When evaluating location of a park, which of the area stats. do you give more preference to?
I understand that when it comes to area population metrics - it’s important to look at the “metro area” as a whole.
However, when looking at things like unemployment, vacancy - you probably want to concentrate on the town numbers instead. Would you go as far as checking a zip code statistics? As in some larger areas zip code statistics could vary greatly from those of the city itself.
Thank you!
@dimochik We focus on the metro almost exclusively. While the city and zip stats can help reveal the kind of area you are in, most of our residents commute to work especially in smaller markets.
-Brandon
@brandon_reynolds, thank you. Interesting… so far i’ve been paying a lot of attention to the zip’s/city’s economic and housing stats. (Not population, though)
Maybe i should re-think my approach.
The #1 thing we check is population and #2 is median home prices. We like to see the 100,000 metro population and $100,000+ median home prices.
-Brandon
Makes sense to me.
Here in Southeastern Michigan, you can have part of the metro with a $30,000 median home price and another part with $300,000. A park may perform differently in the former zip than the latter.
Best Places is great, but I also use https://populationexplorer.com/ to do more of a deep dive into the area I’m looking at. The website is a little clunky and takes some getting used to. But it is fairly robust for a free site.