Market Insights is the deal's evidence tab: what the market around this property says about your rents, your assumptions, and the area — organized so you can move from "the score" down to the raw sources. This guide covers the Multifamily and Self Storage experience.
Top: the verdict and why
The tab opens with a market read — a score with the drivers behind it, what looks like opportunity, what looks like risk, and a short thesis in plain sentences. Treat it as a structured summary of the evidence below it, not a buy/pass verdict: the same market can be right for one strategy and wrong for another.
Rent evidence
- Rent intelligence compares your subject rents against public benchmarks — HUD Fair Market Rent by bedroom count and Census median rent. These are sanity checks, not observed market rents: being under FMR is a lead, not proof of upside.
- Nearby competition is the real comp set: rental comps with distance, unit type, and effective rent (net of required fees and amortized concessions — the honest number). Filter by radius and unit type (keyed to your own rent roll), and include or exclude individual comps so one outlier doesn't skew your set.
- Self Storage honesty: apartment benchmarks deliberately don't apply — HUD FMR measures apartment rent, so Mogul Deal Evaluator won't show a misleading storage comparison, and storage rent growth isn't suggested where reliable street-rate history doesn't exist. Your unit mix's in-place and market rents carry the analysis.
Suggested assumptions
Where the evidence supports it, the tab suggests underwriting assumptions (growth, vacancy) alongside what adopting them would do to your deal — and where the evidence doesn't support a suggestion, none is made. Applying market evidence to your numbers is always an explicit action; nothing rewrites your underwriting silently.
Supporting data
The accordions at the bottom hold the source material: the score breakdown, market data coverage (which sources are available for this location and at what geographic level — read this first when something looks empty), market trends, employment, and demographics.
A practical workflow
- Enter or import your rent roll first — the unit-type filters and rent-gap readings key off it.
- Read the competition table on effective rents; prune comps that don't genuinely compete.
- Compare the conclusion to your underwritten rents and growth — then adjust your assumptions in the Underwrite tab, deliberately.
Common questions
- "The score is good — should I buy?" — The score summarizes market evidence; the deal's own underwriting against your targets answers the buy question.
- "Sections say Not available." — Coverage varies by area; the data-coverage card names exactly which sources are missing and why. See Why Some Property Data May Be Missing.
- "Why no rent benchmark on my storage deal?" — Deliberate: the available benchmarks measure apartments, and honest silence beats a misleading chart.
- "I opened Market Insights on a park and it looks different." — It is different. A mobile home park deal shows Park market comps — lot-rent, occupancy and sales records from public registries and licensed imports — in place of the apartment rent intelligence described here, for the same reason: apartment rents are not pad-rent comparables. See Park Market Comps.
