Relevant Data for Deals

[David Diner]

io,

I'm just getting my feet wet, and am having trouble finding relevant data (median values for sale price, rent, repairs) and other secondary data (like rental vacancy rate, eviction rate, crime statistics, income, rent-to-own ratio, etc...). Mostly I want this data to try some deal analysis with 'ideal' data. If I have this data at a monthly resolution going back far enough (a couple of years should suffice), it would be fun to try to find out how these values interact with each other. (For those who are curious, I would be doing a transfer entropy analysis. If I get interesting results, I'll make sure to share them here!)

I found that CityData has a lot of the data I am looking for, so I've been using that for now. but I'm wondering if there are more specific services for more specific data sets.

I've found that I can get a gist for list price from zillow/trulia, and I've also found sites like RealtyTrac and FindTheHome, and I'm curious as to what a reliable source would be (I feel like I heard somewhere that sale prices are a matter of public record... in which case is would some municipality website / data store have the data available to play with?) Also, is there a data source that would have reliable data through a few years ago?

For rent, I was going through Cragislist and just taking an average, but this leaves me with the same problem of not having a time history of rent averages. This data is probably harder to come by, but if anyone happens to know where the information is kept, I would be much obliged.

Maintenance costs... I had limited luck with. I found an article (Estimating Annual Home Maintenance Costs) which was in agreement with the 50% rule. Is there a reliable source that might have more specific numbers? (I feel like the most reliable source would be to ask landlords in the area).

One interesting thing to note... there was a post here that suggested using census data, and Redfin for some of these data. This was definitely helpful! I'm just wondering if anymore resources popped up since then (the post was over four years old).

Thanks for reading / any good data that comes out of this / sincerest apologies if I posted this in the wrong place.