Cash Flow Friday Tip #6: Quickly evaluate new markets with these 4 free resources

In this week's Cash Flow Friday tip I'm going to share with you the 4 free resources we use in our business to perform a quick and dirty evaluation of a market #1: www.BestPlaces.net - this site provides info on cost of living, quality of schools, population, crime rates, unemployment rate, house prices and all of this can be search by zip code or by city and state. #2: www.City-Data.com - this site is somewhat similar to best places, but goes into a little more detail and even includes things like recent sold comps, a sex offender search, more detailed demographics, a breakdown of neighborhood data by zip code, building permit data, etc. This site is best for a more detailed and specific research #3: www.RentOMeter.com - Want to know what the market rents are for a given zip code or city/state? Then rent-o-meter is free and easy to use and will give you the quick and dirty data needed to see what properties are renting for in your market.   #4: www.Craigslist.org - We use craigslist for a multitude of things including; checking the local rental market competition - how many properties similar to mine are there available, how long have they been listed, are they offering move-in incentives.  Another thing we do is we run test ads to determine the demand within a given market for the type of property we're about to bring to market i.e., mobile home, apartment, SFR, etc. Some of you might find this misleading and unethical, but when looking to acquire  a property within a new market I want to make sure there is plenty of demand before we commit to buy. I'll talk in more detail about this particular system we use for running craigslist test ads in next week's Cash Flow Friday tip.