Buying a home can be a great investment, as investors gobbling up properties over the last few years–when prices and mortgage rates were at the bottom–well know. Now, with homes prices and rates ticking steadily back up, investors are backing away from the market, leaving more room for the rest of us.

Perhaps you fear you’ve missed the best time for buying housing. Prices were low last year, but there are still deals to be had. The good news is that less competition for housing and an overall less-crazed market than in 2013, as I wrote about in Housing Outlook 2014: 10 Predictions From The Experts, can make for fairly decent timing for smaller-time investors. The key is to buy where the prices are still low, in cities with a lot of growth potential.

Whether you’re looking to get into a first home that you’ll live in for a few years, or simply buy a fixer-upper that you can rent out right away, there are still plenty of cities where your money is a fairly safe bet. We teamed up with Local Market Monitor, which tracks home prices and local economic factors in more than 300 housing markets, to put together a list of the Best Buy Cities–the top 20 housing markets to invest in for 2014.

Read the full article on Forbes