I'm a college student studying mechanical engineering at Texas Tech, and have started to see real estate as a great opportunity to achieve financial freedom.

What are you studying?

Vacancy rate is something you can discover through inquiries to local investors, lenders, research studies online, and property management companies.

You sound way more ambitious than I am with toddlers, getting a SECOND masters and studying real estate investing in the side.

That said I have studied for a long time with a focus on owning rentals, I also have family who own rentals to whom I can go for advice.

Most of my MBA studies were focused on real estate and the management of assets. 

But in order to familiarize yourself with different investment strategies, and there are a lot of them, you'll need to study.

But it was a bit hard to study the market from afar so we moved our family here. - we got here last week!

What I am looking to do right now, while we don't have anything under contract, is to put something together showing what we are looking for, what are projections would be for our criteria, IRR, returns, and then a case study of a previous investment we have done, etc. 

Or another scenario is the letter never gets to the right person, but you'll never know if that happens if you don't call.You should skip trace the deceased owners with a decent skip trace service and for the majority of them you'll have no problems finding close relatives and give them a call.Not sure if you're on FB, but I just did a case study with a guy who's not far out of Nashville.