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Are you a real-estate investor looking for strong price growth and great cash flow?
Good luck with that.
It’s a truism among real-estate professionals that properties can be one or the other, but not both. In the world of single-family rentals, or houses that investors buy in order to lease out, metro areas in the middle of the country will likely offer dependable rental streams but none of the runaway price appreciation seen such hot coastal locales as Seattle.
Also read: The new housing play: helping priced-out renters become long-distance landlords[1]
New tools from Attom Data demonstrate that principle visually. Attom pulled together extensive data not just at the metro level but by individual neighborhoods to rank nearly 11,000 communities, giving each a letter grade from A to F. Those rankings depend on factors like school quality, crime and unemployment.
| Grade | Median Prices | Annual Home Price Appreciation | Avg School Scores (5 is Best) | Avg Crime Rates (100 is Nat'l Avg) | Unemployment Rate | Avg Fair Market Rent for 3-Bedroom | Annual Rent Appreciation | Gross Annual Rental Yields |
| A | $513,968 | 21.0% | 3.81 | 73 | 2.5 | $2,132 | 9.2% | 7.9% |
| B | $409,225 | 11.0% | 3.27 | 91 | 3.1 | $1,991 | 9.8% | 8.6% |
| C | $351,756 | 9.8% | 2.67 | 117 | 3.6 | $1,830 | 10.3% | 9.2% |
| D | $321,778 | 7.5% | 2.18 | 145 | 4.1 | $1,748 | 10.6% | 9.5% |
| F | $299,934 | -0.4% | 1.76 | 211 | 4.6 | $1,712 | 12.7% | 10.1% |
Information about the averages within each grade reveals a lot about what investors in each category should expect. Annual home-price appreciation for an “A”-grade property is about triple that of the “C” category, but annual appreciation in rents and gross annual rental yields are higher in the lower-rated categories.
And the beauty of being able to rank hyperlocal communities is that, in the words of Attom Data Vice President Daren Blomquist, “There is a lot of diversity. There are good neighborhoods in a lot of different parts of the country, and they’re not all going to look exactly like each other.”
That means that among the top three metro areas...