Real estate data for investors

How often do you hear about data analysis as a smaller real estate investor? In many cases, data analysis and real-time data are phrases reserved for larger businesses. Companies gather data on the various aspects of their business, store that data in vast data centers, and analyze it to maximize their productivity or get the most out of their budget.

Data works on a smaller scale, too! Whether you own one property or one hundred, you can benefit from data analysis. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy! You can use it to find out the best neighborhoods to invest, the income potential of your next property and much more. You can use data to help you make better decisions for the success of your portfolio. Instead of just relying on guesses and gut feelings, you can have some solid information to minimize your risk, gain a competitive advantage, and thus build wealth more quickly as a real estate investor.

Here are some tips on how to benefit from real estate data in your own business, no matter the size.

Know what categories you want to include in your data analysis

It’s a good idea to go in with a goal. What are you comparing? Are you trying to decide between two or three choices based on certain factors? Here are some of the things you may want to be looking at:

• Locations

• Sales prices

• Rent prices

• Sales of comparable properties

Now that you have a basic idea of what you want to compare, you can move on to researching and gathering your data.

Let the major companies do the heavy lifting

There’s no need to do all the calculations on your own. Huge real estate players such as Zillow have already done much of the work for you when it comes to property values. Start your research there, or on other major sites like Realtor.com or even Airbnb, if you’re thinking about investing in vacation rentals. You can put in any address and find a wealth of data including average cost of ownership, neighborhood info, property sales histories, and more. Use a program like WebDataHub to quickly pull data into a Google spreadsheet. You’ll save time while getting all the data you need into one place.

Research foreclosure reports

One public source of data is foreclosure reports. They’re useful because they don’t just help you research an individual property – they can also help you decide on a neighborhood or market to invest in. If there were multiple foreclosure report filings in a short period of times, that means that the economy wasn’t doing great in that area. It may give you an idea of the history of the area where you plan to invest. Just keep in mind that foreclosure reports can be a bit “behind the times” and don’t always offer trending data.

Find reports with info from other investors

It’s ideal to know how many investors there are in an area (so you can ensure the market isn’t oversaturated) and how much these investors might be making (so that you know how much to invest).

Fix and flip reports are one way to gather data from other investors. Whether you’re planning to employ this strategy or not, you can get some value from these reports. They are available monthly and annually in some areas and can help you find out how many homes have been flipped, how profitable they were, and whether there are too many or too few home flippers in the area. These reports are great because you can figure out gross yields and discover how much you might actually make if you were to invest in that house flipping market.

Create a data mashup and discover brand-new insights

A data mashup is a way to compare two properties or neighborhoods at a glance. A data mashup, or data mash, is when you integrate two or more data sets into one graphical interface. You can look at it and visually see how two different properties have performed in the past, or you can compare two neighborhoods to see how much homes are selling for in that area.

When you analyze the data as soon as you get it, you’re benefiting from real-time data: information that is up to date with the latest trends. By creating your very own data mash, you have the power to stay ahead of the competition. And as all real estate investors know, it is essential to stay one step ahead!

Some investors do this with a spreadsheet and lots of copy/pasting. However, you can do the same thing much more easily with a Google Sheets add-on like WebDataHub. This program lets you pull together data from Zillow, Realtor, Airbnb and more! It’s much easier than copy/pasting everything.

Use your new information to choose the best neighborhood, property, and strategy for your goals.

Every real estate investor has different needs and goals, so there’s not just one right answer for everyone. Advice from others will only take you so far. When you gather your own data together and compare it against your goals as a real estate investor, you can be so much more successful!

Maybe you’re trying to determine which neighborhood has rising property values or which house will be better as a vacation rental. Perhaps you’re trying to find the best strategy going forward, whether that’s a fix-and-flip or a buy-and-hold. Some basic real estate data analysis can help you with all of these things.

Real estate data analytics can help you make and save more money as an investor!

Hopefully, this has given you some ideas on how you can look at complex data in a simple way. You can use that data to choose the most profitable property or avoid making a bad purchase. You don’t have to be a data analysis expert to discover key insights from data, and you don’t need a lot of special tools aside from the information and reports that are freely available online. Good luck with your real estate investing endeavors!

Maria Gushchina