The Data Driven Investor's Guide to Real Estate Course | Section 2 (Partial)

Welcome to section two of the course. Now that you've laid the groundwork with your investment strategy, it's time to dive into one of the most critical aspects of real estate investing, market research. In this section, you'll learn how to identify the best markets and neighborhoods that align with your goals, and most importantly, how to use data to make confident, informed decisions. Understanding your market is the key to success in real estate. By the end of the section, you'll know exactly how to evaluate economic factors and trends in different regions, analyze local amenities, schools, and growth opportunities, identify emerging markets and avoid risky areas, and use data-driven insights to pick the right locations for your investments. This section will empower you to avoid the common mistakes many investors make when choosing a to guide your choices, ensuring your investments are set up for long-term success. Get ready to sharpen your skills and unlock the power of data in market research. Let's get started. Welcome to lesson one of section two. In this lesson, we're going to break down the three pillars of location analysis, the core factors you'll need to evaluate when choosing the best markets and neighborhoods for your investments. These pillars are the foundation of successful market research, helping ensure that you're investing in areas that will generate strong returns. These three pillars are economic factors, market demand, and amenities data. Let's take a deeper look at each, starting with economic data. Economic data is the health of an area. It helps predict future property values and rental demand. An example of economic data is job growth. Is employment rising in the area? Are new industries or companies moving in? This can mean an upward growth of potential tenants. Median income. Higher incomes generally support higher rental prices and better tenant reliability. Unemployment rates. Lower unemployment often signals a stronger economy, meaning that people have jobs and have income on a regular basis. This also increases the demand for housing. So let's take a look at an example of how you would actually look at economic data for an area. Let's imagine that we're looking where to invest. We see an article that says, five best places to invest in Jackson, Mississippi. We go through this article, but ultimately what we're trying to decide is, should we even invest in an area like Jackson, Mississippi? How do we use this economic information to learn more? Well, luckily you could use free resources created by the U.S. government that aggregates data across the U.S. population. This information helps us understand the economics of an area more and determine if it's a place we should invest. So here I'm on the U.S. Census Quick Facts. You can get the link below for it. It is free to use. You can enter in a city, town, or zip code. As well, you can look at state or even the whole U.S. Here I have the United States, Mississippi, and Jackson City, Mississippi. So coming off of this blog that we just fell onto. Now there's a lot of good information here going from people information down to business and geography. But first taking a look at population, we could see the population of Jackson City, Mississippi is around 143,000 people. Now here's what's interesting, what's happened over time. This is actually dropped by about seven percent. Population percentage change from April 1st of 2020 to July 1st of 2023. Now this is not something we would want to see in the area that we are investing in. We want to see people coming into the area because we want to have a higher potential amount of tenants and also have lower vacancy. So this is already not a great sign. We could look at breakouts of population for different ethnic groups. As well, we can look at housing. We can see information like owner occupancy of the population in Jackson City. About a little less than 50 percent of those homes are owned by actual homeowners. Now I find this to also be pretty low. We could see this is lower than Mississippi and United States. Why this matters? Well, usually people who own their own property have a lot of pride. They want to upkeep with the community and upkeep things like say their lawns, which increases overall appearance. What I've seen is that when you start to see this dip, usually under 60 percent, there's a little bit less care to the area. So this is also a warning factor that I would get just from this economic data. We can also go down and look at education too. We could see that Mississippi or Jackson City particularly falls within the same bandwidth as we look at U.S. and Mississippi as a state. So no alarms here. But what if we want to dive deeper into some of these values? We can go to say resident population in the county. So Jackson City is in Hines County, Mississippi, Fred data. Fred is an economic resource that aggregates information across all these different economic resources like census, BLS, and more. Here we can go directly to Fred St. Louis and click on this link. We're going to be met with a graph. So all this data that we just saw that came from the U.S. census, we can actually see it historically really easily by utilizing Fred. We could download this. We could even put it on a map or even