Freeman, there's a quote saying "the deal of the century comes once a week". Just keep doing research, in the long term, good value real estate will always go up so no point fretting about lost opportunities. There are plenty of fish in the sea.
If you go regional, make sure that it has multiple industry and not reliant on just one (eg mining). For some the best way of calculating return is rental yield + capital growth.
If you look around hard enough there are still metro areas that give just as good rental yield as regional. Hence...