I scored 894 US metros on Cash Flow, Growth, and Stability. Here's what fell out.

A few weeks ago Haseeb Durrani posted a sharp piece here about yield traps — high cash-flow ZIPs where the headline number hides shrinking population, depreciating prices, and vacancy that quietly eats the spread. It was the right frame, and I want to extend it.

Yield traps aren't a small-town problem. They aren't a Mississippi problem. They're a scoring problem — what happens when investors rank markets on a single dimension when at least three are needed to evaluate one.

So I pulled the data and scored 894 US metros (and 8,316 ZIPs where rental data supports it) on three dimensions: Cash Flow, Growth, and Stability, ranking each market against every other one. Here's what falls out when you actually run it.

The same-yield, opposite-outcome problem

Pull any two markets with similar gross yields and the pattern shows up over and over: identical yield, everything else diverging.

Two metros that are basically indistinguishable on cash flow:

• Marion, OH — Cash Flow 78, gross yield 8.1%, median value $182K
• Hobbs, NM — Cash Flow 83, gross yield 8.2%, median value $203K

A yield-sort puts these side by side, and an investor screening on rent yield treats them as substitutes. But:

• Marion, OH — Growth 80, Stability 93, 1-yr appreciation +6.9%. Signal: Strong.
• Hobbs, NM — Growth 25, Stability 82, 1-yr appreciation +0.6%. Signal: High Risk.

Same investment on the yield axis, entirely different on every other one. Buying Hobbs because "the math worked" means it worked on a spreadsheet for a year and then didn't — the equity went nowhere while the rent kept showing up. Hobbs is an oil-and-gas town in southeastern New Mexico; when commodity prices are down, so is everything else. That's the trap.

A transparency note before the leaderboard

My top three Strong metros — Sidney OH, Decatur IN, Lewistown PA — don't have measured rent yield at all. In markets where the rent index isn't published, I fall back to Days to Pending and absorption as a cash-flow proxy. That's defensible — fast resale and short days-on-market are real signals — but it's a different kind of evidence than the Marion/Hobbs comparison, where yield was measured directly on both sides. I'd rather say that out loud than paper over it.

What the data shows

Across the 894 scored metros:

• Strong — 3.1% (28 metros). 70+ on all three dimensions with positive appreciation. Mostly sub-$250K Midwest and Mid-Atlantic metros with quietly strong fundamentals — not the ones you read about on this forum.
• Clear — 17.7% (158). All three dimensions above the 50th percentile, positive appreciation. The bulk of where serious screening should happen.
• Neutral — 71.1% (636). No dominant signal either way. The honest answer for most of the country.
• Watch — 2.5% (22). High cash flow but one of Growth or Stability below average. Check the weak leg first.
• High Risk — 4.0% (36). High yield paired with a serious weakness or active depreciation. Hobbs is the archetype.
• Avoid — 1.6% (14). Two or more dimensions in the bottom quartile alongside high yield. Pure trap territory.

The headline: fewer than 4% of US metros earn an unambiguous "go" under a three-dimensional screen. If your buy box has more than that share of the country in it, you're either screening on too few dimensions or you've defined "acceptable" too broadly.

Three ways I actually use a screen like this

• Two-market gut-check — Put your shortlist side by side. If your top candidate has the same yield as your second choice but a Growth score 30 points lower, you've found something the spreadsheet wasn't telling you.
• Yield-trap hunt — Sort by Cash Flow descending, then look only at the High Risk markets. Every one is a place where the yield is structurally suspect.
• State scan — Pick a state, sort by overall. Twenty minutes will teach you more about which markets to research than a month of forum-scrolling.

One weird thing at the ZIP level

Go down to ZIPs and you'll see a cluster in the NY metro (Sag Harbor, Montauk, Bridgehampton — the Hamptons) and Atlantic City showing 18–25% gross yields on $1M–$5M homes. Those aren't cash-flow signals. They're short-term-rental and luxury-vacation distortions, where the rent estimate is calibrated against weekly summer rates rather than annual leases. I left them in rather than filtering them, because "exclude any ZIP over $1M" would also drop legitimate high-cost markets where 5% is the real number. For now the rule is: a 20% yield on a multimillion-dollar home is telling you about that ZIP's STR market, not a cash-flow opportunity.

What this is not

It's not a buy recommendation, and it's not deal-level analysis. It can't tell you about the specific street, roof, or tenant market inside a ZIP. It tells you which markets to spend your due-diligence time on and which to stop staring at.

Yield is the number that makes you feel smart. The other two are the numbers that tell you whether you actually are.

Happy to get into the methodology in the replies — the exact weights, the thresholds, the proxy re-weighting in no-rent-index markets. Especially the hard questions.

— David