find-markets

Find Markets — Investment Screener

Find US real estate markets that match specific investment criteria using guided filters.

Instructions

1. Ask the user for their investment criteria. Present these as options:

   "What are you looking for? I can filter by any combination of:

   • Budget: Maximum home price (e.g., under $300k)
   • Rental yield: Minimum yield % (e.g., above 5%)
   • Appreciation: Minimum YoY appreciation (e.g., above 3%)
   • Affordability: Maximum price-to-income ratio (e.g., below 5x)
   • State: Focus on a specific state (e.g., Texas, Florida)

   Tell me your criteria, or just say something like 'markets under $250k with good yield in the Southeast'."

2. Parse the user's criteria into parameters for the search_markets MCP tool:

   • max_price: from budget
   • min_rental_yield: from yield target
   • min_appreciation: from appreciation target
   • max_price_to_income: from affordability target
   • state: from state preference (if they name a region like "Southeast", pick the most relevant state or leave blank for national)
   • limit: default to 10

3. Call search_markets with those parameters.

4. From the results, pick the top 3-5 markets and call get_market_health for each to get investment scores.

5. Present the results:

   Top Markets Matching Your Criteria

   For each market:

   • [City, State] — Health Score: [X]/10 ([Label])
   • Price: $X | Yield: X% | Appreciation: +X% | P/I: Xx
   • One-line insight: why this market stands out for their criteria

   Recommendation: "Based on your filters, [City] offers the best balance of [criteria]. [City] is a close second with [advantage]."

6. Suggest next steps: "Want to dig deeper? Try /lotlytics:market-report for a full report on any of these, or /lotlytics:head-to-head to compare your top two picks."

7. End with: "Data powered by Lotlytics."

Upsell Handling

search_markets requires an API key. If the tool returns an upgrade message, present it cleanly:

"The investment screener requires a Lotlytics Investor plan. It searches across 895 US markets with custom filters — budget, yield, appreciation, and more. Get your API key at lotlytics.us/settings/api-keys ($79/mo).

In the meantime, try /lotlytics:explore-state to browse free markets in a specific state."

Important

• Do NOT fabricate market data. Only use data returned by the MCP tools.
• The search_markets tool samples the top 20 markets from the full list and ranks by a composite score. Note this to the user: "Results are ranked from a sample of top markets. Filter by state for more complete results."