All Forum Posts by: Shlomi Dayan

Neighborhoods are often classified A,B, C and D. Investors often like to look at their investments through rose colored glasses and a D sometimes becomes a C.

There is no official rule, but here is how I would look at this: find out what the median price is for a city. You can look on Zillow or Redfin. The median price is the dividing line between B and C. Anything below median is C or D, anything above is A and B. 

Look at the distribution between C and D, determine the median (you can ballpark it or use excel), that's the dividing line between C and D.

So for Milwaukee County the Median Sales Price is currently 219,000 which get's you approximately the following for single family homes:

class D: 0 to 140,000

class C: 140,000 to 219,000

class B: 219,000 to 300,000

class A: 300,000 to 1,500,000+

If you include all of the Milwaukee Metro area (which is bigger, about 1.6 million population) the median increases from 219,000 to 265,000. Milwaukee proper would be a bit lower. Of course that moves the whole classification system with it, so you can see it's not an exact science. I tend to prefer larger datasets though, as smaller sets are often more theoretical. 

Yes, you you can.    Freddie Mac just chaned to the seasoning requirement to 12 months.   Fannie at least for the time being is 6 months.