I started wholesaling in El Paso. Six months in, I killed it as a market — not because the deals weren't there, but because every seller conversation kept hitting a language barrier I wasn't equipped to work around yet. Sunk cost be damned, I walked.

The mistake I almost made next was picking my new markets off vibes. "I heard Macon's good." "Someone in a Facebook group said Waco's hot." That's how most of us pick markets, and it's basically gambling.

So instead I ran it as an actual filter: population 90-100k+, secondary/exurban, at least 45 minutes outside a major metro core (not the metro itself — too much competition there), and cross-checked against real investor activity, not forum hearsay. Landed on Cuyahoga County (my hometown, so I know it cold), Jacksonville, Macon, and Fort Wayne.

Here's the part nobody tells you when you're starting out: the bottleneck was never my script or my hustle. It was skip-trace data quality. I could out-hustle a bad list all day and still get nowhere, because half the numbers were stale or wrong-owner. Fixed that before I fixed anything else.

Still building this. Still learning it in real time. Not pitching anything here — just curious how the rest of you picked your markets. Data-driven filter, or did you just start where you were and adjust as you went?