Lamar Cannon is a real estate investor who loves to travel the world.  He set up his business to allow him to do deals no matter where he is on the globe.  His strengths are strategy, marketing and a strong mentality.  He enjoys experiencing new cultures, trying new foods, reading, writing poetry and playing basketball.   In today’s episode Lamar and I talk about how he goes about determining which part of a city to focus his marketing on.  He’s been investing in a lot of different cities outside of his home city of Austin, TX.    Investing in other cities forced him to develop a data-driven system to determine where to focus his marketing.   As a wholesaler (but almost equally as important for rehabbers), he wanted to determine which zip codes have the most action.   What he does is goes to ListSource.com and generates a list based on the following criteria:   1. Entire City (and surround areas) 2. Single-Family Houses Only 3. Last Sale Date within last 6 months 4. 99-100% Equity (shows most likely was cash buyer) 5. Absentee Owners (most likely investors bought) 6. Companies Only (filter to filter down further to make sure getting investor buys)   This is how he gets the data he wants for free…   On the last page right before checkout, you can preview your data and filter it by zip code.  All he’s really interested in is the count of the matching transactions so just the record count per zip code will tell him which zip codes have the most investor transactions.   How cool is that?   Another filter he uses from time to time to determine great areas for wholesaling is the foreclosure rate for the zip codes.  The more foreclosures, the more likely it is that the area isn’t being served well by investors as the houses aren’t being bought before foreclosures are happening…LESS COMPETITION!   For someone like myself that does mostly rehabs, I wouldn’t focus as much on foreclosures, rather I’d include price ranges that are near the city’s media home value as that will be the where the biggest pool of buyers is.   All in all, we shared a lot of great info in this episode to help you determine where to focus your mailing and claim your target farm area.