Get to Know The Neighborhood Of Your Investment Home

Product News

Jul 11

While everyone’s investment process and criteria are different, we have asked and noticed a trend of people who rank neighborhood quality as one of the top parameters in choosing their investment property.

Previously, Doorvest developed its own neighborhood score calculation to rank neighborhoods based on parameters such as crime rates and other variables. But now, we’ve double-downed on the Doorvest Neighborhood Score by powering its backbone with Niche.

From Niche:

Niche has the most comprehensive data on U.S. schools and neighborhoods.
We rigorously analyze dozens of public data sets and over 100 million reviews and survey responses to help you understand what a place is really like.

Before we continue, we wanted to give many thanks for the gracious feedback provided by many of you. This includes feature requests, bug fixes, and overall process suggestions.

New Functionality

You can read more about the design and ideation process below, but first, let’s cover what functionality has been added!

You’ll see an exciting new section on our Doorvest Home Profile that will give you an insight into the overall Home Overall Grade, which is a collection of data from millions of reviews and public data sets captured by Niche. You can read more on the Niche data philosophy in their article here, but to highlight a few, they collect public data from FBI, the U.S. Census, and more to calculate this grade.

*An example of a Home Overall Grade of a Doorvest investment property in Houston, Texas.*

An overall home grade is great, but what’s even better is more insight into what life looks like in your home’s neighborhood. Thanks to speaking with many of our Doorvestors, they gave us insight on what data they would love to see too. To fulfill those wishes, we’ve also added data and grades for:

And not only that, but our Doorvestors wanted to understand how these homes performed in comparison to others in the neighborhood. And so we did that as well. You’ll now find data on:

Median Home Value (vs Your Home’s Value)
Median Real Estate Tax (vs Your Home’s Real Estate Tax)
Median Rent (vs Your Home’s Rent)

And while we’ve made this change to our Home Profile, you can still expect data provided by GreatSchools that was always on the home profile rating the schools in the area as a reference.

The Product, Design, and Engineering Process

It really comes down to understanding our customers. This one was as simple as asking our customers what information they wanted to see us gather so that they could make data-driven decisions as part of their investment process. Asking for feature requests, providing feedback for our team, and giving suggestions for improvements are foundational components of our design process. We review everything provided by you, our Doorvestors, and our internal team members!

For an update to the Neighborhood Score section in our Home Profiles, we wanted to bring the most relevant data to you so you can get all the information you need as well as move Doorvest a step closer to being that “one-stop-shop.” This is even further compounded in importance when considering that the Doorvest transaction happens 100% online and most often, many Doorvestors don’t live in the areas they are purchasing their property!

We aimed to create an experience that gave back a Doorvestor’s time while increasing the amount of information that one could use to make an educated choice on a home they were pursuing.

In short…

We know that the introduction and insight of new data on neighborhoods welcome changes that will improve the customer experience.

Closing this out with one of the Doorvest core values: The Door Is Always Open. We always accept constructive feedback, suggestions, and bug reports, and you can expect to see them implemented in the near future. To request any new feature, click here, or email our Product Manager, Justin, directly here.