Might be able to pick up some trendy ikea type furnishings from graduating students...maybe a nice 4 year old memory foam bed.

Is it a cool trendy and popular part of town?

Buffalo is a little odd; one block of a street might be fine, the next block is pretty undesirable, then two blocks over is the trendy area.

I see the future of real estate investing as one where the landlord makes a unit deeply integrated in the community and location, a trendy, vibrant home that transforms it from just a boring unit to more of a community hangout spot. 

Yes, there was a bunch of volatility along the way,and there will continue to be volatility going forward, and there are methods of hedging your risks in the face of this volatility, but over the long haul, spanning multiple cycles and multiple decades, the appreciation trend is surprisingly steady and far easier to predict in some markets.

When I was a kid, North Street was considered a "sketchy" place - now there are trendy bars and coffee places.

That trend is likely to continue.

Cool name, very trendy..

If your first in on the neighborhood that can also be scary and unless you have deep enough pockets to start snapping up multiple houses to cause an upwards trend I would allow someone else to take the risk first.

Sure, there are some metropolitan areas where prices are higher....but the trend is younger folks want to live downtown, not in the suburbs.