on our own website. But what I want to have your attention focus on is that we have data going back from about 1970 to as close to present as possible, a little after 2020. The population in this county increased and has been a steady decrease ever since. But we really want to look at not just in time what occurred, but what has the change been over time? How does that compare to similar areas? So let's imagine that we want to compare this to a whole different area that we're interested in investing in. We can go to edit graph and I want to actually analyze this not by the thousands of persons, but instead the percentage change. So now we could see which years that Mississippi has actually lost population when it's underneath that line that goes horizontal. Now I can add a line and maybe I'm interested also in close to Miami, Florida. So I could look up resident population in Broward County, Florida. Click it and add data series. Now we can see two different line charts. We have resident population in Hines County in blue and then in red we have for Broward County. We could see that Broward County has had many years here where year over year is an increase in population. And even though they look to follow the same trends in this time period of having a little bit less of an increase, overall we could see that this Broward County really rarely falls below this negative population line and would be more favorable if we're really considering these two values. So we'll be diving a lot more into job growth, median household income, and unemployment rates to see how we will actually select a market, but that's just a quick highlight of how you actually tie these theories together and where the data comes from. Now let's move on to market data. Market data is current trends in the real state market. How well is the housing market actually performing? Some things we look at are home prices. Are property prices trending upward, staying steady, or declining? This can indicate if the area has potential for future appreciation, right? So maybe prices are going higher in this area in relation to other cities nearby it because it has some sort of attractability towards it. Rental demand and occupancy rates. High demand and low vacancy rates are a sign of healthy rental market, right? You want to make sure that the property doesn't have that much vacancy so that you can lower your expenses of having tenants consistently move. So this helps to ensure your property stays occupied. Inventory levels. Markets with low housing inventory are more competitive, which can lead to rising home prices and increased rental demand. Now we've seen this after the historically low interest rates after 2020. We saw a lot of people buying property at this time period and it almost became non-existent of affordable homes for say newlyweds to be able to buy. It was a lot more competitive and we saw a lot of offers on a single property. So by monitoring things like inventory levels, days on market, we can actually assess this. But where do we actually get this data? A lot of people will tell you you need MLS access to get market data. But is this true? Because that could be very expensive and maybe we don't want to get a real estate agent license. Well, you can actually get market data from a variety of sources for free. For example, I'm on Zillow's page right now and you can enter in for home values information on a city or a zip code and it will give you information on how that home value has changed over time. So here I'm looking at Tampa, Florida. We could see key takeaways is that the typical home value is $380,000 with an increase, so appreciation year over year. Then we could see some more market stats including median days to pending. Wow, only 26 days and properties are pending. That is still pretty much a seller's market and we'll go into those definitions in later lessons. But here we can also see over time how home values have changed. We can also submit other cities below and see how the prices compare. Now, if you want to get into the weeds of even more data at the market level, you can go to Zillow housing data and all the other sites like Redfin, Realtor, Trulia at times will post information as well on market stats every single month. So for example, if you wanted to get deeper into home values, you could look here at the different data types. You can go down to even just a specific bedroom type, like in this case, three bedrooms, look at different geographies, download it and then analyze it as well. Another resource that I love is using Redfin's housing market. So they take information about what's going on in the housing market, but aggregate it in a really easy way to understand. So here I'm also looking at Tampa, Florida and similar to Zillow, we can see here how prices have appreciated over time for the median sale price specifically. We could dive into different property types and what this will tell me is this is an appreciating market, which is something that I like to see when I'm trying to invest in areas. I want to see properties rise. I can also look at number of homes sold and I can see median days on market, which can give me an indicator if it's more of a buyer or seller's market. We can also look at how competitive the market is and Redfin has information on how they actually get to these scores. But