An Example

Let's take Scottsdale, AZ as an example since it's the city we most recently published a ranking list about. Scottsdale has, as of last Thursday, 500 properties for sale (excluding land only and pending sale properties). If you want the most you can get for your budget, you'll want to consider each property. For starters, you'll need to know square footage, lot size, the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, any hoa fees, and of course the list price.

If it takes you a very conservative 3 minutes to manually look up and add all the relevant property details to a spreadsheet, you're spending 25 hours compiling data. Of course, if you're only looking in a specific zip code, a certain price, or only want a single-family home, for example, you won't be saving quite as much time, but the principle remains the same. This is just the beginning of the task ahead of you, but our very small fee is already worth the time savings.

Next you'll need to add location specific attributes to your spreadsheet that you can't get from all the big real estate websites. How close is the property to amenities? What is the short term rental vacancy rate in the zip code? What are typical long term rents in the zip code? What is the expected appreciation in the zip code? This will take you at least 15 hours if you can find the data easily.

So you've now got a bunch of data now, but what do you do with it? You can sort your spreadsheet in various creative ways, but you won't have a holistic view of which properties give you the most per dollar. You'll need to assign a numeric value to each amenity, sum them for each property, correct the overall numbers based on location, and then adjust for the asking price. After all that, if you haven't made any mistakes, you should have a pretty good idea of what properties represent the best value. You may have to be a software engineer or pretty darn good with an abacus to achieve this, but conservatively you're looking at 3 weeks work or 120 hours.

Crunching the Numbers

Now we can total things up. It's 25 hours to compile the property data, 15 hours to get the location data, and 120 hours to make the data into something meaningful. So that's 160 hours or 4 full work weeks saved for each ranking list. 160 hours of tedious, tiring work saved for a very small fee.

We know that money is precious, but the only truly finite personal resource we have is time. Take advantage of our ranking list technology today and save yourself a little chunk of your life and help yourself make the most informed decision possible.