating scenario 2 but having a permanent cash outflow for PMI.

=)$350 is a fine place to start if you are COMMITTED to a minimum of 5 to 7 repeated mailings to your list.

Unfortunately there are some that use gimmicks to entice/fool others, and that includes prospective renters... once they've got the keys, they start saving up "in cash" for next years target to rinse & repeat.

It includes a range of sales prices and the affect on outcomes, from breakeven to base case and upside.Best wishes,Scott Lichtman

I'll refinance for leverage and repeat.