All Forum Posts by: Austin Wolff

Great notes, I will keep all of this in mind! And yes, I absolutely should account for housing supply, school ratings and crime ratings. Thank you!

I’m a Data Scientist living in Los Angeles, and must invest out-of-state. Denver is an attractive metro for a few reasons, so I downloaded monthly price and rent growth at the zip code level from Zillow’s public housing data.

I then used a ranking algorithm to sort the top 10 zip codes for investing based on monthly average price growth and monthly average rent growth (both by percent growth), from 2019-2024.

If you know the Denver area well, I’d love your opinion on the results -- I certainly need it. Data science is no good without review by a subject matter expert, such as a local like yourself!

Below is the result of mapping all zip codes, and coloring them by the average monthly price growth (%). You may see some zip codes missing -- this is because Zillow didn’t have data on them in their public dataset I used.

If you’d like to enlarge the image, you can open it in a new tab.

Now let’s only look at only the top 10 ranked zip codes. They are ranked (using the price-and-rent-growth weighting algorithm) as follows:

1. 80003
2. 80401
3. 80219
4. 80017
5. 80010
6. 80212
7. 80239
8. 80104
9. 80249
10. 80226

Let’s see the average monthly price growth map again with just the top 10 zip codes:

Now let’s look at the average monthly rent growth for the top 10 ranked zip codes.

And now let’s look at the rent-price ratios for the top 10 zip codes:

Now let’s take a look at the prices for each of these zip codes:

So far, 80003 and 80219 look like the best zip codes for buy-and-hold strategies close to the front range (if we ignore Aurora, CO completely).

What are your thoughts? Do you disagree? Do these maps fit your understanding of the neighborhoods? I would love to hear your feedback!

 Hey Doron! I downloaded the information from their ACS 5-Year survey. You can read all about it here: https://www.census.gov/program... There's quite a lot though, so you'll need to spend some time digging for what you want.

 Thanks Yinka. I'm a Real Estate Data Scientist, so I used Python/Pandas/GeoPandas. Although any non-coder could create these visuals for free with QGIS and the US Census datasets. And awesome, good to know, thank you!

 Very good to know, thank you. A brief summary of my ranking algorithm is this:

1. I look at metrics like Population Growth and Rent Growth (NOTE: I only graphed cities/towns with a population of 10,000 or more, which is why you won't see smaller neighborhoods here. ALSO: Click on the images to enlarge them on a new tab):

So far, the data does seem favorable to the I-75N corridor.

2. Then I look at Median Price to see if a town/suburb is within my price range. Unfortunately, with a down payment of only $50,000, my max purchase price is $250,000. Acworth and Kennesaw look good!

3. Then I look at Rent-to-Price ratio:

It looks like Acworth is good, Kennesaw is even better.

4. Then I look at Percent Renter-Occupied to see what the rental market looks like:

It looks like Kennesaw has a smaller percentage of renters than Acworth, which still looks good. This preliminary data may still suggest McDonough fits my personal investing needs more. However, I've never even visited Atlanta, and I know there are gaps in this data. It's not perfect. 

I will definitely take your word for it on the I-75N corridor. The data certainly looks promising already, especially for Acworth. Thank you for the feedback and suggestion, I definitely need to double-check my algorithm and take a look at Acworth!

Hey guys, I recently conducted a data analysis study on the fastest growing towns with a median home price below $200k (so I could afford 25% down). 3 of the nation's top 10 were all just outside Atlanta, GA:

1. McDonough, GA

2. Fairburn, GA

3. Villa Rica, GA

Are any local investors or realtors familiar with the area? The data analysis was conducted with the recently released 2021 US Census data (which will unfortunately always be 1-2 years behind), so I'm just wondering how well this data compares to your local opinion?

Hey BP. I recently wrote an article ranking the best MSAs to invest in using job growth numbers provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and rent/income/price growth data provided by the US Census (ACS 1-Year Survey). It might provide some market insights too.

If you're curious what the data says, I'll leave a link to the post below. 

If you have any comments, feedback, or criticism of the data organization, I would greatly appreciate it!

Here's the link to my BiggerPockets article.

 Got it, that makes sense. Thank you for the heads up!