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Subscribers to The Apartment Investment Report can now create advanced customized reports online, directly from their “my account” page on our web site.
The advanced reports are based on sales information that we update frequently throughout the year. The advanced report gives users the ability to zero in on any property size range, age range, county, submarket, and neighborhood (for 55 neighborhoods in King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties). The final report you create will show investment trends by year, starting with 2000.
The trends you can track include:
Once you log in to your account and open up the advanced apartment investment report, click the “start over” button. That’s near the bottom of the form. That lets you start building your own custom report based on the complete database of sales. We know the button’s label doesn’t fit exactly if you are just starting for the first time, but do it anyway.
After you click the “start over” button, look the line just above “Step 1” on the form. It says “There are xxxx records that match your search criteria.” The number of records is the number of sales in the database you are accessing.
As you go through the form, customizing your report based on location, property age, and property size, the form will update the number of records after each step. That slows you down a bit, but it is important to monitor the number after each step.
Record count mattersWhy pay attention to the number of records? The report you are creating will show investment trends by year starting with 2000. So, if you narrow down your criteria too much, you will end up with very few sales since 2000 that meet your criteria. As an example, if after you make your selections the record count has dropped to 5 records, that means there will be less than one sale per year. That won’t give you the best foundation for creating a good trend report. So, by watching the record count carefully as you customize your report, you will be able to back up if needed and broaden your criteria to strike a balance between the ideal customization and the ideal quantity of sales for a good trend report.
Start by selecting the County you want, then the submarket. Once you do that, the neighborhood options will show for only the county and submarket you selected. Then pick a neighborhood.
Here’s a tip. If you want to look at investment trends at the neighborhood level, you may run into problems. There are somewhere between 300 and 600 sales a year. Spread over 50 neighborhoods, the averages are there will be 5-10 sales in a year in any one neighborhood. That’s fine, until you start customizing your report further. (Plus, some neighborhoods regularly have more sales and others fewer sales each year). So, if you want neighborhood trends, either avoid customizing your report for property age group and property size group, or customize broadly rather than narrowly. Remember, keep watching the record count.
These steps let you customize your report based on property size range and property age range.
After you make your selections in steps 2 and three, click the “Create My Detailed Report” button and you are done. Review the online report results to see if you need to broaden your selections. If you need to make a change, just click your browser back arrow. That preserves the choices you made so far.
You can use your cursor to highlight any of the tables and then copy/paste into a document or spreadsheet. That won’t work for the graphs, but once you have the table in a spreadsheet, you can easily create graphs. Please be sure to respect our copyright by referencing us and complying with our Terms of Use.
