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comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  2019 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How to Buy a House the Wall Street Way

    Several factors go into predicting financial returns and future value, including proximity to a Starbucks, yoga studio or tattoo parlor—and whether a tattoo parlor signals a neighborhood on the upswing. It probably does if exercise studios and coffee shops are nearby, Mr. Kay says

...

    Entera handles demographic data delicately to avoid violating the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which prohibits discrimination by lenders, sellers and landlords based on race, religion, sex, family status and disability. It applies also to real estate agents and others who facilitate housing deals.

Heh.





kleinbl00  ·  2019 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Commercial leases don't have to abide by any of that shit. Yer damn tootin' I ran all sorts of demographic data in establishing where to drop. ESRI will give you reports on gob-smaking amounts of demographic data in 15-minute isochrones. They'll bloody tell you how much toothpaste any given ZCTA buys.

user-inactivated  ·  2019 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Sure, and if you do have to abide by the Fair Housing Act and you know Starbucks goes where the well-off white people are, you can use Starbucks as a proxy for demographics you aren't allowed to use.

kleinbl00  ·  2019 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Well, shit - you can pay for an ESRI report while looking for commercial leases. Or just buy it. It's entirely possible that as a commercial business venture, there's nothing forbidding you from buying in whatever neighborhoods suit your demographic needs. Where the FHA gets up in your grille is where you choose who to rent to, and you farm that out to a million penny-ante property managers who may or may not even know who their ultimate masters are.

Some of us are cheap bastards. Some of us measured the drive-time from any given birth center in Los Angeles to the nearest Whole Foods, then measured the distance from any given birth center in Seattle to the nearest Whole Foods, then looked for Whole Foods in Seattle without birth centers near them.

And then we look at the ESRI reports.

And then we get veen to run python scripts on census data to give us births per year per ZCTA for college-educated white women between the ages of 18 and 35.

And when all the data lines up we do a happy-dance.

You'll laugh. I back-checked the data (before ESRI, before veen) by running a correlation between birth centers and Whole Foods, then midwives and yoga studios. Then to prove a negative correlation I went with midwives and Five Guys Burgers & Fries and birth centers and audiology centers.

I are scientific.