u/Key-Acanthisitta-475

I’ve been flipping properties for a couple of years. On my first flip, I leaned heavily on an experienced PM to choose the area and property. I learned a lot, but looking back I didn’t really know how to validate the area myself, and that deal ended up taking 6 months to sell, which killed my margin. Since then, my approach has been to look for clusters of comparable sold properties on Rightmove/Zoopla and then work backwards to estimate a sensible entry price. But it still doesn’t really capture things like speed of sale, or whether an area is improving before it becomes obvious. Do any of you have a more robust way to validate an area beyond comps clustering? For example, time-to-sell, or anything else that helps you judge whether an area is actually strong for a flip? For context, I started building something for myself around this, but before I go too far down that rabbit hole I wanted to understand how others approach it and whether there are better methods people already use.