Why You Need to Understand Your Local Market
The real estate market is all about local conditions, and the best way to learn about such conditions is to research them yourself. The good news is that there are all kinds of real estate tools that you can use to help you learn about your local market.
When I was starting out with my own work, I never really had any tools that I could use to help me do this, and even if I did, I wouldn’t have been able to use them.
All this has changed, fortunately, and today, it’s just one more daily habit of my career to check the market and share data from my social media to my clientele, of course, I know how to leverage various tools and research methods to enhance my work. I want to share some of these tools with you, so that you will be able to understand your own market and enhance your own real estate career.
Why Local Market Research Matters
Real estate markets are always local. What you know about local neighborhoods and communities will ultimately affect your own prospects, which is why it’s important to always do your research.
In Miami, for example, the price to rent ratio is around 18 to 20%(depending on the area), which means that it is much cheaper to rent than buying properties here. This gives real estate investors an advantage over people who want to buy and sell houses.
Now, I can give you other facts about Miami’s real estate market but the important point here is that market research will help you understand which types of properties are most profitable and which ones are not.
Furthermore, knowing how your local market works will allow you to find the best deals without spending a lot of time finding them.
Real Estate Tools for Researching Your Local Market
There are all kinds of tools that you can use to research your local real estate market. For starters, there’s Google Maps. It’s not specifically designed for the real estate industry but it’s a good basic tool if you don’t have access to anything else.
You can use Google Maps to look at local pictures as well as compare different properties. It’s also a good choice if you need to gather information about a particular property in your area.
Another good example is Mashvisor’s Property Finder Tool which features machine learning algorithms to identify the most lucrative properties in a particular area.
Unlike Google Maps, this tool is designed specifically for the real estate industry, and it has a lot of information to offer new and inexperienced real estate investors.
Another good tool is Esri’s Geographic Information Systems, which allows real estate agents and investors to find lucrative deals based on the latest geographic data in their vicinities.
Esri’s features are a little advanced but they can be quite helpful if you know how to use them properly. The geographic information may also be used as proxy data for all kinds of features, such as weather patterns, cost of living and population density.
And finally, there’s Reonomy, which allows users to research different commercial properties and buildings. This platform offers data on 99% of all commercial assets in the United States, though you may be able to find other platforms that were specifically created for your own area.
In any case, this tool is great if you want to invest in commercial properties, and they can also give you a better idea of how local commercial real estate works and what they have to offer.