In Collin County, Texas, the most common investor-owned property type is a single-family house. In Denton County next door, it is residential vacant land. In Franklin County, Ohio, it is a condominium unit.
Three markets, three different things sitting in investor portfolios. A wholesaler who brings the same deal to all three gets one good conversation and two polite exits.
Property type is the fastest read on what a market's investors actually do, and it is a field most people never check before they start calling.
Land is a different business, not a cheaper house
Denton County is the one that surprises people. Its top investor-owned property type is vacant land, and about 25.9% of its investor activity is new construction.
That combination describes builders. Someone buying a lot is not looking for a house with problems — they are looking for dirt in the right place, with the right zoning, at a price that works once a house is on it.
The implications are concrete:
Condition is irrelevant. There is nothing to inspect. The questions are zoning, utilities, access, lot dimensions, and what can legally go up.
Your repair pitch is noise. "Needs a roof" means nothing to a buyer who is going to build. The things you would normally lead with do not apply.
Timelines are longer. A flipper wants to close fast and start work. A builder may be working around permits and a construction schedule, and that changes what "quick close" is worth to them.
Bring a tired three-bedroom to a buyer list dominated by land investors and the pitch misses — not because the deal is bad, but because it is not their business.
Condos are also a different business
Franklin County runs the other way. Top type is condominium, most common configuration two bed two bath, median size about 1,036 square feet.
A condo investor is underwriting things a single-family investor never thinks about: HOA dues, special assessments, rental caps, what percentage of the building is owner-occupied, and whether financing is even available on the complex.
That last one matters more than it sounds. Some buildings are effectively cash-only for reasons that have nothing to do with the unit itself. A buyer who works that market knows which. One who does not will discover it late and blame the deal.
So "cash buyer in Columbus" is not one audience. A buyer whose portfolio is condos and a buyer whose portfolio is single-family houses are solving different problems with different money.
The single-family majority, and what still varies
Most counties in our coverage do lead with single-family residential — Collin, Dallas, Mecklenburg, Guilford, Denver, Adams and Arapahoe all do.
But the same label covers very different properties.
The typical investor-owned property in Collin County runs about 2,348 square feet with a median year built of 2024. In Denver County it is about 1,115 square feet, median year built 1971. Both are single-family houses. One is a new build in a growing suburb; the other is a small older house in an established city.
The buyers are not interchangeable. A Denver investor working century-old housing has crews who handle knob-and-tube and foundation movement. A Collin County investor buying new construction has no use for any of that experience.
Collin County's investor activity is 62.6% new construction; Franklin County's is 2.8%.
The new-construction share tells you which side of this a market sits on. Collin at 62.6% is overwhelmingly a building market. Franklin at 2.8% is almost entirely existing housing. Everything between is a mix, and the number tells you roughly what mix.
Reading a market you have never worked
Put the three fields together and a market describes itself before you make a single call.
Take Adams County, Colorado: top type single-family, new construction about 23.4%, median year built 2001, median size around 1,610 square feet. That reads as a suburban market with a meaningful building component and housing stock that is mostly modern — not a place where "original 1960s systems" is the common rehab conversation.
Now Guilford County, North Carolina: top type single-family, new construction about 11.1%, median year built 1992, median size about 1,460 square feet. Mostly existing housing, modest building activity, stock old enough to need work but not old enough to be a specialist job.
Same top property type, two different rehab realities, and the difference is visible in about thirty seconds of reading.
The point is not that either market is better. It is that "single-family cash buyers" describes both and distinguishes neither, and the distinguishing detail is sitting in fields nobody checks.
What the field does not settle
Two caveats worth stating plainly.
"Most common" is not "only." Denton County leads with vacant land, but it has plenty of investor-owned houses too. The top type tells you what the market is weighted toward, not what exists in it. A good house deal in a land market still has buyers — there are just fewer of them than the headline suggests.
The field is not always reported. Durham County, North Carolina shows a top type of townhouse but no new-construction share at all in the current data. Where a field is missing, it is missing — it does not mean zero, and treating a blank as a zero would have you describing Durham as a market with no construction activity, which the data simply does not say.
When a field is absent, work from the ones that are present rather than filling the gap with an assumption.
The check before you build a list
Three fields, in this order, before you spend a week on a market:
Top property type. Tells you what you are actually selling into. Land, condo and single-family are three different businesses with three different buyer pools.
New construction share. Tells you whether those buyers are building or renovating. Above roughly half, you are in builder territory and condition arguments do not land.
Median size and year built. Tells you what the existing housing is like, which is what a rehab buyer is actually underwriting.
None of this requires a call. It takes a couple of minutes, and it is the difference between a buyer list that fits your deals and a long list of names who were never going to want what you have.
