I wouldn't be very concerned with that statistic.

See the bolded line below:ARTICLE 2.

Navigate wisely, invest boldly, and watch your retirement flourish.

Welcome to BP :) I know a lot of people tend to use either the FBI Crime Statistics page (broken down by State, City, and Year) as well as SpotCrime.com

With respect to appraisals, anybody who thinks that data is data and there's not much one can do with it knows neither appraisals not statistics.

I'm conducting research for an MBA project and am trying to do a bottom-up analysis of the residential real estate, property management market and what percentage of that market is comprised of properties with out-of-...

A couple of thoughts about your situation. 1) Statistically speaking most people stay in their home/mortgage for 5-7 years so you're right at the end of that range.

Based on Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) of the US Department of Labor for those 24 years the cumulative inflation rate was 116.8%. 

Understand the importance of doing your due diligence and make sure that you deal with legit and trustworthy people.The good news is that, after having invested for several years there, I haven't heard of any serious problems with foreigners systematically getting into legal trouble related to real estate purchases (mind you, there must be some statistically speaking, as there would be anywhere).

Sounds like you are trying to do a Lease with Option to Purchase.This requires 3 separate documents:1) Lease2) Option Contract3) Purchase contract triggered when tenant enacts Option Contract.National statistics show that around 65% of Lease-Options fail.