Most important criteria for selecting a market?

[Jon Schwartz]

Hi all,

At the risk of having analysis paralysis, I've been having a lot of fun culling US Census data from the past 10-15 years and assessing markets by the hard numbers.

I'm about to do a big data pull (which is time-consuming), so I have a question for the experienced investors: what are the most important criteria or data points to consider when selecting a market?

So far, mine are:

• Population growth
• Job growth
• Employment diversity
• Rent growth
• Median income growth (though not too high!)
• Household formation growth

What else? What important metric am I overlooking? Commute time? Age of population? Percent of home-owners?

Thanks so much!