overall, it looks to see how properties are getting multiple offers as well as how soon they're going off the market. We can also see sale to list price. So our properties that are selling going above asking, under asking. So as an investor, this helps us to know, oh, if I go into this market, it might be competitive. I could probably only go down maybe 5% on some of my offers. So low balling might not be an option. And one of the last things that I like here for Redfin is that you could see where people are potentially moving towards and where they're moving away from. So a city like Tampa, you have people coming from all areas of the country, specifically from the Northeast. And where they're going towards, they're usually staying local or looking locally, which makes me think that people are selling their properties to those out of state. They're staying in state to be able to maybe still be local to work or to family. As I mentioned, for these aggregators that have information on data and MLS, they usually have monthly stats too, which I also have a lot more deep dive in case you wanted to get into the nitty gritty here. But you could always go down and download data from national all the way down to the neighborhood level. Now that we've covered what economic data is, how to search for at a high level, what market data is, and also what resources we could use, let's now dive into amenities data. Amenities data is basically lifestyle and convenience factors that make a neighborhood desirable. This can make or break a property's appeal to renters or buyers. For example, some renters or buyers, they are looking for proximity to schools, parks, and public transportations. They could be key factors for demand for housing, especially for families and working professionals. Shopping and entertainment options. Areas of easy access to dining, retail, and entertainment often can attract more renters and buyers as more things for them to do. Walkability and safety. A lot of people like to be in areas where they can walk around the neighborhood. Thus, they need to have safety when they're doing so. Typically, low crime rates are important here to have greater demand and higher property values over time. When you think of amenities data, you really do have to start at times with a tenant profile first. For example, if you're looking to invest with families in mind, what are things that they actually value? Probably schools that are local and are good and have good programs. Also, shopping. So, being able to get quickly to Target, to Publix, to ShopRite to get that food that they can then make for the family meal on Sunday. And then also parks. Usually, families are money conscious and want to be able to do activities as a group without spending so much money. So, going to a nearby park, playing catch could be a great solution. So, how do we add these two together? How do we find areas that satisfy a tenant profile while fulfilling their values? If we actually try to look for areas that do satisfy each of these three values perfectly, they usually are in A neighborhoods that are too expensive for investors to really make an income. But if we try to focus on areas that have new businesses coming that can satisfy some of these values, we can get in ahead before we see their property values rise. Also known as up-and-coming areas and using new businesses to help you uncover them. So, for example, let's look at shopping. When you're thinking of big box stores that offer shopping, what would you think? Probably Walmart. Walmart is one of those that has pretty much everything, has the groceries as well, and they can be very cost effective for families. As well, another big store is Whole Foods. Whole Foods now shifts over a little bit more to the affluent side. So, those that have more money to be able to spend on groceries and thus you'll find Whole Foods in more luxury or more affluent areas. So, if you are looking to target families in these affluent areas that maybe are on the cusp of growth, you could try to find where is the nearby Whole Foods opening up. In what cities or in what states. The reason why this works is because these companies are worth billions of dollars, right? So, when they're deciding where to open a new facility, do you think that they're going and doing this research manually to go look at economic data? Of course not. What they're doing is spending tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars on data that we'll never be able to get our hands on. So, just like if you've seen a younger sibling that kind of follows what their older sibling does but always tries to not make the same mistakes, it's pretty similar. You can be the younger sibling that basically tags along on all the research these companies have already done for free if you just look to see where they're coming next and be able to determine based on the type of profile of tenant as well as the area that you want to invest in what that could be as an up-and-coming strategy. So, in summary, piggyback off of commercial real estate research and we'll go into as well how we could use GPTs to scan news articles to be able to help us with this process. So, for your action step, this is one of the few lessons where you actually don't have one. This was all about learning and first understanding those three pillars of location