It never makes sense to buy without cashflow in a volatile market.As many above have said, and I totally agree, the most important part of a team is to have someone with Boots on the ground.  

The roof cause of all these is their financing is only 5 years by design with the volatility of cap rate touching 250 bps over period of 24 months.

There are RE purchases where this is not the case or poor financing decisions (variable rate loans, etc), but in general I believe my comment is accurate.yes .... one thing that we need to explain again and again is that ........these real estate vs index value return is very very predictable, we know the volatility looks like, we know the spread , we know the movement of ten year yield.Based on 200 years historical research , an hard-asset that appreciates more then inflation rate (so key is location) , would even further accelerate when inflation is high ; while historically speaking an index how it react on inflation really depends on the weighting of its sector, if S&P consist of 60% real estate company for sure by now it would crash in 2023 (becoz real estate sector is sensitive to rate but SF housing is not).so when we deep dive, we know why we achieve expected result and why we lost money.Once people understand the co-relationship between any investment and bond yield, rest is easy.

It's also at all-time highs, and its historical far more volatile than RE. 

You avoid market volatility and while short term gains often don't look as impressive, long term gains over a 10 to 20 year period often surpass short term investment strategies because they don't lose capital.

Year 5-10 buy 1 to 2 in STRs with low leverage, in different years, get the tax kickback and (volatile) income, and 1 LTR with low leverage and the rest in debt fun or equity fund that can get 6-10%.You will have 2-4 low leverage, excellent properties making you very good cash flow & sizable capital in debt/equity that will give you 6-10%. 

It's a very volatile business environment there with much higher risk, much harder to get financing, the economy is based almost entirely on tourism, etc.

Flip to pay down properties, expenses have been so volatile.

In real estate's case, you get that incredible upside and volatility and that's what makes it worth it.

I've listed some of the pros and cons below.STRPros- Higher rates, higher upside if fully occupied- More flexibility to adjust rates depending on time of yearCons- More time consuming (both from filling vacancies and preparing for and onboarding new tenants)- Potentially, more volatility in cashflowMTRPros- Less volatility, steadier cashflow- Less time spent finding new tenants- Attract different types of tenants like traveling nurses, who are high qualityCons- Can't command as high of rates as STR, but still higher than LTR- Harder to take advantage of seasonal increases in rates during Seattle summersLet me know if you have any other questions!