Online tools to analyze a location?

[Matthew Welk]

I am in the process of choosing my first real estate investment location. I am interested in the BRRRR strategy. I know the data points that I want to gather, but I am having a hard time finding the actual data. I've been looking on sites such as city-data.com and bls.gov, but the amount of data that they have is overwhelming. A lot of the data on city-data.com seemed to be rather old (2016). Some metrics (e.g. employment growth rate), I have easily found that metric for recent months, but have struggled to find that same metric as an average over multiple years.

I assume experienced investors have specific sites and spreadsheets bookmarked so that they can easily gather all the data they need when they are evaluating a new location. I'd love to hear what online tools you all use in order to analyze a new location. Below are the specific data points that I am interested in.

- Employment growth rate
- Population growth rate
- Home appreciate rate
- Vacancy rate
- Foreclosures