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Updated almost 4 years ago on . Most recent reply

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John Nichols
  • New to Real Estate
  • Spangdahlem, Germany
3
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9
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Investors!- Neighborhoods in San Antonio to avoid?

John Nichols
  • New to Real Estate
  • Spangdahlem, Germany
Posted

So as I look more and more into San Antonio I realize that the site I am using "areavibes.com" does not rate very many San Antonio neighborhoods favorably. However, I have seen many inaccuracies from this website and I'm sure some of these areas aren't as bad as they're made out to be.

I would like to get some first hand knowledge from the BP family in the area!

-Which neighborhoods do you steer clear of no matter how good the deal appears to be?

-Where do you draw the line? From a technical standpoint is it a certain number of violent crimes per capita? From a personal standpoint is it the neighborhood having graffiti or houses in disrepair?

-What are you thoughts?

Thanks in advance everyone!

John Nichols

Most Popular Reply

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Joseph Cacciapaglia
  • Real Estate Agent
  • San Antonio, TX
1,713
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1,192
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Joseph Cacciapaglia
  • Real Estate Agent
  • San Antonio, TX
Replied
Originally posted by @Lee Ripma:

@John Nichols

How about a way to only show what I call B class rental property locations? 

  • MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area) with major airport within 50 miles 
  • Population of at least 150k
  • Minimum of 3k housing units
  • Median home value between $100k-$250k
  • Household income of $30k or greater
  • Forecasted population growth rate greater than zero

Here is that map for San Antonio

    This is an interesting data driven approach. I'm worried that this type of analysis in the wrong hands will cause a lot of trouble though. I'm sure you're using this as your step 1 in your location analysis. However, I could imagine many new investors seeing something like this and thinking anything in the shaded area is good to go, and worse yet maybe that all the shaded areas are equally good to invest in. I'm sure you realize that's completely untrue. There are a lot of neighborhoods in those shaded areas where I wouldn't invest, because they're either too tough to attract tenants to or have greater turnover issues than other parts of town.

    It also looks like this ignores some of the best neighborhoods for investing. I'm guessing that you're ruling out the A areas with this map too, maybe because in general it's tough to find deals there. However, there are pockets of more affordable homes in some of the A areas that do extremely well as investment properties. Some of my most successful investor clients focus on areas like that. It also rules out some pretty nice areas that happen to be located on the edge of zip codes that would otherwise be C areas.

    I guess my general point is that zip code level analysis can be interesting, but isn't terribly effective for picking the best neighborhoods to invest in, or at least not here in San Antonio. I realize the appeal of using zip codes, because there is a ton of data at that level. I find a lot of the online tools have this same issue. They'll provide zip code average rental rates for properties that are in below average sections of the zip code. Unfortunately, San Antonio is much more nuanced than that, it I've seen these types of tools cause major problems for new investors.


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