Best zip codes in Tucson to invest

[Natalie Teramoto]

Hi BP Community! I recently started looking into Tucson, AZ as a new area to invest in and was wondering if anyone has any insight on the best zip codes there.  I've been hearing great things about Tucson and its potential, but at the same time I see that crime rates are high.  I appreciate any insight fellow investors in the area can offer! Thanks in advance!

[Patrick Allen]

This thread hasn't really gotten any eyeballs since I posted the numbers below, and the same data felt appropriate to place here.

Thanks to the work of @Dave Meyer and the BP Insights team, I was able to take rental market data sorted by zip code to create the following spreadsheet of Tucson's top zip codes:

You will see I sorted the data based on average inventory for a 5-week period in February/March 2020: the number of rental properties being advertised "for rent" as presented in the BP Insights data set. We can also see the "concentration" of rental properties per zip code (vs. all residences), which when combined with an "A, B, C, D Neighborhood" classification system (see this blog post for a simple explanation) can paint a pretty specific picture about what micro-markets might work for a given niche & strategy. In this case "R" stands for rural, as some of these zip codes include quite a lot of open desert-scape.

Generally speaking: anything in the city proper (River Rd -> Golf Links | Oracle -> Wilmot) is going to have a higher prevalence of rental properties than the periphery, although Sierra Vista is a respectable 8th place with nearly 100 of their own rental property options. 

A discussion on the fastest appreciating markets in town would be a very different one, but hopefully this gives a more empirical spin on the conversation.