HI - 

I’ve always found “best markets” discussions a little unsatisfying.

It often feels like people are talking past each other — appreciation vs cash flow vs risk tolerance — and the answer is always some version of “it depends,” which is true, but not very actionable.

Over time, I’ve come to think part of the problem is that we often mix deal analysis and market selection into the same conversation.

For myself, I started trying to separate the two:

• Market selection: Which cities even belong in the conversation?

• Deal analysis: What to buy once you’ve chosen a market

This post is about the first one only.

Instead of asking “what’s the best market?”, I started asking a slightly different question:

As a starting point, I built what I think of as a balanced lens — not optimized for max cash flow or pure appreciation, but something that tolerates tradeoffs and avoids extremes.

The idea was to compare cities relative to one another, rather than arguing whether a single metric is “good” or “bad” in absolute terms.

The dimensions I ended up looking at were things like:

• Home prices relative to national norms

• Rent affordability (rent vs income)

• Employment diversity

• Liquidity indicators (days on market, inventory)

• Structural friction (e.g. landlord-friendly vs tenant-friendly states)

Everything is scored relative to the set of cities being compared, and then stack-ranked. No claim that this produces “the answer” — just a way to make tradeoffs explicit.

I eventually put this into a spreadsheet so I could sanity-check my intuition. What surprised me wasn’t the rankings themselves, but how often the exercise surfaced where my gut feeling disagreed with the data — and forced me to explain why.

At least for me, that’s been more valuable than chasing a single “top market” list.

I’m curious how others here think about this:

• Do you start with a preferred strategy and narrow markets from there?

• Or do you pick a market first and adapt your strategy around it?

Would be interested to hear how others approach market selection before getting into individual deals.