.- She's been late on a portion of her rent check for almost a year now (there is a $200 balance she keeps forgetting to pay, and recently she failed to pay the rest, currently the amount is $600)- In December she clogged her toilet and I had to call a sewage company for $300 to fix it (the lease I inherited from previous landlord says nothing of her responsibility with unclogging things so I had no power to shift the expense to her)- In February, "someone" in her unit dislodged the toilet (on Friday) and it started leaking even after my handyman fixed it (same day).

You will get a good understanding that they are shifting the full cost of flood insurance to the homeowners. 

(Make sure you upvote his post)And kudos to you for catching the paradigm shift that most investors miss!!

Once you have a certain amount of equity and an understanding of the financing options available to you, you can just shift equity from property to property in the form of a down payment.  

Just in the last month, I've had:A slab leak at one property.A rat chew through a PEX line at another property, flooding the house.A crumbled pipe shutting down drainage at another property, requiring a partial repipe.A bad foundation shift at another property that's going to require shoring up.And finally, my tenant at my only out of town rental called to let me know her neighbors were shooting off guns for New Year's, and she has bullet holes in her wall and roof.

Unless you have information that the rest of us don't, I think that conservatively buying detached property that produces reasonable cash flow is the way to go in this market, and short of some fundamental shift in the ecoonomics and desirability of this city, I can't see most buyers looking back in 10 years wishing that they had bought elsewhere.Second, with regards to attached houses (think condos), it's my opinion that current owners are riding a bubble.

I am a contractor, my wife a real estate agent and our focus has recently shifted and instead of her and I looking for clients, we have focused 100% on finding homes to flip on our own.  

We've shifted to Condos, where compared to other vacation markets we like (such as Southern Florida), the condo fees are relatively low and the rental rates are pretty good for properties on the Beach- at least so it seems. 

However, after recently relocating to California for personal reasons, I've come to realize that the market here is quite challenging for beginners like myself.I'm contemplating shifting my strategy to out-of-state investing.

And I've noticed the shift in the market for rentals for this area and was notified of that by my management company as early as January of 2016.