Overview

Timely data to help you identify growing areas

For a geographic area, our Emerging Areas dataset examines the inflow and outflow of people along with their income indicators, and classifies the area’s growth and change in composition. We identify the features / characteristics of an “emerging area” and then rank the areas that are over-indexed for those characteristics.

This is a free feature service that includes a subset of the attributes contained within the full Emerging Areas product, providing insights at the county-level for all MSAs within the US, for the latest month available, and updated monthly. The Premium Version at the tract-level, containing 12 months of history and all attributes is also available on the ArcGIS Marketplace here.

What can Emerging Areas do for you?

You gain an exclusive view into the arrival and departure of people in a specified geographical area. Emerging Areas also calculates the potential impact to an area's income levels, and helps identify patterns more rapidly than traditional datasets.

Who benefits from the Emerging Areas dataset?

Regardless of whether you’re a residential or commercial real estate investor, agent, underwriter, analyst, developer, construction company, leasing manager, or mortgage lender, you need actionable data to facilitate smarter, informed decisions that keep you a step ahead of the competition. 

Features

This sample includes two key metrics: Total Net Flow and Short-term Classification. Total Net Flow refers to the difference between the total inflow and outflow for the given area for that month. Short-term Classification offers the following five classes, based on the most recent 3 months and normalized by the same period one year prior (please note that the Long-term Classification is only listed here for informational purposes and is not included in this dataset):

Growing Population
Short-term: The absolute difference in net flow (extrapolated to a full year) between the three most recent months and the same three months the previous year leads to a population growth of >5% (tract-level) or >2% (county-level). 
Long-term: The average population growth rate over the last 12 months is >5% (tract-level) or >2% (county-level). 

Growing Income
Short-term: The average income of population inflows in the most recent three months is >20% (tract-level) or >10% (county-level) higher than the same period from the previous year, and this difference is established to be statistically significant.
Long-term: The average income of population inflows over the last 12 months is >20% (tract-level) or >10% (county-level) higher than the median income of the area itself, and this difference is established to be statistically significant.

Growing Population & Income
An area meets criteria for both Growing Population and Growing Income.

Declining Population
Short-term: The absolute difference in net flow (extrapolated to a full year) between the three most recent months and the same three months the previous year leads to a population growth of <-5% (tract-level) or <-2% (county-level).
Long-term: The average population growth rate over the last 12 months is <-5% (tract-level) or <-2% (county-level).

Stable
An area that does not meet any of the other criteria.

Resources
Emerging Areas Blog Post
Emerging Areas Use Cases
Emerging Areas Webinar