Hello, my friends and welcome to another episode of Ask Marco where I answer your investing related questions.

Today's question comes from Ryan. He says, Hey Marco, I have been listening to your podcast for a few months. What? That's all, I'm only kidding. When you mentioned you're tracking over 400 Realestate markets, is that available on your site? What you said in your Kansas city market spotlight about being a city in the top 100 is a good thing. How do you find that data? Okay, so couple questions here and I think it's centered around finding or asking the question, where are the hot markets? So my first comment is, what is a quote-unquote hot market? Sometimes people ask this question, not only to me but just openly everywhere, whether it be in the media or online. And people ask, where are the hot markets? What is a hot market?





I've been asked to write articles about hot markets, you know, where are, what are the hot markets? The question is, is how are you defining a hot market hot in what sense? In terms of a price appreciation, historic or current, what is the trend? Is there a certain percentage of year over year price increase? Does hot mean that there's a high level of investor interest is hot mean that it's um, it's just a great cashflow market and people are very interested in it. And that doesn't necessarily mean that it's appreciating in double digit territory year over year. I think generally speaking, a lot of people define a hot market as a market where prices are appreciating or increasing at a fast rate, a rate that is above historical averages, whether nationally or for that local market. So when that happens, people take notice of it and the media starts reporting on it on a regular basis to the point where that market becomes inflated, pricey, overpriced, overvalued, unaffordable.

And now all of a sudden we have a bubble market, not just a hot market. So we have to talk about this in terms of you know, how we define a hot market. Having said that, your first question is, is this available on our website? No, not yet. And I say yet, but we were, I am planning to post some sort of summary information on our new website, which is again, like I've said before, launching soon has been delayed a few times because of some bugs and a couple of changes that I wanted to make. It will be a dynamic ongoing morphing website from this day forward, but I do plan to have regular, whether it's monthly or quarterly summaries of the so-called quote unquote hot markets. So that is coming. It's not there yet. I will put something up. I'm just not sure how I want to do it yet.

Now to your second question, how do you find the data? Well, complicated answer because we actually aggregate, the data comes from multiple sources, not just one source. All markets are ranked using a proprietary scoring system that we use. That's something just helps us aggregate the data and then rank them in a particular order based on the weighting of different elements. However, the data is your question, how do you find the data? So my point is the data is not in one place, but the data is out there. Most of it is free. So I'll give you some websites here which are great and you can go and find more information than you'll ever want and put it together for yourself so you can find the pieces of the puzzle. So the first one is, this is kind of a little bit more of a basic one.

The website is known as the Department of Numbers. Yes, you heard that right? It's the Department of Numbers and the URL is DEPT as in short for a department, DEPT of Numbers. So Department of Numbers, but the department is abbreviated, D E P T, deptofnumbers.com and on there you will find information about pretty much every major Metro area by state and Metro. And you will also find information about employment, unemployment, income, rent, GDP as in gross domestic product. The even have information on inflation, rents, rent trends,