Creating Maps with Rental Data

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.