I am not recommending this specifically, but I went to a Celebration of Life last weekend. I noticed a woman had a pile of loan papers on her table, so I asked her about them. (We're in escrow on our next project, so I knew exactly what they were.) She was in the process of buying another rental property in Flint, MI. I was kind of shocked, but her numbers looked surprisingly strong. The houses I saw photos of looked like solidly well built bread-and-butter type 3+2 rentals. She uses a property manager as well. This is not a recommendation, it's just an unexpected conversation that relates to your question.
We landlord in a Senior Community in the SoCal Desert. I'm happy with our rentals, but I wouldn't recommend the area particularly. We just happen to know the market there really, really well. However, it's been over two and a half years of solid research and we haven't found our next property there. So we finally found one five miles from our NorCal home. It needs a ton of work, so we won't even be looking in SoCal until this flip project is finished.
