I do it on every property because my first house had issues with Orangeburg, and cost me a small fortune to dig up and replace.  

While it can be difficult to dig through the census bureau has good information on population shifts.

It really digs into all  the important concepts and equations in real estate finance and presents them such that I can understand and use them.  

Edgar,you started off in the right place, welcome to BP. there is a lot of information on this site, dig in and search at the top, with the blogs and podcasts in the Education section. any questions, just post them here on the Forums, someone is bound to have an answer for you.

Since no one responded, I did a bit of digging, spoke to some agents here in Vancouver, etc.

They often have, or are aware of, "pocket listings" that can give you a leg up on the competition.As an investor, it's your job to prospect for deals, but a great agent can help you figure out exactly where to dig and just how deep you need to go to strike gold.

So if i spread that out to a hundred zip codes and the entire City/County instead of that small little town,  it would be interesting to look at as far as media costs and rentals, growth, etc, and it might make me want to dig deeper into that market.  

However I suspect I need to keep digging on this.

I was elbow deep in human feces, digging it out of the main sewage line of the first rental property I’d ever purchased.

@Jeff Zenko, also look into joining a local REIA such as DIG.