How To Find Great Neighborhoods For Your Next Property
Your one-stop shop for all the info you need!
When it comes to investments, I tend to lean towards the options that are more passive in nature. That’s one of the reasons why I favor dividend stocks and REITs (real estate investment trusts). During my house search, I searched the web for towns that met my standards. I decided to move to an area that wasn’t too far from home but still felt new. Looking at properties an hour away, sometimes you just don’t know what a town will be like until you get there and see it for yourself.
Thankfully, a useful site to give you all the information that you need exists! Niche.com.
You get a grading system for each important category. This includes public school quality, housing in terms of affordability and availability, good for families, diversity, nightlife, and crime & safety. These are all the important highlights that you can get at first glance before diving in deeper.
I like the ability to filter towns by certain grading scales. For example, want to find a town where the minimum crime and safety score is a B+ and the public schools are at least an A? You can do that! Want to find a town that has a great diversity score and great for families? You can also do that!
If you don’t know where to start your search, there are already pre-curated lists of best places to live, best places to work, and best places with a walkable town. I mean, anything that you can think of is on Niche.
Once you find a town, you can see more details on the people and real estate within the town. For example, lets take a look at Alpine New Jersey together. You can see the median home value and the median rent for the area. You can also see the breakdown between what percentage of the town rents versus how many people own their home.
In addition, you can also see any properties that are for sale in the area.
Each segment of the grade is broken own with relevant stats to support the grade. For example, taking a look at the crime ratings for Alpine, we can see the below. We can see how many property crimes are in the area between burglary, theft, and car theft. We can also see the rate of violent crimes and in this case, Alpine has virtually none.
We can also see the diversity score encapsulates the percentage of people within each age bracket. In addition, we can see what percentage of the town is college educated and what percentage is not.
Lastly, Niche also offers you the ability to see the town’s median household income along with the ratings for each school in the area. They also have a comment section on the bottom where people can leave honest reviews on what it’s like to live in a town. I really like this site and it’s been my go-to for researching towns.
Hope this was helpful!
You can read more and check out my stock analysis articles over on Seeking Alpha.