There are a ton of reasons why Columbus is a great market; however, I think it's important to evaluate markets based upon your individual goals.

It's not so much a pros/cons list as it is evaluating the risk of this specific deal.Potential risks include tenants paying below market rent, tenants on a lease agreement that doesn't protect you as fully as it should, not adequate screening (or worse, blatantly lowered screening standards to fill doors and sell the property at 100% occupancy), tenants not current on their rent, etc.There are ways to find out about those risks and sometimes even mitigate them before you buy.

One day she asked me to come help inspect and evaluate a property she was buying, so i went to help her pro-bono.

I'm going to work to try and learn about how to evaluate an area for rental potential so I can determine where to be looking.Thanks for the reply!

How can we, as investors, predict or evaluate such possibilities?

The "you can't count on appreciation" idea seems birthed in a world where you can't evaluate things.

How much they owe can help you evaluate whether or not it's worth your time. 

Rather, when looking at the comps used in both the appraisals and Zillow, I'm starting to think that both methods of evaluation might suffer from a common characteristic: Not distinguishing between distressed sales and normal sales.And this might make sense.

When we evaluate loans for purchase, we always include accrued interest because we assume that the loans have been properly serviced.

Use these criteria to evaluate:1.