Best way to get current rental market data?

Question

Happy New Year everyone! I'm hoping to get accurate insight into a few rental markets I am interested in. It seems like overall the real estate market as far as buying is crazy, but I'm worried that once I purchase the property may sit vacant for a while. I read in an article that there are 25% less renters, which I'm guessing is because some are choosing to buy instead, while others are staying put? Maybe it's just the season. Either way, I want to make sure once I buy, I am able to rent the property out quickly. I want as much detailed information that I can get about how rentals do in the area. I have reached out to property managers in two of the areas and that has been helpful, but I would like to be able to gather data myself.

Any websites or platforms that anyone can recommend?

Diana Rivera · Answer

@Samuel Czachor Thank you so much!!! That's very helpful. I never noticed that feature in Zillow! Will definitely do more research using that and the census data. You brought up very good points, which i will keep in mind. Will have to come back to reread this post as I continue to dig in to the data. You're awesome! Thanks again!

Samuel Czachor · Answer

Hi @Diana Rivera! Brandon Turner brings up a few good resources in his book: Rental Property Investing... (highly recommended). Two online resources are Zillow.com/research/data and Census data which can be found at data.census.gov.

Zillow is selective up to zipcodes while I've been able to find census data on the county level for Los Angeles (although more selective data likely exists). Zillow shows the price of rentals over time while you can find vacancy rates in the census data. I would take these numbers with a grain of salt since the selectivity is not perfect (i.e. Zillow divides by zip code, but does not account for high and low-rent areas within a zip code). Census data has a similar issue with vacancy rates as one part of a county may have low vacancy rates while another is higher, but the data only shows the overall rate within the county. For these reasons, I think it's most reliable to look at the trends of rent prices and vacancies over time. If rent prices have been going up and vacancies down, that may be an indicator of a sellers-market making finding good tenants easier.

The data is a little raw (especially for census data), so if you have any trouble feel free to message me and I'll try to help you out!