Our area is definitely not a 1% residential zone, far from it with the insane prices in the city nearby.
There are always blind spots in the market if you look. I'm always surprised at how few people talk about Commercial property on this site. Around here rents are at best about 0.3% of a typical selling price for a SFH, maybe a little better for one of the few apartments or townhouses around, or if you buy rural (which has its own set of issues, such as septic fields etc).
In the commercial area it is much different. I bought a mixed use commercial building that actually has two apartments (and 42 other units, storage, offices etc) for about what I would have paid for a duplex. The building needed a lot of work, but it was at 1.5% when I bought it, and now that the work is all but done and I am close to fully rented it is closer to 4.5%. It did require a year of full time labour to upgrade, not to mention $90k in materials and tradespersons (I can frame, drywall, putter and do basic plumbing and electrical, but I can't upgrade a sprinkler system or install a fire alarm system).
A year of hard work and a bit of risk has moved my FIRE date from 12 years in the future to basically now, though I have no desire to stop working on things.
Most RE investors are completely fixated on residential property, and don't even consider commercial. Commercial rents are often higher, you can often get multiyear leases, the tenants have an interest in maintaining the property, and at least around here the rents can be triple net (they pay rent, utilities and property taxes). Of course there is a risk if a tenant goes out of business, but you have a lot more remedies against a business than residents - you can lock the doors and auction their stuff if they disappear, for example.
That said, my next buy might be residential, if I find the right property, or it might be a small business with the right parameters for me. Come up with/research a set of criteria that make the math and your efforts worthwhile, then keep looking and talking to people. The good opportunities come up and vanish very fast, the garbage stays on the market for awhile waiting for the greater fool to come along.