Price-Rent Ratio App for Largest 200 US Counties

I have previously written here and here about the use of price-rent ratios as a measure of what geographies have the potential to provide good cash flow rental properties.  Some areas of a metropolitan area will simply provide a better cash flow than others due to various factors. By narrowing down your search to specific geographies you can better focus your marketing and acquisition efforts. Lower price-rent ratios, while only one variable that you should consider when looking for cash flow rental properties, often provide a good idea of what areas are better than others.

Trulia established thresholds for the ratios as follows: a price-to-rent ratio of 1 to 15 indicates it is much better to buy than rent; a price-to-rent ratio of 16 to 20 indicates it is typically better to rent than buy, and a price-to-rent ratio of 21 or more indicates it is much better to rent than buy.

I have put together an online application that anyone can use to research the 200 largest (in terms of population) counties in the U.S.  This application allows you to select a county, an option (Price-Rent Ratio or Change in Price-Rent Ratio from 2013-2018), and it will retrieve a color coded map and table displaying the price-rent ratio information by census tract.  You can also click individual census tracts on the map to display specific price-rent ratio information or click a record in the table.  

You can access the application by clicking here or by clicking the image below.  There is a little bit of a lag time when the application initially loads so please be patient.  We'll be tweaking the application for performance in the coming weeks.

We used data from the American Community Survey (ACS), produced by the U.S. Census Bureau, for the most recent available year (2018) with the R programming language and the tidycensus package to produce the mapping application.