Data driven investing

[Matthew Boutte]

I'm looking to buy my first investment property this year. I'll probably out of state due to high prices and high taxes in my home state. I'm a data scientist, so I started building a dataset to start exploring where in the country I might make my first purchase. I was expecting all my metrics to turn up Austin, Nashville, and Boise as top performers. But the top 10 regions for each metric are turning up all sorts of places I hadn't thought of and that aren't in the news. Some examples of regions that end up in the top 10:

• Fastest population growth (Jackson County, Georgia)
• Highest net migration rate (Horry County, South Carolina)
• Fastest job growth (Eddy County, New Mexico)
• Fastest income growth (Mineral County, West Virginia)
• Fastest home price growth (Grays Harbor County, Washington)
• Fastest rent growth (Franklin County, Massachusetts)
• Highest rent to price ratio (Jefferson County, Arkansas)

Is this kind of data based searching worthwhile? Or is it a recipe for analysis paralysis?