This guest post was kindly contributed by QMan, a REIN member and educator. You’re sure to see more from him in the future. - Chris

The Challenge
One of the challenges I face is trying to identify the going rents for a given pocket of a particular community before we make our purchases to help determine cash flow. Our real estate agents our great at giving us guidance, but I’m always trying to give that extra 10%.

What You Need:

• Spreadsheet Template from BatchGeocoder Web Site
• Google Account to Save Your Rental Map
• Tine and A Little New Knowledge

One Solution:

I have been gathering rent data from rental web sites and plotting them across a given area. It takes about 10-15 minutes to gather the data, by cutting and pasting into my spreadsheet.

Here’s an example of going to Craigslist and Kijiji to find out rents for Pickering.

1. You copy and paste the address and rental information into the spreadsheet template provided by BatchGeocoder. See the attached rental spreadsheet (to download, right click and save as).
2. You paste the cells that have text from your spreadsheet into BatchGeocoder. It validates the information and spits out a sample map, when you click the appropriate buttons.
3. At the bottom is a button “Download to Google Earth” – save the file to your desktop.
4. Login to your Google account – go to Maps – and select “My Maps.”
5. Create a New Map and Import the file you downloaded to your computer.

You now have a Rental Map that you can return to or build upon. Here’s the map that was generated by the spreadsheet. Try clicking on one of the little black dots.

View Larger Map

Also, here’s a more detailed spreadsheet you can play with. Original Post on myREINspace.

Related posts:

1. Ontario Rental Website Rankings – October 2009 Thanks for your interest in the Ontario ranking report. You...

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Dean Leischer and Dan Eisenhauer posted a couple of links on REINspace that I thought I should share.

The City of Red Deer posted an interactive map that’s worth checking out. It’s an interesting way to see zoning information and several other layers of relevant data.

Dan Eisenhauer pointed out the City of Edmonton’s Maps section which offers quite a bit of information. Some of it I don’t care about. Like this

I’ve gotta put my internet guy hat on for one minute though. Neither work on Firefox without the use of a plugin, which most people can’t figure out. That’s a big problem, because I’ll bet they won’t work with Chrome, Safari, or older versions of Internet Explorer. Further, City of Edmonton, why are you so stupid? Having an entry/landing page that has essentially no text on it, and then opens up a giant window of legal crap is only one step better than causing a pornado. I’ll also bet they’re not paying enough attention to their website to see that link, or to Google their own name and see my post. If they do, I’ll send someone a cookie.

Those are both great applications, and as a real estate investor, I love seeing more information like this shared. However, if you’re going to play in the internet, do it intelligently. In this case, Red Deer wins.

Now I’ll go play with some more maps.

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