analysis. In the next lessons, we'll actually get to work of helping you choose your market as well as neighborhoods. See you there. In this lesson, we are going to cover how to choose a market. What metrics do we need to consider? Here's a preview of a tool we'll be using in our next section to help find top markets to invest in. We are very close to being hands-on, however, we still have a few foundational topics to cover, so stay with me. In the last section, we covered economic stats like resident population. We want to see population growth over time. Here's a population chart for Broward County, Florida by Fort Lauderdale, Miami area. We can see population has increased historically. This is a positive for investors, especially for those looking to invest for appreciation. Since this market has checked off our box to have population growth, does that mean we should invest in it? Absolutely not. Looking at population growth is just one piece of the puzzle. We need to review a combination of metrics to make a decision, not a single one only. Looking at just a single metric to make your decision is like only looking at price when buying a car. This can lead you to a bad decision, one where the car may not even drive off the lot. You need to look at multiple factors. So let's start with best for cash flow. If we want to invest for cash flow, we want to find markets that have high rental rates in proportion to the property price. So how do we find markets that meet this criteria? First metric is rent to price ratio. We will cover in detail what this ratio is. Overall, it helps to quickly gauge how profitable an investment will be for cash flow. Low vacancy. If we are investing for cash flow, we need to sustain tenants on a monthly basis. If there is high vacancy and we have the property unoccupied for one, two, or even three months, that can crush our cash flow, wiping our entire cash flow for the year. Positive rental rate change year over year. It's good to know that at the present time, rent is high enough to cover expenses. However, we need to make sure that this is true for the future as well. We can use historical data to identify how rents have been trending over time to do so. Affordability rate of change. The rule of thumb is to spend no more than 30% of your household income on your living expenses. So if we see that median rents are already 30% of the median household income in the area, this would indicate we likely cannot raise rents in the future because it would be unaffordable for tenants and likely no demand at those prices. This can impact our expected cash flow. Let's focus on rents of price ratio as it will be our main driver for our algorithm. How to calculate rents of price ratio. It is a yearly rental income divided by the property price. Higher values are better, meaning that the property has more spread for positive cash flow. Let's take two examples. One property can be purchased at $90k with rent at $1,400. If you multiply $1,400 by 12 and divide it by 90, you get $0.19 as your rents of price ratio. Another property in a different market has higher rent but also has a higher purchase price. This impacts the rent of price ratio to be lower than about 4 times less at $0.05, making it a less attractive investment. Here's a tip on how you can eyeball this too for a property. These two examples I actually have pulled directly from real listings. The first one $90k, this is on Zillow, and if you go down you can see the rent estimate, which again is an estimate, not an exact. But the rent estimate is $1,400, and we can also go down to the estimated payment, about $600. Just eyeballing this, it's about $800 in cash flow. Now if we go to the other property, which is in Nashville, about $390, we could see that the rent estimate is $1,600 or so. Now if we look at the estimated price, because remember the price is higher, so our mortgage will be higher as potentially even our taxes and insurance as well. Estimated payment is about $2,100. So just doing really rough math here, we might be losing out on about $500 a month in cash flow. Now to do this against every single property would be very cumbersome and require a lot of data. This is why rent to price ratio is key. The benefit in rent to price ratio is it gives us the ability to assess profitability for markets rather than just one property at a time. So instead of us calculating this value across all these different properties, we can quickly use summary metrics of median rent and median price to calculate at a zip code, county, and state level to help us then zone in on areas that are high for cash flow. Next, best for long-term growth. If we want to invest for appreciation, we want to find markets that are appreciating in value and have economic growth to sustain it. How do we find markets that meet this criteria? First metric is median sale price year over year. We will cover in detail why this matters, but overall it helps us gauge quickly how home prices are changing over time in a given area. Next, education with degree. If we are investing for appreciation, we want to see the area thrive with increased job security. Areas with a high ratio of the population having an education of associate's degree or higher tend to have higher paying jobs and typically have lower unemployment, so helping with economic growth. As well, population