Lower your price, not your standards.Your house is either priced too high, or it's in an area that's undesirable to good renters.

I stick to craigslist only and that's left me with 0 vacancy since I've been doing it, but sometimes it's a close call/undesirable tenants.

I can easily come up with the remainder needed to finish off the mortgage, however, that leaves me in a bit of an undesirable spot.

In order to limit that, I sometimes didn't screen as carefully as I should have and ended up with some undesirable situations that I could have avoided by screening more carefully and tolerating a little more vacancy loss.

Examples of pitfalls include purchasing in an undesirable area, not understanding the market values (vs. list prices), not knowing the rental values (current and market), inheriting bad tenants, buying a lemon, going rogue on renting and management with no contacts / systems / no legal understanding of PA and Municipal landlord-tenant laws, not having trusted resources and contractors in place, using out of state lenders or shaky financing, throwing lipstick on a pig when renovating a house and wondering why it's ARV isn't increasing, tenants are renting, etc.

The point about the "trailer trash" mentality is that it makes it easy to dismiss tenants as undeserving, uneducated, undesirable.  

How do you think these peripheral markets will evolve in the next few years, especially as both groups continue to look for opportunities?

It’s clear that the companies dominating this space are keeping the best deals for themselves, leaving only the undesirable properties for the open market.

That new part of Chicago near Schaumburg is great...I am pretty familiar with it because I am originally from Elgin.I know personally that I create undesired stress by taking on too much too fast.

Probably they are older or distressed properties in undesirable neighborhoods certainly they can be found.