Drew,
Drake has a pretty large Greek presence from what I've been told. Many of the undergrads live in fraternity/sorority housing on campus. You do get some grad students living in the housing surrounding the campus. From what I've seen much fewer undergrads are living off campus in the area. There seems to be an unusually high presence of individuals who are people of "the cloth" who live around that area of town. At a duplex that I looked at back in the spring, the upstairs tenant was a nun. Recently I have looked at a duplex where the upstairs tenants are two young guys who are in the process of studying to become ministers. Adjacent to the duplex is a single family house where a pastor and his family live. Not sure if these are just anomalies, or if there is a definable trend in the area.
For the SFR we own near Drake we have turned over tenants once. Neither set were Drake students. Trans Union has a tenant screening service that you can pay for. It has worked for us in the past, and we will continue to utilize it in the future.
I think that FSBOs in general are over priced. Most people that do this are attempting to avoid paying a commission and are not in the business of selling their property under market value. There may be some deals to be had occasionally, I just haven't personally seen any.
After I move to town, I plan to develop a process of targeting distressed properties through direct mail (tenant issues, tax liens, physically distressed, etc.). I plan to do this by simply driving around town, looking at the state of properties, and obtaining a tax lien list from the county in order to develop an address list.