increase year over year. It is critical to see population growth for appreciating markets to spur demand for housing, right? If people are leaving, they're not going to need housing and thus we're going to see even more rentals on the market, having your property sit longer. So with population increase, it helps to put upward pressure on property prices to increase as well. Median household income. This is the income for a household in a given area. For similar reasons as the prior metrics, we want to see economic growth in an area that has disposable income. So we want to see this increase. Let's focus on median sale price year over year as our main driver for our algorithm. In the last section, we looked at using free tools like Zillow's Home Value to view market metrics. Here we have Nashville, Tennessee. Now if we are told that the median value of a home in Nashville is about $433k, what does that tell us? Not much. There's no basis to make a judgment if this is good or bad. However, when we add the context that property values have increased year over year, we now have an idea of how prices are trending. Trend analysis is huge when evaluating markets. We need to know what is happening now but also historically so we can make future predictions. Here we can see the home value has increased for Nashville, Tennessee in the last 7 years or so. This can help us to confidently predict that this market will likely continue to see appreciation and could be a good one to consider for long-term growth. For your action step, let these two considerations soak in. To assess a market, you need to consider a combination of metrics, not just a single one. To assess a market, you need to consider trend analysis of what's happened historically, not just right now. Alright, I'll see you in the next lesson where we will get hands-on to choose a market. Alright, it is time. We are finally getting hands-on on how to choose a market, and the rest of this course, a lot of it will be hands-on as well. So if you haven't already, make sure you have your action points filled out. Especially step 1, setting your investment strategy. This is going to be key in how we decide which metrics to look at for choosing a market. Great, so right now I am on a dashboard. So for those who are new to any data analytics, a dashboard is basically a way to summarize information. So instead of us digging through spreadsheets, which is very 2000s, we do not want to do that. We want to use either dashboards, AI, analytics to be able to help summarize information and get us to those decisions quicker, right? Because ultimately, we want to start looking at properties. So for a dashboard, you'll see a lot like these. They usually have some summary metrics, filters, and some sort of table as well. So let's actually walk through this. Here in the top left, we can see that as of this recording, we have market data as of July 1st of 2024. This is usually about four to six weeks outdated from the present time, because it does take time for these data aggregators to summarize what happened in the last month. Census data, this is the economic data. Remember we went through population, growth, as well as education. This data is usually outdated by one to two years. This goes across anywhere that you see population or median household income that comes from the government. It's always going to be outdated. Why? Because they don't have the capability to pull the entire population and aggregate data on a regular basis. So we have a combination of two data sources, which I'll go into what that data is in just a moment. But now I want to go over to filters. So what's powerful about this dashboard is that we're taking data that would otherwise be in lots and lots of spreadsheets and quickly able to see things like quick lists, investor metrics, and economic metrics. So I'm actually going to start from the bottom up to be a little bit more intuitive. EM, economic metrics, such as median household income. If I click this, we will see the chart on the right change. You can see the colors change, which I'll explain in a moment. We have employment ratio, education degree, vacancy, owner-occupied ratio. For more definitions on what these are, you can click this here to the glossary and you'll get information on data sources as well as all the metrics. Those are economic metrics getting a pulse of the health of an economy. Now, if we look at investor metrics, we covered one in detail recently, which was rent to price ratio, how profitable an area may be. I'm going to click this just so you could see, again, the map change on the right-hand side. Now, as we covered, looking at metrics one by one is useful, but to really make a decision on which counties or areas to invest in, we need to look at a combination of metrics. This is why we have quick lists here. These are basically combining different metrics that we can quickly analyze which counties are best for our strategy. We have here best for cash flow, creative finance, long-term growth, and up and coming. Now, this will depend on your strategy. There isn't one single region that satisfies all investors. Please note that. Now, what other filters do we have here? We have filters on median list price, geography, so north, south, west. Remember, we talked about landlord laws. This could become important to filter out