Best online tools for market research

[Peter Lampione]

I've searched existing questions about online tools for market research, but wanted to ask some specific questions as I haven't gotten them answered yet.

My wife and I are just starting out and doing research on markets in the Tampa Bay / Sarasota area.  It is a bit overwhelming as there are so many neighborhoods and we can't become experts in all of them.  To narrow it down we are starting by picking school districts, then we want to look at which neighborhoods have a decent amount of multi-family properties, and continue narrowing down through other criteria (rents vs prices, crime, jobs, population growth, services available, ...)  In addition to online analysis we will spend time in the neighborhoods during visits there, but for this post we are looking for advice about online tools, specifically:

• Is there a good online source to determine how many properties in a given area are multi-family?
• Is neighborhood scout worth paying for?  Is the info available from a paid membership not easily available elsewhere and worth the cost? 
• Is rent-o-meter worth paying for?
• Is greatschools.org the best option for researching schools?
• Looking at crimereports.com and crimemapping.com for crime data.  Have seen a few others, though they all seem to have similar data.  Any suggestions on which are best (most accurate) and how to best leverage them would be appreciated.
• We are using city-data.com, usa,com/rank, walkscore, bestplaces.net, statelocalgov.net, and Zillow to get some general information. Any other tools/services we should consider, or any of these you consider not worth it?

Thanks for any help you can provide, these forums have been really helpful for us as we are trying to learn the business.

Thanks,

Peter