Like any novice does, when I first began investing in real estate I began scouring the web for tools that could help give me as much insight into the data as possible.
Now remember, as a biologist data is EVERYTHING to me.
When I was working on my M.S. degree we certainly didn’t present handwaiving to our committee to get a degree, we collected actual data and drew conclusions from it in a statistically meaningful way.
I truly believe that my former career and the arduous and patient process of data collection and analysis is what has allowed me to succeed faster than most aspiring investors.
To me it’s simple, remove the emotion, which includes a real estate agent’s subjective bias, and look at the opportunity through data.
Okay let’s get into the tools.
Before I went out and built my own tool I tried to make what was out there work.
Rentometer is a must but it lacks some key components about the actual area, median rent only gets you so far.
There are a few other tools out there, but none that really worked.
After two years of trying to scrape together data to make objective decisions about out-of-state properties, I realized that nothing on the market was going to cut it.
So I dug deep into several different databases to find the data that would allow me to be agile and confident at the same time.
Soon enough, it was working and my investment portfolio was taking off!
The part that was unexpected to me is that as I began sharing my successes with my investor community, they began asking me about properties they were assessing.
Within months I became so bogged down in consulting, that I was unable to invest.
That is when I decided to build VestMap!
VestMap is a PropTech tool that allows you to…