I have a half dozen years of experience renting out a few single family homes and am looking to bet big in a different market.

Try renting for two years and work on improving your credit.  

Rents per unit are about 1K for long term tenants, although I'm likely to do STR or at least a combination of the two.

Have ya'll rented to college students without co-signers who are on scholarship etc like above situation?

if you just read headlines you'd think everyone in the US rented. 

In addition in many CA jurisdictions the ADU addition results in the primary being rent controlled.  

This allowed John to do one of a number of things to increase his profits.  

I rode around and managed to find a few people working on rehabs and found out who they were renting to, rents they were getting, and one guy was kind enough to walk me through his rehab project.

So it essentially increases the cost to the buyers by 2%? 

Planning the BRRRR it, should be able to rent it for $3,700 is my expectation.