Thoughts on Indianapolis vs St Louis vs Birmingham vs OKC markets

[Eric Chase]

Greetings friends! I’m a SFR buy and hold investor looking to branch into a new market. These are the ones I keep hearing about and I’m interested in your thoughts on their positives and negatives as they compare to each other. Would love your long-term thoughts on jobs, population dynamics/growth, cash flow, appreciation...anything you can provide about the markets will be value added to me! Thank you and all the best! Cheers! Eric

[Chris Clothier]

@Eric Chase - We've researched and visited each of those markets.  They are all similar.  I don;t have the indy data on this spreadsheet and included oklahoma city by accident.  But, here is the data that we compile anytime we go to a new market and we have researched close to 20 markets at this point.  

Don't pay attention to the first line as it didn't line up correctly, but you can see from the columns and lines that we pick a few metrics centered around affordability and future job growth.  The viability of a market is really going to be centered around job growth and wage growth.  Affordability is equally important and tax rates, cost of housing and median income all play into that number.

A site you can use that gives you all of this plus a ton of other data points is Best Places .net.  Also, use MSA numbers and not just city numbers.  That will take into account surrounding areas and path of progress.

Oklahoma City	St. Louis	Birmingham
MSA (as of 12/2017)	OKC	STL	BHM
Population	1,358,450	2,811,590	1,145,650
Median Home Price	$132,300	$143,400	$126,300
Homes Rented	31.72%	26.98%	26.31%
Homes Vacant	10.43%	10.31%	13.45%
Cost of Living (% of national avg)	87%	91%	84%
Property Tax Rate / $1000	$10.13	$13.62	$5.20
Unemployment Rate	4.70%	4.90%	6.00%
Recent Job Growth (last 12 mos)	2.98%	2.96%	-0.35%
Future Job Growth (next 10 years)	41.25%	41.02%	33.30%
Family Median Income	$63,140	$70,470	$60,921