Best resource(s) for evaluating neighborhoods from out of state

[Richard Evanns]

Esteemed listmates,

I am new to out of state investing. Been looking in a few markets, and now that the crime map has been abolished from all the real estate sites, i began looking at other resources where I could find it, and the question kind of occured to me:

What resources, or combination of resources, is best to use for looking at a neighborhood, from out of state? Like for example, i have a city in mind (memphis TN) but as alot of cities are, Memphis is a big place with vastly different neighborhoods.

So my question is- are there any tools that our of staters like to use- neighborhoodscout.com for example, is one- to evaluate specific hoods for purposes of basic deal eval? I know my agent will know, but I don't want to pester her for every place i am just pointing and clicking on.

Any more experienced out of state investors have any resources and/or processes to share that they use to evaluate hoods from far away? The abolition of the crime map was just kind of the straw that broke the camels back, leading me to realize that i don't have many great tools for neighborhood eval.

[Bob Okenwa]

@Richard E.

Crime maps are like statistics, they only tell part of the story and can be skewed to confirm a bias one way or another. Take a look at the map below. If you look at Phoenix and Tempe and didn't know the area well, you'd think to avoid Phoenix and Tempe. If you go just north of the box of lines surrounding the word 'Phoenix', you'll find historic 100-year old homes selling for almost $1 million or more. Tempe is a college town so the crime there is tied to college students. On the flip side, Tempe has a ton of STR's and there are 1-bedroom apartments that rent for $1500+. Tempe looks worse than Mesa, but in actuality, Tempe is a more desirable place to live and home values are higher.

There are a ton of crime maps out there. Not sure what you're looking at, but Google is your friend. Find another one. Part of the job of an agent is education. I'm not saying send her a list of 104 homes and ask for an evaluation of each one, but a handful spread across the city should be sufficient.

Last but not least, do your own homework! Find the median value of homes in the county. Homes at or above tend to be in better areas. Homes below the median value tend to be in worse areas. Go to Zillow or Redfin and set search filters for homes sold the last 3 or last 6 months, set the price max as the median value of homes in the area (Redfin shows it as 170k), and set the bed/bath count of 3/2 with 1000 sf as the minimum. 

Because I'm a nice guy, I did your homework for you (feel free to Venmo me $5 for my work lol jk). Below are pictures of what I came up with. The only things I know about Memphis are Beale St, good BBQ, and the Grizzlies are good this year. I got the info below in about 2 minutes. First pic shows under 170k, second shows over 170k. I can tell that East Memphis, Sea Isle Park, Midtown and Central Gardens may be better neighborhoods than the surrounding areas. Ask your realtor about these locations and go from there.