Two counties hold almost exactly the same number of investor-owned properties. Collin County, Texas has about 63,100. Franklin County, Ohio — that's Columbus — has about 58,300. Close enough that on a spreadsheet they look like the same opportunity.
They are not remotely the same opportunity. And the thing that separates them is not size, or price, or how hot the market is. It's that the investors in one are building houses and the investors in the other are buying houses that already exist.
If you work both markets the same way, one of them is going to feel broken.
The number that gives it away
Here's the split, in one line each.
In Collin County, about 63% of investor activity is new construction. In Franklin County, it's under 3%.
That's not a small gap you'd argue about. It's the difference between two different businesses.
Line up how activity splits in each county and it's stark:
Collin County's investor activity is 62.6% new construction; Franklin County's is 2.8%.
Read the first two rows against each other. Collin County does roughly seventeen times more new construction than rehab work. Franklin County does about seventeen times more rehab than new construction. Near-exact mirror images, which is a stranger coincidence than it looks.
A quick note on what "new construction" means in this context, because it's easy to picture the wrong thing. It doesn't mean investors there are buying brand-new houses from builders. It means the investors are the builders — or they're buying the dirt that gets built on.
Here's the cleanest way to see it. The median investor-owned property in Collin County was built in 2024 — essentially new, some of it finished after those investors bought in. Not renovated in 2024. Built.
In Franklin County, the median investor-owned property was built in 1984. That's a house in its forties: original systems are long gone or on borrowed time, it's likely been through one cosmetic update already, and it's due for another. The most common type there isn't a single-family house at all. It's a condominium unit — two bed, two bath, about 1,000 square feet.
The houses themselves tell the same story. The typical investor-owned property in Collin County runs about 2,348 square feet, four bedrooms, two baths — a family house in a new subdivision. In Franklin County it's about 1,036 square feet, two bedrooms, one bath, with two-bed/two-bath the single most common configuration. That's less than half the floor area.
So picture the two buyers. One is standing on a vacant lot with a site plan, thinking about build costs and timelines on a 2,300-square-foot house. The other is standing in a thousand-square-foot condo with a dated kitchen, running numbers on what a refresh costs and what it rents for after.
Both of them are accurately described as "cash buyers in a major metro." You would show them completely different properties.
Why this ruins otherwise good outreach
This is where it stops being trivia and starts costing you deals.
Say you've got a solid pitch that works in Columbus. Older property, needs work, priced so there's room for a rehab. You take that exact pitch to a Collin County buyer list because the investor counts looked similar.
You'll get silence. Not because your deal is bad, and not because the market is slow — Collin County is one of the busiest markets in the data. You'll get silence because you brought a renovation project to people whose entire operation is putting new houses on empty land. There's nothing wrong with the deal. It's just not their business.
It runs the other direction too, and this one's more expensive. Bring a vacant lot to a Franklin County buyer list and you're pitching to investors who overwhelmingly buy finished buildings. Some of them will take a lot. Most have never done it and don't want to learn on your deal.
The mistake in both cases isn't effort. It's assuming that "investors are active here" means "investors here want what I have."
The second number: how crowded is it
There's a less obvious difference, and for a wholesaler it might matter more.
Collin County has about 3,378 active investors holding those 63,100 properties. Franklin County has about 698 active investors holding 58,300.
Sit with that for a second. Roughly the same amount of property, but one market has nearly five times as many investors competing for it.
Divide it out and the gap gets concrete. The average active investor in Collin County holds about 19 properties. In Franklin County, about 84. That's the whole difference in one number: Columbus investors are fewer and much larger.
What that means practically: in Franklin County, a smaller group of buyers owns a lot of property each. They're easier to identify, there are fewer of them to learn, and building a real relationship with thirty of them could cover most of the serious money in the county. In Collin County, with 3,378 active investors, you're one of many voices and no single relationship carries the same weight.
Neither is better. They reward different approaches. A thin, deep buyer list is the right play in Columbus. In Collin County you need reach, because any individual buyer is a smaller slice of the whole.
Pace: who's speeding up and who isn't
Last one, and it's the number most people skip.
Both markets had a busy two years. But if you split those twenty-four months in half, they're moving in opposite directions.
Collin County: about 23,300 acquisitions in the last twelve months, against roughly 21,200 in the twelve before that. Slightly accelerating.
Franklin County: about 9,500 in the last twelve months, against roughly 21,100 the year before. That's less than half.
Another way to say the same thing: 36.9% of Collin County's investor-held properties changed hands in the last twelve months, against 16.3% in Franklin County. Better than a third of the book turning over in a year is a market in motion. A sixth of it is a market sitting still.
A two-year total would have told you both markets were busy. Splitting it tells you one is still climbing and the other has cooled off hard. If you were planning to lean into Columbus because the headline property count looked big, that number is the warning — a lot of that activity already happened.
The concentration shows up at the ZIP level too, and this is where it gets usable. Collin County's busiest ZIP, 75009, shows roughly 4,494 purchases in twelve months against 11,240 investor-held properties — about 40% of that ZIP turning over in a year. Franklin County's busiest, 43224, shows about 589 purchases against 1,340 properties. Both are the hottest corner of their county. One is running at eight times the volume of the other.
To be fair about what this does and doesn't prove: a slowdown in purchases doesn't mean those investors are gone or out of money. It means they bought less recently. Some are digesting what they already own. But it does mean fewer of them are actively shopping this month, and that's who you're trying to reach.
What to actually do with this
The useful habit here isn't memorizing two counties. It's the order you ask questions in.
Most people start with "how many investors are in this market?" That's the least useful question, because it's the one that made Collin and Franklin look identical.
Better order:
What are they buying? New construction share and median year built answer this in about five seconds. A median in the 2020s means you're looking at a build-and-hold market; a median in the seventies or eighties means condition is the whole game. It tells you whether your deal belongs here at all.
How many of them are there, relative to the property? This tells you whether to build a short, deep list or a wide one.
Is the pace holding up? Compare the last twelve months to the twelve before. A big total with a falling recent half is a market where the activity is behind you, not in front of you.
Three questions, and you know whether to work a market before you've made a single call.
The reason this matters more than it sounds: most advice about cash buyers is written as if there's one kind. There isn't. There's a builder in Celina and a condo rehabber in Columbus, and the only thing they have in common is that they both pay cash. Everything else about how you reach them is different.
Check what the investors in your market are actually buying before you decide what to bring them.
