Increasingly, investors are buying up even single-family homes on quiet residential streets in Amherst and turning them into student rentals that sometimes become nuisance houses with loud partying. See this article from the Amherst Bulletin. This is creating a lot of distress among neighbors, some of whom are even selling to escape their once-peaceful neighborhood.
I discussed this at greater length in my blog post on the Housing Recovery. Throughout the country, ordinary buyers are being shut out of the housing market to varying extents by investors from Wall Street and elsewhere who are snapping up owner-occupied homes or foreclosures and turning them into rentals. This is one of several reasons that inventory is so low this year (see the same blog post on the Housing Recovery for the others).