DeForest, WI: average rent, home values, and rental yield

Why this grade

Overall 53.4 is a weighted geometric mean of the three category scores. Because they are multiplied rather than averaged, their distances from a perfect 100 combine as an exact identity, and each category's share of that distance is the arithmetic below, not an estimate. Cash Flow carries 45% of it, which is what makes it the binding constraint on this grade.

Inside Cash Flow, the shortfall splits over the factors the model scored here, exactly, in proportion to their published weights. The largest component is expense-adjusted yield (weight 22 of the category's 35, 25th national percentile, 85% of the category's own shortfall); next is price to income (weight 13 of the category's 35, 77th national percentile, 15% of the category's own shortfall).

What this is not. It is not a claim that a different value on any one factor would produce a different score or a different grade. Every factor is scored as a national percentile and the grade is a percentile cut against the other 4,812 ranked markets, so this market's position moves only relative to all of them, never on its own. 2 of the 13 factors could not be measured for this market (violent crime, property crime) and had no credible reference group to impute from, so they are dropped: each category renormalizes over the factors that remain, and a dropped factor is never scored as neutral. 2 of the 13 factors were imputed (rent growth, home-value growth): the model had no city input of the kind it scores, so it used a reference median instead of a measurement (the same county, or the same state and population band; a national median for a yield cost input), and the factor table marks each one as a fallback.