Any interesting areas to invest in smoky mountains?

"They told me they're moving out", was my weary reply, anticipating the mountain of work ahead for me, to renovate their trashed apartment.  

You’ll need to grind through a mountain of rejections.Long-term scalability is tough.

You can create wealth with either approach but both approaches are more challenging than in the recent past.At this point I mostly seek highly desired property locations such as beach or lake front, Mountain cabins, bonus if they are near a destination such as national park of monument or other tourist attraction, etc.

We 1031'd from a LTR in the DC suburbs to a ski in/out in the CO mountains (but not a major resort) two years ago.

If you are too far out, in a very small mountain town or too far out of town, you could have trouble with good help.

So far, I tried considering investing in Bay Area (Fremont, Milpitas, San Jose, etc. ) , Mountain House, Lathrop, River islands, Merced.. but heard that Sacramento is better as the returns in Bay Area are not worth the investment as it is too expensive (though there is greater potential for appreciation which is not guaranteed), Mountain House has already reached peak and prices are falling, Lathrop (Stanford crossing with low school rankings) /River Islands  (school district but heard that it takes very long to find tenants): Mixed opinions that is fast growing but also that it is a just an experiment with high risk..

Interestingly growing up my family mostly vacationed in Puerto Rico as my grand parents were living at the their home in Vieques for a majority of the year, in my young childhood they owned a hotel in Lincoln, NH one of the most popular mountain destinations in New England.

There are definitely still supply/demand imbalances in quite a few Sunbelt markets at the moment, and the Huntsville area is no exception.Single-family and multifamily new deliveries peaked in Q2 2023, so there’s still a bunch of new inventory waiting to be absorbed—hence the negative rent growth and appreciation some folks are seeing right now.In my view, what’s interesting about places like Decatur and Meridianville is not where they are now, but where they’ll be in a decade.The Huntsville metro area is constrained by mountainous geography to the east (beginning with Monte Sano State Park and beyond), so the natural path of development and progress is west towards Wheeler Lake and north towards Meridianville and Hazel Green.If the Huntsville metro area continues to match the pace of demographic growth it’s seen since the 1990s, these suburbs could, in my humble opinion, look very different down the line. 

Kathy - I explored Furnished Finder for my STR in the mountains of East Tennessee - between Knoxville and Chattanooga.