To help investor clients find the best houses that will rent well and have a better chance of giving a good return on investment, I've been screening houses based on the rents of nearby comps.  I have no problem looking at houses 8 hours per day, but strangely enough most investors have jobs or businesses to run, and it is more time efficient to look at houses that a rental comparable market analysis (CMA) show would rent for a decent return.  That system does work, the only problem is evaluating houses all day long tends to slow down what should be my main business of listing and selling houses.

One of the tools that realtors have is a website/app called RPR that has some great tools for estimating home values (much more accurate than Zillow)   It also has some heat maps that show home values, price per foot, distressed properties, etc, and allows us to find prospecting areas for more focused searches.

One thing it doesn't show is rental prices, to create a similar heat map with rental prices I have to download the listings, convert the addresses to gps coordinates then plot them on a map.  An example is above, the real value is to zoom in both maps more closely and prospect based on returns vs cost.  Then setup the search areas in the mls to watch for good properties. (the left half of the image is courtesy of RPR)

If you're interested in seeing this data and images in more detail, send me an email and I'll hook you up.