certain regions if you want to be landlord-friendly. Specific states, maybe you're investing close to home instead of out of state, so you're going to filter on your specific state, as well as population. I personally like to invest in areas or cities that have higher population and have a mix of employment. That really is up to preference. One more for the filter section is we also have the map scale. Here, if you ever want to understand what's going on in the map, you can quickly gauge. Here, we're looking at rent to price ratio. We can see our minimum value is 0.03, a lighter shade, which we could see the lighter shades are along the coast of the west and towards this part of the northeast. Makes sense, right? San Francisco, New York City is the reason people don't invest as small-time investors because they don't cash flow. However, there are markets in this darker color that do cash flow. We could see some of them here pop up. If we were to hover, we could see, for example, this county in Illinois has a pretty high rent to price ratio, likely could be good for cash flow. Now, if we go to the top bar, we could see that we have a summary of what's happening. How many counties, median household income, median days on market, list price, and rent. So, for example, if I just filtered here, so now when we filter out the midwest, we could see we now have only 890 counties, median household income has changed as well, and our following metrics. You might be thinking, wait, there's a lot on the map that I see that are blank, right? Some parts of Nevada, Utah, but not so much for the northeast or for the lower part of California. These areas that you see shaded likely have very low population and thus don't really have that much data to work with. This is actually a good problem to have for our purposes. We're trying to invest in areas that have growth, that have population, that have jobs. So, we don't want to really look into these rural areas anyway. So, don't worry about the blank areas. This is actually a good thing. And here we could see all of the regions in order by what we selected. So, rent to price ratio, if we scroll over to the right, the rent to price ratio is here, 0.14 being the highest. So, if we were to assess of what we filtered, the highest cash flowing area is this parish in Louisiana. We can also look at more info like total population, median household income, et cetera. So, this really helps to get everything into one spot, but you might be thinking, well, what is the data that you're aggregating in one place? So, like I mentioned, we have it here in the glossary, but also we covered it in previous lessons too. Some of that data that's free, like Zillow's housing data, Redfin's data, apartment list, and realtor as well. We also look at census data. Now, you might be thinking, do I need to go and look at all these sources to be able to understand a market? No, we did the work for you. So, you don't have to do that. It does take a level of data analytics skills to be able to pull all that information and to be able to throw it into a dashboard like this. So, the idea here is not to create a dashboard. It is to use a dashboard to start taking action. So, how do we start taking action? We are going to refer to our action steps. There are five that we talked about. Capital, how much can you invest? Investment strategy, are you looking for cashflow or appreciation? Acquisition strategy, how do you acquire this deal? Are you a W-2 worker that will use a traditional bank loan, like from PNC, or are you self-employed and you need to look at other strategies like DSCR loans or creative financing? Your hold and exit strategy, what are your plans to make the deal profitable? Are you holding it for the long term or maybe shorter term or you're maybe just doing a wholesale? Location strategy, what is your risk tolerance for where the property is located? Are you okay with going out of state? Landlord friendly only or non-landlord friendly? Are you okay with high climate risk? These are all things we discussed in the last section and you should have that logged in your action steps. Let's go through an example here. We have Alex. Alex is a newbie investor looking to acquire his first deal. He starts by filling out each part of his goal planning. So, capital, he has 80k saved in his bank. For investment strategy, he wants to prioritize cash flow. He really doesn't want to lose money month over month for appreciations. This is his main focus. He's a W-2 job, maybe works as a software engineer and he'll be able to secure a bank loan no problem. For hold, he seeks steady income and he's really cautious about short-term rentals. He's heard on podcasts that they can be really profitable. He doesn't want to put so much work into something for his first investment. Location strategy is he wants to target future appreciation areas. He is also okay with going out of state. But how does this actually translate to the strategy? So, how do we take what we know about Alex to actually put it into those five goals of what he can actually afford and also his risk tolerance? So, he said he can invest 80k, but that wouldn't be smart to put all his money down into an investment, right? We'd want to have reserves. So, he can be conservative and put 60k down on investment property. So, for an investment property, if he's