As a real estate investor, let me say this is fantastic. The only suggestion I have is to include more demographic information. I usually need a lot more detail about the neighbourhood (ethnicity, income, profession, married %, pop by age group, etc). Are you familiar with zipskinny.Com? They do a great job at the demographics.
Where does the data come from? We collect and publish building permit data at the property level which might be a good add-on for investors looking to for info on the the condition of the structure. If you're interested in adding building permit records to your reports I'd love to discuss. You can email me direclty at chris [at] buildzoom.com
Perhaps this crowd won't agree, but "income properties" and "real estate investment" are horrible things when it comes to residential real estate. This is THE major driving force for urban cost-of-living increases on both American coasts. If I could downvote the whole concept of this industry, I would.
When speculators speculate on food commodities, people argue that it provides market liquidity to justify why that's not entirely illegal. Well, real estate is by definition illiquid, so speculative activity in this area benefits nobody but the speculators.
>If I could downvote the whole concept of this industry, I would.
So, are you the one that downvoted most of the comments in this thread?
>"income properties" and "real estate investment" are horrible things when it comes to residential real estate
Don't confuse flipping houses with actual real estate investment. There are 45m renters in the US, all living in "income properties." Why is this horrible?
I still don't understand why you think RE investment is morally wrong.
Would also love to know how you came up with, "real estate investment...is THE major driving force for urban cost-of-living increases on both American coasts."
Just read my top comment or talk to any economist. You're gambling with fundamental human assets (as are food speculators), except that in urban real estate, there is very limited elasticity in supply. So your self-interested activity takes profit off of and drives up the cost of living for no gain to anyone but you. The fundamental value of the asset is unchanged for your involvement, but the price is higher.
>Jobs + great weather + anti-development policy = high prices.
The thing is, the anti-development policy is a big chunk of that, and it derives directly from "real-estate investing" (and not just renting, owning.) - so you could say that you are agreeing with the parent, I mean, if you take a generous interpretation of "real-estate investment" that includes homeowners who consider their house to be an investment.
Who votes? mostly people who own property and want that property to increase in value. This means we (here in silicon valley) have a regulatory system that makes building new high-density housing quite difficult.
In California, the problem is exacerbated by measures like prop 13, which insulates property owners from the tax consequences of increased home values.
Leasing, I agree, is super unpleasant. Especially in commercial situations. (It's like buying, only less flexible!)
But, it's a really difficult problem to solve. I mean, encouraging or subsidizing homeownership seems like an obvious first step, but that has non-obvious negative effects on the regulatory regime, because more homeowners means more voters voting for policies that make building more housing difficult.
I mean, obviously, parent comment isn't being productive; but one can trace a lot of the high cost of living at least here in silicon valley to homeowners blocking high-density construction in an effort to drive up the value of their own assets.
Of course, the parent comment seems to think that renting out real-estate is a major part of this... and personally, I don't think that is the case. I don't think that landlords are the political force that homeowners are, and the scarcity of housing, at least in silicon valley, is largely a political problem.
No, it really isn't, and you're dramatically ignorant about how the American real estate market presently functions if you think that's true. (Great weather? You think the east coast has great weather? You're joking clearly.)
Does all of the property analysis currently happen in individual reports? As a RE investor, I'd love some comparison tools to comp out similar properties side by side.
Shoot me an email if you want to chat further. Love talking all things RE tech.
This is awesome. I'm investing in Waterloo, Ontario and I've built my own spreadsheets to help me make good investment decisions. This blows it out of the water. I'm glad you made this product.
Right now you can generate a report on the property using as little as Address, Purchase price, Square footage and a guess of beds/baths. We estimate the rest based on market data - the basis for each estimate is shown in the report.
As someone who doesn't know much about real estate, this comment made me sign up, while the web site confused me a bit.
Keep it up, I like the report on my house.
I actually saw this posted on Reddit earlier and was super impressed! Glad to see it here posted as well :) I was silently wondering if you were aggregating MLS data.
I run SimplyRETS[0] - we provide a normalized API to MLS's RETS data. I'm not trying to sell you anything, but I'd love to team up - You should shoot me an email (cody@simplyrets.com)!
Edit: looks like zipskinny is down, but here's an image of what their chart looked like: http://www.bobguskind.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/zip-ski...