Sonnia is right the best way to find out if an area is surrounded by rentals is to have a Realtor help you. When shopping for a house it is good to have someone to do all the legwork for you and it does not cost you anything.

Some areas do sell older homes for the same or more then a brand new home because they have put some improvements on the home. Such as back yard landscaping, fencing, blinds, and paint. When looking in a newer area you need to remember that people tend to move every 3-5yrs on average so seeing several homes in the same area could just mean that the home owners are ready to move into a bigger or smaller home within that 3-5yr time frame.

Way to keep an eye out and invest in your future home wisely.

The best way to find out if the properties are being occupied by "owner's" or if the property is being used as a rental, is to contact an agent. We can do the investigations into any specific neighborhood. I work directly with the title company and one of the services they help me with is finding this type of information. It would take time to investigate an entire neighborhood, but the information is very important in your buying decision. If you want to do the investigating yourself, you can log onto the county assessors office and look up each property address. This is a public site, the owners name and mailing address will be listed. If the mailing address is not the same as the subject property address, you are probably looking at a rental property. This is not always the case, but can be fairly accurate. Again, it is time consuming, and can and should be investigated by your Realtor. That is what we do for a living, work for our clients!

I'm looking in West Pasco as well, and have noticed the same thing. If you find a specific house, I'm guessing you could call the listing agent and ask them for more info. Maybe I'm too optimistic but I think the majority of the sales are people who can't afford it anymore or are relocating. My agent also told me that he was told one person recently listed 5 or 6 rental properties in West Pasco so that is a possibility of course.