MLS activity alone can be misleading unless you’re filtering very tightly on price-per-unit, rehab scope, and exit strategy.For flips, most of my clients only make numbers work when they’re buying below market—off-market leads, tired landlords, or foreclosure-related opportunities.

My last question and the answers are for you.How will you serve people being a section 8 relator? 

@Nicholas AiolaAny relation to Al?

Regardless of relative or not have all new occupants run through your application process. 

Aside from rehab overruns, what was the biggest non-construction lesson from your last flip? Financing structure, timeline pressure, holding costs, exit assumptions?

Interested to hear what caught people off guard ...

Small parks are relatively easy to find too as lots of people don't want them.

As a real estate investor/owner you should be mindful of landlord/tenant disputes, premises liability/personal injury conflicts, payment/performance related disputes, mechanics liens, title related defects & property condition defects and related disclosures.

The assets became grossly overpriced, economics normalized, financing became tougher, and many investors / general partners suffered losses.There's some new MF Syndications happening now, but interest rates relative to cap rates at sale make it difficult to work on a spreadsheet.   

Once you’re at the point of analyzing micro-markets and individual deals, I agree that many of these macro signals lose relevance — and better tools take over.At that stage, I’ve found relative, city-level signals useful not as answers, but as a way to surface tradeoffs and decide where to zoom in next.It sounds like you adapt strategy to market; others seem to do the reverse.

As a starting point, I built what I think of as a balanced lens — not optimized for max cash flow or pure appreciation, but something that tolerates tradeoffs and avoids extremes.The idea was to compare cities relative to one another, rather than arguing whether a single metric is “good” or “bad” in absolute terms.The dimensions I ended up looking at were things like:Home prices relative to national normsRent affordability (rent vs income)Employment diversityLiquidity indicators (days on market, inventory)Structural friction (e.g. landlord-friendly vs tenant-friendly states)Everything is scored relative to the set of cities being compared, and then stack-ranked.