Just Kidding. I'm heading off into the crazy realm of long distance real estate investing. Luckily I will probably be able to pull along some buddies with me to reduce the risk and keep the early deal machine running. Check out my other post on regional analysis questions ;)
As an aside I've basically thrown together a meta-analysis on trying to pick the best cities to plop down our first concentration of cash flow deals. I know it's not ideal since most of my analysis is retrospective, so I'm wondering if anyone has found a better way to use more advanced techniques. I do data analytics for a living and so far the best data source I've found is the zillow data but even that falls well short of what I would like to see (I'm used to using Tableau for advanced work, but the time to standardize data... plus not having the listing level details ugh...)
Is there some data source I'm missing? Like a way to plug into the MLS system via an API query. Or even just pull the whole list for a region down to a CSV or something? I'm willing to trade refined data for solid data sources :) and maybe a small cut ;)
My first / most recent analysis went as follows (forced into Excel...):
1. Best Colleges / college cities (had to start with a base from somewhere since I figured even in a recession people got to send their spoiled kids to school somewhere.) (my first attempt was to actually start with investor friendly vacation cities as the base data level but this was too few / narrow / not enough cashflowing...)
10a.(Jumped from 1 to 10 since the following is not done in order just a weighting system that was used as filters:
US News' Ranking of Univ > 300
Univ Population > 10k (with minor exceptions)
Cities Population > 40k
Most recent Population change of City > 0% (cash flow mainly like I said, but combined with following could lead to incr apprec)
City density (peeps / sq mi) > 1,000
Rental Vacancy Rate < 6% (must use PM so high turnover is not super ideal) (yes, I know, base was college area... grrr....)
Median property value < $210 K (risk mitigation)
Median Rent (used with above for rough cash flow ranking)
Cash Flow Indicator ( 1 - Rental Vacancy Rate) * Median Rent / Median Propert Value > (Iteratively throw away cities on bottom 50% of list.)
Tax / Legal Friendliness of State
Then take the top 7 from above and review the micro investing climate (actual cash flow, Cash on Cash, etc) of turn keys. (then back into that ARV from the ones that need work for BRRRR-ing)
Then take the top 3 and start talking to realtors, PMs, contractors, etc to see if a good team can be built.
Pull trigger.
All that was left on the list was places with too much humidity or not enough. Odd.
Do you have any recommended metrics to add to above? What is a better starting list than college towns?
