City map by neighborhood class type?

[Alex S.]

I got pretty confident with numbers while analyzing deals but one thing that always gives me a lot of pain is what is the best way to analyze a particular neighborhood (s). I can find a crime map, can see schools, walk/transit scores, median income, rent growth, etc but all this information is in different sources, and for different states it's even more diverse. Everyone is saying  A-B-C-D-F neighborhoods, where can I find a rank for the neighborhood I'm interested in, and also compare it to a nearby neighborhood like a heatmap or something visual? Is there a single place to check the neighborhood class-type map for a selected city/state?

[Evan Polaski]

@Alex S., as Jaron and Scott note, this involves knowing the ins and outs of the markets.  One person's A is another's B, and possibly a third person's C.  And at the end of the day, what I say, or Jaron or Scott says is a B, doesn't matter if your tenant base doesn't feel the same.

As for broader neighborhoods, I personally live and invest directly in Cincinnati and specifically the older neighborhoods.  In this type of area, you can't just say "Pleasant Ridge is a B, Kennedy Heights is a B-/C+, and Golf Manor is a C/C-".   There are streets in Kennedy Heights that are nicer than Pleasant Ridge.  There are pockets of Golf Manor that are better than certain pockets of Pleasant Ridge.

All feed into the same school district.  

But I like Jaron's last comment, and this is hard to do if you are out of state, but I only buy properties that I would live in if I needed to.  I am a small time investor, but have done pretty well with my rentals and flips. And I think a lot of it is because I only buy properties that I would live in myself, if I ever needed to.