Worth their weight in gold...don't go it alone if you plan on having any resemblance of a real estate business. 

Personally, I don't put a lot of weight on schools for rentals.

Yeah it costs more and so you as an individual investor needs to weight out what is best for your cash position.

The most popular markets are ClevelandToledoMemphisBirminghamKCIndyDetroitEach of these markets is popular with turnkey investors because of the low barrier to entry, high rental demand & high rent to price ratio.

If it's an area that's hard to attract tenants, asking income of 4x rent may be limiting you, anyway, as if they made 4x rent, they could likely afford a more popular area. 

Some platforms are more popular in certain areas.

I’m in the process of starting my first direct mail marketing campaign and I’m trying to avoid the popular sought-after leads such as absentee owned and pre-forclosure so I figured I’d look into tax delinquent owners and landlords who had to recently evict their tenants.

Lease-options are still very popular in South Jersey.

I've been considering the newspaper, billboard blips (this is like a 10 second flip screen on the popular areas that rotates with everyone else's ads), craigslist, business cards, direct mail etc.  

Trust me if you have money available and are willing to partner with experienced investors so they will teach you, you will be a very popular guy.