Hello, my friends and welcome to another episode of Ask Marco where I answer your investing related questions.
Today’s question comes from Ryan. He says, Hey Marco, I have been listening to your podcast for a few months. What? That’s all, I’m only kidding. When you mentioned you’re tracking over 400 Realestate markets, is that available on your site? What you said in your Kansas city market spotlight about being a city in the top 100 is a good thing. How do you find that data? Okay, so couple questions here and I think it’s centered around finding or asking the question, where are the hot markets? So my first comment is, what is a quote-unquote hot market? Sometimes people ask this question, not only to me but just openly everywhere, whether it be in the media or online. And people ask, where are the hot markets? What is a hot market?
I’ve been asked to write articles about hot markets, you know, where are, what are the hot markets? The question is, is how are you defining a hot market hot in what sense? In terms of a price appreciation, historic or current, what is the trend? Is there a certain percentage of year over year price increase? Does hot mean that there’s a high level of investor interest is hot mean that it’s um, it’s just a great cashflow market and people are very interested in it. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s appreciating in double digit territory year over year. I think generally speaking, a lot of people define a hot market as a market where prices are appreciating or increasing at a fast rate, a rate that is above historical averages, whether nationally or for that local market. So when that happens, people take notice of it and the media starts reporting on it on a regular basis to the point where that market becomes inflated, pricey, overpriced, overvalued, unaffordable.
And now all of a sudden we have a bubble market, not just a hot market. So we have to talk about this in terms of you know, how we define a hot market. Having said that, your first question is, is this available on our website? No, not yet. And I say yet, but we were, I am planning to post some sort of summary information on our new website, which is again, like I’ve said before, launching soon has been delayed a few times because of some bugs and a couple of changes that I wanted to make. It will be a dynamic ongoing morphing website from this day forward, but I do plan to have regular, whether it’s monthly or quarterly summaries of the so-called quote unquote hot markets. So that is coming. It’s not there yet. I will put something up. I’m just not sure how I want to do it yet.
Now to your second question, how do you find the data? Well, complicated answer because we actually aggregate, the data comes from multiple sources, not just one source. All markets are ranked using a proprietary scoring system that we use. That’s something just helps us aggregate the data and then rank them in a particular order based on the weighting of different elements. However, the data is your question, how do you find the data? So my point is the data is not in one place, but the data is out there. Most of it is free. So I’ll give you some websites here which are great and you can go and find more information than you’ll ever want and put it together for yourself so you can find the pieces of the puzzle. So the first one is, this is kind of a little bit more of a basic one.
The website is known as the Department of Numbers. Yes, you heard that right? It’s the Department of Numbers and the URL is DEPT as in short for a department, DEPT of Numbers. So Department of Numbers, but the department is abbreviated, D E P T, deptofnumbers.com and on there you will find information about pretty much every major Metro area by state and Metro. And you will also find information about employment, unemployment, income, rent, GDP as in gross domestic product. The even have information on inflation, rents, rent trends, kind of mixed bag of information, even historical information. But it’s a little tricky to navigate. You actually have to look for links on the far right and at the bottom and then you have to drill down by either state or Metro. So once you figure out the navigation, it’s pretty easy to figure out.
That’s one website. The other website is Fact-Finder. It’s a part of the site of the US census census.gov that is located at factfinder.census.gov, factfinder.census.gov, the site is actually called American FactFinder and you know there’s, again, you have to learn how to navigate this. They’ve got a search and advanced search feature, a guided search, but there is a ton of information. Some of it is dated, some of it is current. It’s a mixed bag of stuff. The third is you know what you’ve already heard of and that’s zillow.com, now Zillow has a section of their website where they have Metro home price and value information. It’s not easily found on their homepage. If you actually do a google search for zillow.com market information or something to that effect, you will find the area that I’m talking about and there you can search by city, state, zip or even neighborhood.
It does give you quite a bit of good information. I like it because it actually shows market trends in terms of rents and sales and even rental information is there. Now again, this is not highly accurate. They have their algorithms and their Zillow Zestimate feature is good, not great. It’s good. It’s, it’s more accurate in some States than others. It just depends on where public property sale data is available or easily available. It’s not bad, but it’s just another source of information, another source more at the neighborhood level. But they also have Metro market-level information and that is Neighborhood Scout and that’s neighborhoodscout.com, I know the owner and I’ve provided a lot of um, feedback and content to help him build or shape that website so it’s more investor-friendly, you know, they’ve done a great, great job at that website and putting it together.
So that’s another source. And then last but not least, you know, we just have access to data from our affiliate partners and service providers that we work within our network, be it property managers and or new home builders or you know, rehabbers that provide turnkey properties for us. So that affiliate data is also helpful. You kind of have to put on your, you know, your thinking cap and your detective cap and search and find some of this information. Some of the other information is available just by looking for articles about the market in a search engine. And although it requires a little more combing and reading, the often will cite sources of that data, which may or may not be publicly available, but that’s just another way to find some of that data. Last but not least, this is really more of a question.
I’m just curious if you, or you as in anybody listening here would be interested in a service, a subscription service where I provide market data for top 20 top 50, top hundred or 400 markets in the country in terms of what is going on in those markets, so it’ll be, it’ll be a little bit more data-driven, but it’ll be market information so you have the information about what’s going on in all these markets around the country. Is that a service that you would be interested in? It would be kind of a monthly or annual subscription-based service. If that is something you’re interested in, I’d be curious to know, you know, what that would be worth in other words or what you’d be willing to pay for it. I’ll probably end up sending out a survey question via email to everybody one day or I’ll put it on the website and just ask and you can click a couple of buttons and just say, yes, I’d be interested, and this is, it’d be worth to pay for for a service like that, so it might lead to that. I don’t know, but we’ll see. Anyway, I hope that helps. Ryan, if you have any other questions about your question here, let me know. Other than that, I want to thank you for listening. We will get another episode out next week. If you have a question about real estate investing or finance, just let me know. Click the Ask Marco button, that passiverealestateinvesting.com and I will get to it ASAP thanks for listening. We will see you on our next episode.
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