city-data help

[Saul Urena]

Hello Fellow BPeers:

My question is about the website city-data.com. while its a great website to get info about certain neighborhoods and or zip codes, it has a lot of in-depth analysis it is just hard to just digest all of this information. I am doing research on certain neighborhoods around my target areas of population growth, demographics, etc.,but the site has so much information I don't even know where do you begin? are there any other website to gather all this information? My strategy is wholesaling in NYC, and I'm about to embark on my first direct mail campaign. I just want to know a bit more about my target areas other than driving through them. Thanks in advance.

[Tyler Mills]

Originally posted by @Saul Urena:

Thanks Tyler Mills very helpful info I will try that site tonight.. I would think that the census site would not be as current as these other sites

Both of these sites use the census data directly as their core/primary data source, so the census is more up to date, but realistically that would only be for a short period of time as these sites are probably pretty well-versed in accessing and updating their data when the new census information is released.

As a side note, census data is actually updated/corrected every year but large census intakes are only done every 10 years, so this creates the misconception that census data is not accurate/up-to-date the farther it gets from the last large intake.  

If you take a look at the last census update though it was for 2013, where as city-data and usa.com still both rely a lot on the 2012 update, so you may actual get better data from the census site depending on how significant the changes/corrections in your are were. I know usa.com will tell you what census year the data the provide is coming from, not 100% sure if city-data does the same.