To borrow from Steven Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: “Begin with the end in mind.” You should start with your goals from investing and work backwards to develop your criteria.
Intuition can be wrong, but it takes a lot of data to get to the same understanding of a neighborhood that being there and talking with the people that are from there can give you.
The great thing is that there are plenty of resources to be able to network and gain local knowledge. Usually when networking and trying to find professionals that are well recommended you will not directly find that individual.
Using biggerpockets to network is good for two reasons. First is because there is a solid depth of active users on there. The other is that since there is an education component from the platform, there is a good chance of meeting like minded people from the site.