Investor · San Antonio, TX · Member since 2014 · 78 posts · 12 votes
So after doing a lot of reading on the forums and listening to a lot of the podcasts, I am beginning to appreciate the importance of researching an area before purchasing. Not only is it important to research areas from a price to rent ratio standpoint, but also from an appreciation and safety standpoint.
So my question is this: How do you research an area ? Specifically. I am having a really hard time with this.
I am wanting to invest in san antonio and it is a big city. There are a lot of people here, and I don't know where I should start.
I have looked at places like city-data and a lot of browsing around on zillow and redfin, but am having a hard time coming up with things like price to rent, appreciation rates, job growth etc.
Online you can use zillow / trulia and google map(street view). Be sure to look at the bottom to see when the last update was for the streetview. You can also find birddogs in the zip codes that you are interested. If its an area that neither you nor the birddog is familiar with you can hire them to drive for dollars...
Realtor.com and Zillow.com have a sold listings section now. It's great for doing light sales comps.
Craigslist, Postlits and the like should give a good idea how much rentals are going for.
city-data.com has a fair number of other stats for consumption.
Once you have all of this information, you can figure out how your places stack up. If you want to be the priciest place in the zip code, make sure your finishes are top end relative to the area.
rentometer.com gives a nice general idea of rents in the area. As far as safety goes, spotcrime.com gives you an idea of incidents in the area around a certain address.
I was just scratching around at this last weekend as well. I don't know how to get there directly, but if you go to homepath.com, click on a specific property, then click on local characteristics it gives a lot of good summary data lick city-data site. There is a button to search other locations.
I have also found the us-census website useful, but not easy to navigate. Here you can average vacancy rates, breakdown of homeowners/renters, average income and unemployment. Probably biggest item is population growth.
There are some things I think you can only get from MLS; I have gotten some GRM, $/sf, avg days on market data for a market from RE agent.
you can get employment (sector and growth) data from bls.gov, but only for the bigger markets