Market Finder is a powerful tool to help you analyze your market area and identify the highest opportunity zip codes and neighborhoods. Use Market Finder to see which areas in your current county to best focus your marketing efforts in, or when you're looking to expand to a new area.

The first step to analyzing your market area is to select or enter in your state. Next, enter in your county or multiple counties to compare and analyze.
From the heat map, you can see the range of investor scores for each area.

Within the heat map, you can view:

Below the heat map, you'll find a breakdown by area of:

On the right side, you see a quick overview of:

Clicking Calculate will show you the exact property characteristics to pull based on past investor deals.

Click View On SiftMap to automatically apply these filters and add these properties to your account.

The Transactions section shows you the percentage of sold records that match this criteria. Click View All Transactions and you'll see details of the transactions history.
For more on Sold Properties, please see: [Need next article link]

The Homeownership Rate displays:

These details help you evaluate rental income potential.
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You'll also see a breakdown of percentages by property type, bedrooms and year built which helps you further refine the data you pull.
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When deciding on the best areas, you'll want to look at investor transactions, days on market, and home values. For the investor transactions, high volume indicates opportunity, while an extremely high volume signals there will be heavy competition with other investors. Select an area with a solid amount but not extremely high compared to total transactions.

Review the zip codes and neighborhoods in the top tier of results. Select the zip codes that will cover about 75% of the market area in the county. Rank the zip codes and select the top 5 or so to focus on for your tier 1 or "farm area".
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If you plan to fix and flip, you'll want to select zips or neighborhoods that are close to the median value for the county. Also select areas with a relatively lower days on market. Areas with high days on market means it may take longer to move the property.

For rentals, compare the homeowner ship rates and rental prices.

What is considered an investor transaction?

A sale where an LLC or company purchased the property from an individual.

Why doesn’t the investor count match what I know from a deal?

LLC's or Trusts selling to another company or trust are not included in the investor transactions counts.

How recent are the numbers?
Homes Sold is the last completed month. Investor Transactions use the last six completed months. DOM and Median Home Value refresh with public data updates for the selected county/ZIPs.

What’s the best single metric to determine where I should market?
There isn’t one. Use DOM + Months of Inventory + Investor Transactions + Price fit together for the fullest picture.

The Median Monthly Investor Transactions amount seems low, is this amount accurate?

Yes. If the median amount of monthly investor transactions seems low for the county, look at the individual zip codes. A few smaller rural areas in a county that also includes a large city can bring down the median and make it seem lower. It doesn't mean these are necessarily "bad" markets, just that you probably wouldn't want to focus on those particular zip codes.

Getting Started with SiftMap

Sold Properties: Analyzing Transactions