Start with the property
The address, units, price, rent assumptions, financing, operating costs, and risk context define the property’s starting point.
Platform · Methodology
3Y Methodology.
How 3Y turns property inputs, local data, and your investment goals into a clearer real estate analysis.
Methodology
The flow is simple.
3Y combines the facts of a property with local context and an investor’s goal. The result is not just a market estimate; it is a personalized analysis of whether the property and the goal can meet.
Add local context
3Y brings in neighborhood and market signals so the analysis is not floating above the actual place where the property sits.
Work from the goal
Instead of only asking what the market says, 3Y asks what price, assumptions, and outcomes would fit the investor’s target.
Data sources
Public data, organized for investment context.
3Y uses federal, public, and research-backed datasets to describe local conditions. The goal is not to overwhelm the user with raw data. The goal is to translate the right signals into a calmer investment view.
Geography
How 3Y handles city and tract assignment.
City-level market pages are built from census tracts, but real-world boundaries do not always line up cleanly. 3Y uses consistent geographic rules so a tract is not double-counted across multiple cities.
Tract-to-city assignment
For city-level market pages, 3Y assigns a census tract to a city when the tract’s geographic centroid falls within that city’s boundary. This keeps each tract assigned to one city, even when a tract touches or crosses multiple municipal boundaries. It also avoids double-counting when 3Y summarizes city-level distributions.
Data granularity
We use the most local reliable data available.
Many signals are available at the census-tract level. Others are only published or statistically reliable at broader geographies such as county, metro, state, or national level.
When tract-level data is not available or would be misleading, 3Y uses the best available broader geography or a documented fallback method instead of pretending the data is more precise than it is.
Depending on the metric, that fallback may be a county value, metro value, state benchmark, national benchmark, or a modeled estimate based on nearby comparable geographies.
This is why some radius-based metrics may show the same value across the 1-mile, 3-mile, and 5-mile views. That usually means the most reliable available source for that metric is broader than the radius itself, or that the nearby comparison area does not contain enough distinct data to support separate values at each distance.
In those cases, 3Y keeps the value consistent rather than inventing false precision. The repeated number is a signal about the data’s available resolution, not a calculation error.
Interpretation
Markets are not uniform, so 3Y shows distributions.
A single average can hide the part of a city that matters most. 3Y often shows percentile ranges, medians, and local distributions because the spread can be more useful than one citywide number.
That is especially important for investors comparing neighborhoods inside the same market. The question is rarely “What is the city average?” The better question is “Where does this property sit inside the local range?”
Projected growth
How 3Y projects rent and price growth.
3Y projects both home-price appreciation and rent growth with the same recency-adjusted method, applied to two sources: the FHFA House Price Index for prices and HUD Small Area Fair Market Rents for rents.
For each local area, the calculation starts with two compound annual growth rates: a long-run rate measured over approximately the past decade, and a recent rate measured over the past three years. Each rate is annualized over the actual number of years in its window.
3Y then blends the two, weighting the recent rate at 65% and the long-run rate at 35%, and caps the result at the long-run rate so a short-term surge cannot lift the projection above the area’s longer trend.
modeled growth = min(long-run CAGR, 0.65 × 3-year CAGR + 0.35 ×
long-run CAGR)
This lets a cooling market reflect more recent conditions while preventing a brief hot streak from inflating projected growth. The construction is applied to both terms, using FHFA for price growth and HUD SAFMR for rent growth.
Related methods
Two systems make the methodology more personal and more local.
What 3Y does not claim.
3Y is not an appraisal, legal opinion, tax opinion, insurance determination, government map, or financial advice. It is a decision-support platform designed to help investors understand a property through their own numbers and local context. Users should review important decisions with their own qualified professionals, including financial advisors, real estate agents, insurance agents, tax professionals, attorneys, or other appropriate experts.