Hey guys, this is Jaren with retipster.com
and I recently found something pretty cool
that I wanted to share with you.
This website right here bestplaces.net
is pretty much the one stop shop for market research
when I'm picking out a new state or County to target in my land business.
Before finding bestplaces.net,
in order to find the different data points I needed to guide my decision,
I had to go to a number of different websites and a lot of them were really hard
to navigate and figure out.
I really love this website.
It's super easy to use and everything that I need is in one centralized location.
It has saved me so much time and hassle.
Now be aware there are a ton of things you can do with this website.
I'm barely scratching the surface in what I'm showing you today.
I'd highly encourage you to come jump on here and play around
because it's absolutely amazing.
Now with all that said, my goal in today's video is to simply show you
how I step by step use bestplaces.net to conduct market research in my land business.
So yeah, let's get to it.
Alrighty.
Welcome to my market research template.
There are several columns here that I briefly want to go over with you.
The first one being column A.
In a moment I'm going to show you how you can gather all the counties
for a particular state through bestplaces.net.
It's pretty amazing.
Then we're going to go through different places on the site
to gather all of the corresponding information here.
The unemployment rate, the job growth over the last 12 months, the future job growth potential,
the population growth since 2010 over the last 10 years,
the violent crime and then the property crime.
There are some pretty major reasons why I'm looking so closely at these different metrics
and I actually wrote an entire blog post about it over at retipster.com
So, if you haven't seen that yet, go ahead and check that out.
It's linked beneath this video.
Just know that these met rics are strong indicators that a market is in high demand
and if you want to sell a property quickly, it's best to try and go where the demand is.
Now, as a comparison, I'm generally going to be comparing
the County specific data to the national average.
As you can see here, here and then here.
The two exceptions are for job growth and population growth.
I'm using 2% for job growth because that's the standard in the apartment syndication space
and I figured, Hey, if it's working for them with how complicated syndications can get,
it's probably a really safe gauge to use in the land business.
I'm using 10% for population growth in the last 10 years
loosely based on the syndication world as well.
Though I'm being a little bit more lenient here because with land I'm not really concerned
with validating that there's a large enough renters’ population to justify my investment
and all that stuff.
Land is just a lot simpler, so I think that you can be a little bit more loose with it
when it comes to population growth.
Now I will say all of these metrics that I'm using are what worked for me.
I'm by no means saying that these are the standard or that should use these at all.
I'm just showing you what I do in my business so that you can hopefully see the principles here
and apply them to your unique market and circumstances.
Sound good?
All right.
Now let's go ahead and go back to bestplaces.net and start gathering this information.
So, the very first thing we're going to do is we're going to grab the counties.
So, I want to scroll down past this middle section here
where it says "Browse Best Places by State".
For the sake of example, today we're going to be using Florida
because that's where the majority of my land business is based right now.
And as you can see, once we click on a state bestplaces.net breaks down the entire state
either by city, metropolitan area, counties, or zip codes.
And that's a really big deal because I can click here on counties
and then all of the counties for the entire state of Florida are listed right here
and then I can just come here, highlight them, copy,
go back to my spreadsheet, right click and there you go.
Literally just a few clicks and you have all of the counties listed on your spreadsheet.
Now going back to bestplaces.net I'm going to use St. John's County
as the example for today's video because that's where I do a lot of business.
Now that we're on the County profile page,
we're going to scroll down and I want to show you there's a number of different categories
where you can do further in-depth research on a number of different aspects
about the particular market.
It's pretty phenomenal, but again,
I'm not showing you all the bells and whistles of bestplaces.net
I'm just showing you how to gather the information that I use to determine a strong market.
So, the majority of what we're going to be gathering is actually right here
on the overview tab with the exception of crime.
First things first.
We're going to go back up here to unemployment rate
and that's 2.8% so I'm going to go ahead and copy that, paste that in.
Then I'm looking for job growth.
I'm going to scroll down to where it says economy
and then I'm going to click where it says more economy.
There again, it highlights the unemployment rate.
But then it says right here that the job market has increased by 2.8% over the last year,
So, I'm going to go ahead and copy and paste that there.
The next data point that I'm looking for is future job growth
and it's actually on this economic page.
It's the next sentence here.
So future job growth over the next 10 years is predicted to be 50.1%
So, I'm going to go ahead and grab that, paste it.
Now I'm going to be looking for population growth.
Going back to the overview tab.
I'm going to scroll down again to where it says population here
and as you guys can see clearly since 2010 it has had a population growth of 25.4%
So, I'm going to go ahead and copy that and then paste that in the column.
And now the only thing left to grab is the violent crime and property crime.
So, we're going to scroll up over here to these categories and we're going to click on crime.
And right there at the top it says St. Johns County violent crime is 20.4
and then St. Johns property crime is 40.3
Pretty simple, right?
Let me now show you what this would look like once it's all filled out and complete.
As you guys can see, once all the data is collected,
I can simply come to one of these columns
and then sort Z through A
and now within seconds of doing that,
I can now see which counties are going to be most advantageous when it comes to future job growth.
I can do that with population as well.
I can do that with job growth over the last 12 months.
I can do that with an employment, with crime.
It makes it super easy to see which markets would be my best choice.
Now, I will tell you that for me, once I've outlined a handful of counties,
there's still one more step in my process.
I will then go and run some numbers to get an idea if you can afford to do business there.
If I have $20,000. Isn't going to be the smartest thing for me to use all of that on one deal
or should I be in a county where I can break that up over several deals?
Obviously that's a decision you have to make.
For me personally, I would rather be in an area
where I can break up that $20,000 over a couple of deals.
If after you've run your numbers and the price works for you, great,
go ahead and grab a direct malice for that County and send out some letters.
I hope that you found this video helpful.
If you did, and this is the first time you've heard of the land business,
go ahead and check out this awesome video that Seth did
explaining how the land business works in detail.
For more tips, tricks, and real-world guidance on how to crush it as a real estate investor
come and join us over at retipster.com