May 7, 2007 - Bert Sperling's new book, "Cities Ranked & Rated: More than 400 Metropolitan Areas Evaluated in the U.S. & Canada" (Wiley Publishing) hits the stands today and offers many more choices than the overall top ten best places to live. The book offers city rankings in different categories, allowing people to choose the best place for individual tastes. This information can be extremely beneficial to investors interested in wealth building through real estate. While every city offers excellent deals, being able to position your sale to people with a particular interest or being able to endorse your sale with a Best Places ranking may make your property more desireable.
The city rankings depend on ten broad categories that have been developed through Mr. Sperling's years of experience in determining Best Places to live. The ten categories are economy and jobs; cost of living; climate; education; health and health care; crime; transportation; leisure; arts and culture; and quality of life. Statistics about each of these categories are fed into his software and lead to the determination of our overall top cities. This year's top five overall are:
1- Gainesville, FL
2- Bellingham, WA
3- Portland, OR
4- Colorado Springs, CO
5- Ann Arbor, MI
But if you feed different criteria into the software, you can get customized reports for different tastes. For Singles, the top cities are New York, Los Angeles, Washington, Boston, and San Francisco. For Families With Children, try Louisville, CO; Gaithersburd, MD; Roswell, GA; Lakeville, MN; and Flower Mound, TX. Retirees might like Northampton, MA; St. George, UT; Charlottesville, VA; Fayetteville, AK; or Gainesville, FL.
Mr. Sperling's site, www.bestplaces.net, offers a repository of information about many cities throughout the US. Visitors to the site can plug in any city to receive links to news and reports about that city. Mr. Sperling also performs custom searches for a fee. Mr. Sperling has worked with Money magazine, Self magazine, Hartz Mountain Corporation, and a variety of other businesses to determine particular rankings for different search criteria.
Visitors to our site, www.lockboxdeals.com, can use the resources of Best Places to research a potential real estate investment. For example, if you are interested in one of our deals in Sparta, TN, just type it into the search engine on Best Places to find a region map, links to information about demographics, schools, and news.
We are working on LockboxDeals to incorporate this information seamlessly into our site for the benefit of our visitors. We would love to hear your comments.
Another fun site for finding your best place to live is www.findyourspot.com. This site allows you to take a short quiz with a variety of questions including interests in activities, religion, housing prices, weather, etc. The site will then compile a list of 24 cities that suit your individual interests. It will also allow you to search for housing and employment in your choice.
So whether for your primary residence, a vacation home, or part time home, take advantage of all of the benefits of the internet to find your Best Place. |
