For vacant units, consider virtual staging through VirtualStaging.ai or something like that to help prospective tenants visualize the space.Hope this helps expand your marketing toolkit.

If you could visualize a realistic first deal, what would that look like? 

Has every market (by city or by zip) in SoCal, which is where we fix & flip & build rentals.I'd recommend more drilled-down market stats like the bottom graph for validating your underwritings and making go-no go decisions, but it's still interesting to visualize & pick-out those super-performant markets.To be fair, I haven't seen something like this either, that's why I built it!

Hey Mike, good discussion and good that you have some clear expectations going in.As others have mentioned, since you'll be living there, it can be better to start with a subset of cities that you'll genuinely enjoy living in, then work backwards into data and metrics from there.For the cities you mentioned, here's a visualization of current rent-to-price ratios.

I am getting married next October and want to be able to hang out with my future children but it is a little hard to visualize that since I don't have kids and am not married yet.What book would you recommend to read next to really pound my why into my head?

Home buyers are very easily visually influenced.

It's one of the few things you can't see during a showing/ visual inspection and I've seen issues up to $100k with sewer lines so it's worth the $150 to send a camera in and see what's going on.

Hey @Alex Dixon, great visual representation!

@Ben ClingerHi Ben, I just noticed your post.Toledo just clarified their inspection criteria for section 8 houses and decided they wanted their cake and to eat it too...we don't have to have an interior inspection (since LMHA inspects that during their inspection), but we DO have to pay for a Lead Inspector contractor to visually inspect the exterior of the house and of course we DO have to pay the $45 fee (which is of course what this is all about).LMHA of course inspects the outside of houses along with the inside so the whole lead inspection is redundant.

The strength of this property is its visual impact and also the amenities offered.