Continuing education adult education, crash seminars, and special short courses are not acceptable.

How many people in your household (adults and children)4.

In that case, a house orig. built in 1978 would be serious competition with one orig. built in 1999.  60% of the time you may be catering to first time home buying couples looking to start a family and will be in the home for 5 years on average and 25% you're customers are fresh out of college singles with a cushy six-figure income that want to be amidst all of the action in town, who moves after 1 to 3 years  Then there's the already established single / couple (who has adult kids not living with them) looking to down-grade in size or for a simple change, from suburbs to rural maybe, whom you cater to 15% of the time and don't plan on moving after this. 

Most young adults your age have no clue what path in life they want to take but you seem to have a focus and drive most do not. $5k to invest in real estate is not the move I'd make at this moment.

As an adult over the age of consent you are able to sign a contract--in this case a rental agreement.

It will take months of savings to acquire significant furnds for a down payment, 20K on a 100k purchase on an after tax basis from savings will take at east 133 months or 11 years gaining 200 bucks gross a month.After seeing thousands of people over thier personal and business finance issues, I could count such savers on one hand, if most people get 150 bucks after tax monthly, the kids will usually get a new toy, if they don't the adults will or it mostly turns into disposable income in reality.Over that 11 years very little has gone to principal reduction, but there may be closing costs for a new loan. the equity should hit 15 to 20% even in slower markets if you buy decent properties.

I've dropped my app fee to $25 per adult now and still most of the people seem to balk at that.

Just as an example: I once ran a guy out of town who was a professor at a bible college, who decided oit was OK to demand sexual favors from a lady who was in an installment purchase agreement with a non-profit organization.

I decided that I would continue to pay the water bills, but kept asking for money.I was finally able to get one of the adults to sign the lease (there are 5 adults living in the house, gram, mom, son, 2x daughters).

I used to work in a few group homes for developmentally disabled adults, and there were as many as six in one home.