Cap Rate Signals started as a private spreadsheet. [PLACEHOLDER: 1–2 sentences on what you were trying to figure out for yourself before this became a publication.]
By day I lead user experience at [PLACEHOLDER: company name, role description, what you do there]. By night I've been a long-distance real estate investor for years — [PLACEHOLDER: specific market(s) you've invested in, asset type, how long, what worked and what didn't.]
That dual perspective is what produced the framework. Product people learn to be suspicious of decisions that can't be tested. Real estate analysis is full of those — "hot market," "up and coming," "great fundamentals." They sound like analysis. They're actually just judgment in a tie. The point of the Curation Methodology and the Markets Are Built, Not Found essay is to put that judgment under a scoring system that produces falsifiable predictions instead of feelings.
The framework tracks confirmed corporate investment — semiconductor fabs, pharmaceutical manufacturing, federal and defense installations, healthcare expansion, hyperscale data centers, EV and battery manufacturing — and scores the metros most likely to reprice as workers arrive. It's built around two things most analysis collapses together but shouldn't: how much a market could reprice (pricing delta) and how likely that repricing becomes durable(durability probability). Most listicle "hot markets" have one but not the other.
What gets published here every week:
- The Now / Next / Later board — the canonical ranking of ~100 U.S. metros by catalyst strength and execution lifecycle. Updates every Sunday.
- A companion research essay explaining what moved and why, or working through the implications of a specific signal.
- Per-metro briefs covering the catalyst stack, the workforce profile, the housing absorption math, and the entry-window call.
Two metros — Boise and West Lafayette — are free to read; the rest are behind the Founder's tier.
Cap Rate Signals is a research publication. Nothing on this site is investment advice. Every prediction is tracked and published; the framework is meant to improve through its own failures, not to be infallible.