Real estate investment in a college town

[Jordan McDonald]

My wife and I are moving to a college town in Texas next year. We are planning on purchasing a rental property (our first), hopefully doing some house hacking along the way. I ideally want to purchase a quadplex, but the fact that students go home during the summer worries me. Younger families are starting to move into town so single family homes might be a little more advantageous since it would seem there's not much of a seasonal cycle due to fall and spring semesters. What are some special considerations to take into account being in a college town? Would it be wise for a "newbie" to start off in this kind of situation?

[Dustin Frank]

Owned 6 rental properties in Hays, Kansas, a small college town....we always started advertising our rentals the day after St Patrick's Day and would make the students sign a one year lease..you basically have until school starts to rent it out with the more responsible students signing earlier. If you have a vacancy in December or January it wasn't uncommon to be vacant until march. We charged an absolute premium for rent since a lot of the students were from out of state and considered our rental rates cheap.