Rental Market Analysis

[Andrew Lawrence]

When analysing a real estate market, aside from job & population growth which seem arguably the most important factors, how important is looking at a city's number of new commercial and multifamily construction in a given area (construction/community growth?) and how do you gauge this? I have seen ideas such as looking at the number of permits issued at a city/county permitting office but even they don't seem to have all of the info together to show the bigger picture of how a city is doing in terms of investment activity, best ways to approach this?