putting 20% down, this means he can afford a property with a market value of around 300k. He discussed he doesn't want to lose money month over month and cares about cash flow, so investment strategy will be cash flow over appreciation. Acquisition strategy is traditional since he has a W-2 job and can likely get a lower rate just going with the bank in this way. He's reluctant on any big risk for his first investment strategy. So, long-term rental for stable monthly payments is going to be his goal. And for location, Alex is a little bit bullish. He's open to having his property in an up-and-coming area that can provide cash flow now with future appreciation upside. Alright, now we have a good understanding of Alex's goals and we can walk through the dashboard with it. So, Alex is going to put traditional money down and he's only looking at properties that are going to be less than 300k. So, I'm going to remove these higher price markets and you're going to see on the right-hand side, both the left part of the US and part of the right side also disappear. Why? These are high price markets like San Francisco and New York City. Next, Alex also mentioned that he's looking for cash flow. So, we're going to filter here on best for cash flow. We will also see the markets update as well. Alex said he's willing to go out of state. So, let's imagine that he maybe listens to a podcast or two or he has an uncle that's, you know, living in Florida. So, maybe he wants to or he's heard that investing in Florida could be profitable because there's two exit strategies, long-term as well as short-term rentals. So, he wants to focus on this area as well as maybe probably the whole southeast region. So, we're going to filter here and just look at the south. We now see our map is zoomed a bit. We can now see that we're looking strictly at the southeast, a little bit of south region. But one of the things that Alex is apprehensive about is going into an area that isn't good for long-term growth. Even though he's looking for cash flow primarily, he wants to still balance the two a bit. So, he sees here at this Iberville Parish, Louisiana is really high for cash flow overall. So, you might look at other metrics like going towards population growth because we know this also affects long-term growth. And we could see that there are some markets in Louisiana specifically where there's been a negative population growth. We can see that in our map scale that it's negative here in this orange shade. So, he likely wants to not invest in this area as well as some parts of North and South Carolina. So, he's going to now switch back and look at long-term growth as well to see how this changes which counties rise to the top. By now filtering on long-term growth and filtering on just specific states where he knows the population growth is trending upwards rather than downwards, Alex is now met with a new set of counties here that rank towards the top. We can hover over these counties to be able to see more information on list price, rent, and population. Now, for population, Alex may want to only invest in areas that have a higher degree of population because they likely have a mix of employment as well. When he does this, he sees now is only a couple of counties. We've gone from over a thousand in the search initially to now just 19. And here we could see Greenville, South Carolina as the top when it comes to long-term growth. We could see some interesting metrics around median household income, education, rent, as well as some for creative finance too. Now, again, the main thing he's focused on is cash flow. So, he can go back to cash flow once again and start to see that Greenville, which I believe was over here, is still pretty good. It's still in a medium to darker shade of blue. You could also look at up-and-coming since that was also an interest, which Greenville still is in a bluish shade, whereas Lee County, Florida also may be something of interest. So, at this stage, what Alex can do is now say that he's comfortable maybe looking at three specific areas. In this case, Greenville, South Carolina, because it pretty much ranked towards the top of long-term growth, but also was pretty strong on cash flow and up-and-coming. Lee County, Florida, since it's the top for up-and-coming in this instance. And he may choose one other, maybe based on where his uncle lives or some knowledge that he gained in a qualitative manner. So, this is how you're able to tie together your action points of your goals with data all within just one sitting. Now, I encourage you to explore using this map and do not take longer than two weeks to be able to choose one to three markets to go off of because you'll really understand where the value is once you start diving into neighborhoods and looking at properties. In the next lesson, we're going to cover how to marry this quantitative data, so numbers, with qualitative data, looking at news articles and more to help get a full picture of a market. See you there. If you found this helpful, I've got an exclusive offer for you. When you grab my new book, The Data-Driven Investor's Guide to Real Estate, you'll get free access to the full course, but only for a limited time. This course dives even deeper into what we cover here, so click the link below to grab your copy and start closing deals in the next 30 days.