If so, this would pretty much enable me to stay local and take a shot at my first property rather than resorting to other places.

By asking for credit reports, tax returns, and pay-stubs, some HML's, can't tell themselves apart from conventional lenders and in my view, and I suspect yours, delude themselves.The large banks, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the other GSE's, have huge databases of loans as well as the statistics to show how these correlate with defaults.

We currently use a google spreadsheet that pulls in MLS info and Zillow info automatically and it auto-populates ARV using 90% of the Zestimate (I know...yuck...but it's at least a quick and dirty number that enables us to know if we want to dig deeper).  

All on Sub2, or is your angel investor enabling you to do cash purchases?

Also regular inspections will enable you to spot any maintenance issues.  

Without giving away too much of what is an ongoing process of discovery, this gave me greater clarity  - could I keep the property filled at the right price that enabled the investment to pay for itself?

Not sure where Charlie got his information about rents, because I have never reported my $1,000 we get in rent for our 2 bedroom to any database that I am aware of.

This thread was initiated not to agree on the best return metric but as an academic exercise to enable me to understand why the annualized return (IRR) goes down over time for a subject property I was analyzing. @ Stephen Greenway correctly explained that the decreasing irr comes from holding the property and averaging more modest and sustainable cash flow returns over the long haul bringing down the initial "flip" return. 

It would be nice to see some benchmarking data based on the age of the building/climate/size/etc.  

Does anyone know of any accessible databases that carry 5-10+ economic projections at the city or county level?