best areas to invest in Milwaukee

[Latesha C.]

What are some of the most hot spots to invest in, within the Milwaukee area?

[Marcus Auerbach]

Latesha, that's a very broad question. I have a few thoughts on that.

"Hot" depends who you ask. Fringe neighborhoods are always hot for wholesalers, Third Ward is hot for developers, Whitefish Bay for many of my residential clients (and flippers) and Menomonee Falls is hot for builders.

For buy and hold investors I always ask them about their target audience. Every marketer in consumer goods will start with the question - who is the target audience? Single mom's, males between 30 and 40, young families etc..

Most investors will start with a neighborhood, or even worse with a property. Then the product (the house) will define the costumer (tenant). So the most important top level decision is made by default, one could say by accident.

Once you know who your target audience is - young families with kids in school age - you can start looking for a neighborhood that is "hot" for that type of investment.

On the flip side I don't know what areas are not hot at the moment, we are generally very short on inventory. Normally we like to see 6 months worth of inventory for sale, in December we had 3.2 and now we are down to just over 2 months. In other words if it is a good deal, it will sell in days. In that respect everything is hot now.

As far as what is beeing discussed a lot is River West and Harambee, Walkers Point, also Washington Hights - but that is also because investors love the idea of a turn arround story - a cheap neighborhood and a (potentially) golden future.