They research the people they are going to be doing business with and what dynamics of a deal are in place to make a deal perform.  

I think there is much to be learned here from the dynamics of the housemates.

I was going to start with either a logistic regression or naive bayes since most of the variables are categorical and the dependent variable is binary but a decision tree might be the way to go.I was also thinking of trying to tie in life events (birth, birth +17 years, marriage, divorce, credit card default, tax lien, etc) to the model but there are substantial hurdles: access to data, reliability, scraping and\or text mining, having a dynamic stream, accurately tying the life event to the right person\household, etc.My actual end goal is to approach deal-finding in a data-driven way, my current thought process on how to achieve that goal may not be correct, and I'm more than willing to adjust, but I'm thinking there must be a more analytical approach than relying on word of mouth or MLS emails.Trevor, what was your goal when scraping properties near military bases?

It's definitely important to stage the property and take good pictures but you don't need to pay a professional if you have a decent DSLR and $40 to buy one of those online HDR (high dynamic range) programs, you can get the same type of photos. 

I'd be careful about applying past metrics to the current property market.There is rather a different dynamic at work now that before the crash.Prior to the crash, supply and demand were closer to being in balance than they are now.

Understand the dynamics of the relationship you are entering into, and stick to the rules of separation.

Different dynamics from residential rentals.  

Of course local dynamics play into each market.

We hired a revenue manager in conjunction with our dynamic pricing and having someone looking at pricing every day has really helped. 

Thank you - Such a big help learning about this market and how its an entirely different STR dynamic than my other STR investment markets