I recently bought my first rental property in North Memphis, in an area that is currently scrappy but has potential for growth.  

The fact that a retirement plan will be tax-deferred means you can grow the account to a larger value than if you were paying taxes along the way with each investment.A simple analysis you could do would start with the following premise:If you have, say, $100,000 in a retirement plan, in order to take it out you would give up a 10% penalty for early distribution (if you are under age 59 1/2) as well as whatever your tax bracket will be if you add $100,000 to your adjusted gross income.  

This is not a long term strategy but would be nice for the next five years to support my growth.  

Also the light rail will go all the way up to UNCC by 2017 so we are seeing an explosion of growth in that area too.

As you grow the type of financing you can get will change. even if your portfolio isn't growing much, terms, types of loans, restrictions etc vary over time.It often means a variety of sources; hard money lenders, private lenders, smaller banks that are portfolio lenders, Commercial loans, Blanket loans, lines of credit etc.

SA is bringing in sizable business and economic growth is probably situated around 3.5% per quarter.

In a Roth, you really want growth.  

We are looking to start with a few small rentals and then once we have enough saved in our ROTH IRA start using real estate as the growth driver for our retirement.

@Natalie Kolodij I don't know if you need access to the MLS for this, but over here you can find the average growth and inflation rate in a national real estate listing service.

Economic growth potential seems to be the reason behind the movement of markets within and into the top 20 for 2016.