"Localize your growth assumptions"

When you project a rental out ten or twenty years, three assumptions do most of the heavy lifting: how fast the property appreciates, how fast rents grow, and how fast expenses climb. Small changes in any of them swing the IRR, the wealth projection, and the rent-or-sell decision more than almost anything else you type.

Which is a problem, because most people leave them on defaults that describe no market in particular.

No market is average

A national average is too low for a fast-appreciating metro and too high for a steady cash-flow town, at the same time. Salt Lake City is not Indianapolis. Two identical houses in those two markets should not share a growth assumption, yet on a generic default they do, and every long-horizon number inherits the error.

The direction of the error matters too: overstate appreciation in a cash-flow market and you'll overpay for equity that never arrives; understate rent growth in a boom metro and you'll pass on deals that were actually fine.

Finding your market's real numbers

Look at what your county and metro actually did: five-to-ten-year home price appreciation (FHFA's house price index is free and county-level), rent trend for your ZIP, and a realistic expense inflation figure (insurance alone justifies checking; some states have repriced dramatically). You're not predicting the future, you're replacing "average everywhere" with "measured here."

Doing it in Rescover

Set appreciation, rental rate growth, and expense growth once in your default investment parameters and every new analysis starts from your market's reality. Any single analysis can still override for a specific deal. Rescover's market pages show where your metro sits so you can gut-check what you enter: a 7% appreciation assumption means something very different at a metro ranked 30th versus 300th.