All Forum Posts by: Art Perkitny

@Richie Thomas the zip 60505 is not a war zone. The C grade designation seems to be accurate as an average for the area. 

As for rents, not sure how rentometer is showing $1,400 as an overall average. 

Based on data from the most recent American Community Survey here are the breakdowns for rents in Aurora: 

1.4k seems to be the average for units with three beds of greater, but not smaller units

Also, according to the data, rents will be higher as you move out from the center of the city:

Hope this helps! 

@Dustin Griesing 

Here is a comparison for Bay City and the state of Michigan 

Link to Comparison

My above commentary was more looking at the change if you plotted a line of regression rather than individual data points. 

In the graph showing percentage of college educated adults, for example, it's clear that the number increases from 2016. However the trend looking at all the data is clearly going down. 

@Christian Hall

As most have already stated the population is declining and so are median home values. 

Rents have crept up, but remain very low 

Tenant profile is regressing as well, with poverty rates going up, more households reporting using SNAPS (supplemental nutrition assistance program) year over year, and a general decrease in number of individual with college degrees in the area. 

All things considered, things don't seem to be looking very good for Bay City

Data comes from the American Community Survey 

Hope this helps 

@Bowen Taylor Payson

The method you are employing is great! 

Seems like you have a good grasp on market research, nonetheless here are a few metrics you can add to your search:

 - rental vacancy rate 

 - homeowner vacancy rate 

 - poverty rate

- education attainment rate (high school/GED & Bachelors)  

- number of housing unit

- household income

- rent to income ratio

- rent to price ratio

- population on SNAPS (supplemental nutrition assistance program) percentage 

 - prop tax rate 

- median age of buildings

- number of structures by units (SFR, duplex, tri, quad, etc...)

- median rents by number of bedrooms in unit

@Adam B Henderson and @Vipul Negi

Here is a document that may help with your search. It lists all the cities within the country over 100k in population and is ordered by median home value.

Link to Spreadsheet

I suggest selecting a few cities that meet your criteria and then dive deeper into researching the sub-markets that comprise each of them.

The sub-market selection will have more of an impact on price as well as investment performance than the city itself. 

If this is your first investment, I don't suggest trying to find the highest cash flowing property however. The reason being that this will likely be in a D/F neighborhood, which will expose you to more risk than needed when starting out. 

Hope this helps

@Reinaldo Giudici here is a document that may help with your search. It lists all the cities within the country over 100k in population and is ordered by median home value. 

Link to Spreadsheet

I suggest selecting a few cities that meet your criteria and then dive deeper into researching the sub-markets that comprise each of them. 

The sub-market selection will have more of an impact on price as well as investment performance than the city itself. 

Hope this helps 

@Sarah Klein this may help with your search. It's a choropleth map of Austin neighborhoods and their corresponding median home values:

Seems like the further outside the city center you go the less expensive it become with the notable exception of the west side.

As for assessing future neighborhood growth, I would look at trend data for various metrics such as population counts, educational attainment, poverty rate, household incomes, etc ...  

Hope this helps 

@Kevin Seiler

I suggest beginning your search by looking at the data, such as demographic data from the Census. This info will give you a decent idea of what to expect and help filter down your search to a few cities.

Metrics that I find valuable to understand are populations total, home values, household income, poverty rate, unemployment, rate and educational attainment. Also, the trend for the aforementioned metrics is also very important.

These are just some of the indicators that will help you understand the quality of an area as well as the kinds of returns one is to except. 

Once you have selected a couple of macro markets, it's time to repeat the process, but for the sub-markets within your selected locations.

Hope this helps!

@Ryan Judah I have complied a spreadsheet of locations that meet your criteria. 

The cities selected all have a population greater than 200k and I have order them by the CAGR of the past five years of population totals.

In addition I have included the median home values as well as median RE taxes paid for each city to help further filter your selection.

Here is a link to the spreadsheet 

Link to Spreadsheet

As for low crime and desirability, this will be something that is unique to the submarkets within whichever cities you decide to invest.

Hope this helps! 

@Evan Reinecke 50k to 100k will be difficult to find without it being either a property in need of a lot of work or a rather bad area. This will be further complicated because you do not want to look into anything within the city of Baltimore (which is where properties of this price point will be most common) 

The graphic below shows the median home values of Baltimore and surround incorporated cities. 

As you can see, cities surrounding Baltimore will be more expensive.

Also, below is the home value distribution for all of Baltimore County

As you can see, the number of properties in the under 100k cohorts are few 

Hope this helps