When starting out you can trade labor for equity by DIY means. 

The oft-referenced official metrics that come to mind are Housing Starts (which you referenced as "New Builds") and breaking down the market into types of housing - apartments vs first-time buyer SFR vs trade-up SFR vs high-end.

I have a friend who's an architect by trade who is pretty good at and enjoys figuring that sort of stuff out.

Want to trade homes?

The first leg is your trading leg...this leg's only function is to spin as many deals (stocks in his case) as possible.

Put it out there, see the feedback, if your only getting shady characters interested, then there you go.But, with a little bit of word of mouth from here, I bet you will get quite a few legit interested parties, willing to trade time and sweat for knowledge.  

Future home sales will need to come from younger buyers unless older people plan on trading houses to one another in an internal game of property ladder.

Properties can be traded up with a 1031 exchange.5.

By contracting it out ourselves and instead of hiring companies to do the work, we will hire the professional's for each trade.

The purpose of a cap rate is to measure what NOI's are trading for a specific market at a particular time for a particular property type.