a good realtor can pull a list of absentee owners for you in yor area. in my county i can go to rent court and look at the owners filing for eviciton/rent court and get their information. that's 1 way to compile it. same with probates, tehre's the register of wills. as far as vendors, the cost is relative to your budget. there are companies like site-x data, and first american realty solutions and haines who provide data and you can pull a list from there. another popular vendor to pull lists from is melissadata.

If they do that where you live, an agent should be able to pull that data for you.Very eventually, it will appear in the public records.

Also, if the city has the national chains, like CB or Remax, many times one of those will have data on listings nationwide, where you click on a map which state you want.

I have heard of Courthouse Retrial System and Chandler Reports.My current method of deriving this data is not easy and not always up to date.Thanks, :D

I check the data against what the others have said to make sure they are in the normal range and not just irrationally optimistic.

Try searching for media price data that covers from (at least) 6/07 until now.

You can alos contact some local property managers as they would give you their opinion as to the rental value of your property and they also have comp data.

Outside of purchase price and front-end realtor commissions, what other costs should I build into my formula to ensure a profitable investment.

About the only metric you can use without totally driving yourself nuts with analysis would be cost per rentable square foot based on the last sales data.

Most 3rd party data out there is going to originate from census data.