Turnkey Real Estate Research question.

[Kenneth Lowry]

I want to begin my REI with out of state turnkey real estate. It seems like the best fit for me. From what I have been learning about it, the important things to research are the turnkey companies themselves and the areas to invest, both at the city level (because you want a city with growing employment potential among other things) and at the neighborhood level (because you don't want a high crime rate area, etc). My question is, what are the best sources of information for each of theses? I imagine the area research would be some type of internet information but I also imagine the research on the turnkey companies will not be so straight forward.

[Ali Boone]

My vote when this question comes up is to encourage people not to reinvent the wheel. There are a lot of people out there who have already done the market research and even gone as far as vetting turnkey providers (and their markets). If you start in on internet research, you could find a heck of a lot of numbers and info that you won't necessarily know how to interpret. Numbers are meaningless without the bigger picture, and it's not always easy to get the bigger picture. 

So I encourage people to start out, instead, asking everyone where everyone is buying and who they are buying through. You'll start hearing certain markets and turnkey names over and over, so you'll start getting a bigger picture. Once you have that, then the trick is to start vetting the information about both those providers and the markets. Not every city where a lot of people are buying is necessarily a smart city to be investing in. Once you have a stockpile list of cities people are investing in, use your research time to figure out the market fundamentals on those cities and use those to start narrowing your search. Like let's say you keep hearing a lot about Indy, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Philly. What are the market fundamentals about each of those cities? Hint: some of them are stable growth markets, and some of them are not. Which ones, and why does that matter? Those are the questions that will lead you to the exact information you need to know in order to start making your decisions.

Not sure if this helps, but I wrote this a while back on how to find turnkey markets:

https://www.biggerpockets.com/renewsblog/2015/12/2...

Reach out anytime if I can help anymore!