If you don't have a mortgage professional right now, I would recommend reaching out to a few investors your know and getting them to give you a referral for their favorite (read: one who produces quantifiable results) "money" man or woman.  

In a very simple and reductive sense, stocks are a quantified analysis of the perspective people collectively have of the health of the economy (and individual companies).

It's okay to take risk, but it must be thoroughly quantified. 

What the techies refuse to understand is that real estate is not a series of 1's and 0's, you can not quantify judgment, intuition, intrinsic aspects of value or possible potential as you might with some widget like a car meeting popular demands.

You said: “So far we have home prices going up because of 1) lack of inventory, 2) rising rents, and 3) wage inflation in tech.”I think that interest rates have a lot to do with it too, so I busted out my extra sharp pencil to try an approach at quantifying at least the interest rate impact portion.

You just need to get on the phone and talk to people with experience to see if your theory (wants and expectations) matches up to the reality of the marketplace.Also if you are new going on LoopNet and other places you will not know all the metrics to quantify what makes a good deal or not and how the loan market works for that market and required reserves etc.I can look at a property and scrub it 100 times faster because I know the metrics and what to look for.

I was quite surprised to see Cape Coral at the top of the list of sales to investors and it makes me think the methodology used to quantify an "investor" is somewhat flawed.  

How would you quantify it in assets?

I am wondering how you quantify that, assuming no actual pier work or adjustments are being done immediately? 

With value pricing, the emphasis is first placed on the customer and the value each project will add (if it can be quantified).