Purchasing property to rent out; research to find target market

[misoandpickles]

I have a friend who runs a couple share houses and is still bullish on the market, and he's convinced me to consider being a landlord.

Each share house has to have its own target market--male, female, hikikomori, etc. What I'm running up against is how to determine the state of each target demographic in the local area. How does one go about researching demand for rentals within each demographic?

[RetireJapan]

Wouldn't your friend be able to help with this? I can't think of many things I would want to do less than run a sharehouse

Hope you're maxing out iDeCo, NISA, etc. and this is just the gambling/fun investment pot.

[misoandpickles]

Friend is able to help but I think he also realized that he'd be training his competition. So I have to do as much legwork as I can.

[mighty58]

... how to determine the state of each target demographic in the local area. How does one go about researching demand for rentals within each demographic?

I don't have the answer, but it sounds like you're looking for some sort of city-wide, neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood breakdown, in order to identify promising areas. That's a pretty specific, highly granular level of information... and because most of the publicly available data (from the government of industry organizations) doesn't get into that level of detail, you'd likely need to pay some money to a professional real estate research firm. I would observe that most individual investors go with what they know (i.e. neighbourhoods they are somewhat familiar with), and do "research" by walking the neighbourhoods and really understanding local conditions, and following listings for several months to see the turnover and pricing levels.

The thing is, identifying the neighbourhood is only the first concern, and the multitude of operational aspects of running a share-house seem like a full-time job, especially when you have more than one. But you didn't ask about that so I will digress.

[misoandpickles]

I know the areas quite well, and with a walk-through I think I could identify potential properties and then research them at the town hall.

A major key to quick ROI is not going through a realtor, so while realty information would be helpful you're right that it would have to be paid and not tied to purchase of a property.

My friend lets (forces) each house to be self-sufficient, making each one choose a leader and agree on internal policies. He pays a small salary to a local employee who is also working on his own avenues of income. He also has other sources of income so this isn't his sole living and I'm not thinking that it would be mine either.