Determine if an area is good rental neighborhood.

[Jason Fraser]

Does anyone have suggestions on how to determine if an area is a good rental neighborhood?

The questions comes from a house I recently looked at. Great condition, nice inside, recently remodeled kitchen. Neighborhood is great as well. It's a FSBO.

The thing I'm looking at is other homes to determine rent rates as well as competition.

Thanks for the help in advance.

[Andrew Syrios]

Here's my recommendations for what they're worth:

First, drive the neighborhood. Look for pride of ownership, dilapidated or boarded up buildings, lots of 'for sale' signs, people hanging out in the middle of the day doing nothing, trash, etc. This can help you get a good feel for the neighborhood. Also, call on the 'for rent' signs and ask around to get an idea about rents.

Second, research the area. You can find crime stats along with a lot of others by zip code on sites like homefair.com and clrsearch.com. You can also find income data by subdivision with the map feature on city-data.com. You can get comps from zillow.com (be wary of the zestimate though) and rent comps on rentometer.com, hotpads.com or craigslist (use the map feature). Loopnet.com has commercial sales data and there are many others like that.

Third, ask around. Your local REIA group can probably give you some good tips. But you can just ask people you meet in the neighborhood how things are around there.

I hope that helps.