When the chips are down, the elderly are expected to die and decrease the surplus population.

- We have a couple of facilities where they were a bit heavier in cash payments and also had a population that liked to pay in person at the facility.

The largest population group in the US is now entering their statistical home buying period, which is likely contributing to the low levels of housing inventory at the national level.  

It’s certainly not the populous state with a massive economy.

@Ivan Sepulveda - unfortunately population does matter and it will vary by lender.

I'm currently shopping for a SFH in the Chicago area, and the market is not slow by any means, so to win an offer sight-unseen you're offering over market value otherwise why would the seller choose your offerIf you're talking investments in smaller towns (sub 100k population), with a good supply of housing and lower demand, it would be much easier to pull this off. 

@Hans Baldau Greenville is exploding and they expect the population to go through the roof in the next 10 years.  

If you extrapolate that out to the normal population, that amounts to a couple hundred foreclosures depending on the area.

Are there any good resources to see current population trends and other real estate related data trends by town or as granular as possible in order to be able to make intelligent projections about real estate investing.

Citydata.com is an excellent resource to help you identify your markets and a site where you can try to identify economic, job, technological and population factors plus other important factors that may affect your long term investments.