How can I find hotel properties to buy other than using Google?
Probably the easiest way to invest in hotel rooms in the U.S. is to invest in a Real Estate Investment Trust, or REIT.  REITs are securities that invest in real estate and trade like a stock.  There are different REITs that invest in different things: some own office buildings, some residential rentals, some hold mortgages, and some are diversified in lots of different types of real estate.  There are also REITs that are exclusively invested in hotels. REITs are required to pay out at least 90% of their profits as dividends, and there are tax advantages to investing in REITs.   You can search for a REIT on REIT.com's Searchable Directory.  You can select a type (Lodging/Resorts), a stock exchange (NYSE), investment sector (equity), and a listing status (public), and you'll see lots of investments for you to consider.
The Motley Fool suggested a good rule of thumb in one of their articles that may be able to help you determine if the market is overheating. Determine the entire cost of rent for a piece of property. So if rent is $300/month, total cost over a year is $3600. Compare that to the cost of buying a similar piece of property by dividing the property price by the rent per year. So if a similar property is $90,000, the ratio would be $90,000/$3600 = 25. If the ratio is < 20, you should consider buying a place. If its > 20, there's a good chance that the market is overheated.  This method is clearly not foolproof, but it helps quantify the irrationality of some individuals who think that buying a place is always better than renting.  P.S. if anyone can find this article for me I'd greatly appreciate it, I've tried to use my google-fu with googling terms with site:fool.com but haven't found the article I remember. "In Orange County (southern California), one agent has blogged pretty extensively about using rental parity to determine when it is time to rent or buy. Rental parity is achieved when the cost of renting is equal to the cost of owning; in theory, if you buy when a home is selling above rental parity, you're overpaying, and you'd be better off renting. He has many posts on the subject; a few you might care to read would be this one, and this other one. You might get a better sense of how to calculate rental parity by looking at an example or two. There is also the NY Times calculator mentioned in other responses, and the Patrick.net calculator. Be aware, the calculators are garbage in, garbage out. In other words, you have to consider the input carefully. In particular, I found the defaults on the Patrick.net calculator were not realistic. So far as I am aware, the agent at OCHousingNews does not make his calculations public (though I have never actually asked). He's using a spreadsheet which I have never seen. That is another option, if you care to do this kind of analysis yourself. Search around, you can find a spreadsheet that someone has posted here and there. But keeping something like that updated is not trivial. In my experience, in practice, it's difficult to be totally rational and mathematical when it comes to many decisions, and as other respondents have noted, where you live is one of those decisions. Too, saying ""buy when rental parity is achieved"" is sort of like saying ""buy low, sell high,"" as though it were perfectly clear when stocks are at a bottom and/or a peak. In our case, we bought a house about 12 years ago, before rental parity was being discussed in the blogsphere. Looking back, we supposedly bought at the wrong time, according to that agent's rating system, but it turned out fine for us. Our house has appreciated, whereas the S&P 500 is basically where it was 12 years ago. Had we been thinking in terms of rental parity, we might not have bought at that time. Of course, your mileage may vary, and hindsight is always 20/20. I think the most helpful advice I can offer was something I got from a real estate agent around the time we were looking. He told me ""when you're looking at houses, be sure you like the floor plan and the location, because those two things are not easily changed."" That advice really helped us to see things more clearly." Its a great time to buy! 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 - NAR  Nothing but a bunch of leaches and add-nothing middlemen. The internet should have put them out of business with the travel agents. Instead, they successfully lobbied enough state legislatures to permanently wedge their club into one of the most valuable markets on earth. Our current economic troubles are worse because they were successful. An entire organization built around lying for profit. I'm an Aussie and I purchased 5 of these properties from 2008 to 2010. I was looking for positive cash flow on properties for not too much upfront investment. The USA property market made sense because of the high Aussie $$ at the time, the depressed property market in the US and the expensive market here.  I used an investment web-site that allowed me to screen properties by yield and after eliminating outliers, went for the city with the highest consistent yield performance. I settled on Toledo, Ohio as it had the highest yields and was severely impacted by the housing crisis. I bought my first property for $18K US which was a little over $17K AUD.  The property was a duplex in great condition in a reasonable location.  Monthly rentals $US900 and rents guaranteed and direct deposited into my bank account every month by section 8.  Taxes $900 a year and $450 a year for water. Total return around $US8,000.   My second property was a short sale in a reasonable area. The asking was $US8K and was a single family in good condition already tenanted.  I went through the steps with the bank and after a few months, was the proud owner of another tenanted, positive cash flow property returning $600 a month gross. Taxes of $600 a year and water about the same.  $US6K NET a year on a property that cost $AUD8K Third and fourth were two single family dwellings in good areas.  These both cost $US14K each and returned $US700 a month each.  $US28K for two properties that gross around $US15K a year.   My fifth property was a tax foreclosure of a guy with 2 kids whose wife had left him and whose friend had stolen the money to repay the property taxes.  He was basically on the bones of his butt and was staring down the barrel of being homeless with two kids.  The property was in great condition in a reasonable part of town.  The property cost me $4K.  I signed up the previous owner in a land contract to buy his house back for $US30K. Payments over 10 years at 7% came out to around $US333 per month.  I made him an offer whereby if he acted as my property manager, i would forgo the land contract payments and pay him a percentage of the rents in exchange for his services. I would also pay for any work he did on the properties.  He jumped at it.  Seven years later, we're still working together and he keeps the properties humming.  Right now the AUD is around 80c US and looks like falling to around 65c by June 2015.  Rental income in Aussie $$ is around $2750 every month. This month (Jan 2015) I have transferred my property manager's house back to him with a quit claim deed and sold the remaining houses for $US100K  After taxes and commission I expect to receive in the vicinity of AUD$120K  Which is pretty good for a $AUD53K investment.  I've also received around $30K in rent a year. I'm of the belief I should be buying when everybody else is selling and selling when everybody else is buying.   I'm on the look-out for my next positive cash flow investment and I'm thinking maybe an emerging market smashed by the oil shock.   I wish you all happiness and success in your investment. Take care. VR "While you’re new or relatively new to this idea then the fitting idea is to perform a little research and primary get conversant in what’s possible with offshore investment opportunities.  I couldn't agree more. A good way to begin this research would be to do an online search for an investment opportunity called ""Royal Siam Trust.""" "It certainly seems like you are focusing on the emotional factors.  That's your blind spot, and it's the surest path to a situation where your husband gets to say ""I told you so"".  I recommend you steer straight into that blind spot, and focus your studies on the business aspects of buying and owning homes.   You should be able to do spreadsheets 6 ways from Sunday, be able to recite every tax deduction you'll get as a homeowner, know the resale impacts of 1 bathroom vs 2, tell a dirty house from a broken house, etc.  Everybody's got their favorites, mine are a bit dated but I like Robert Irwin and Robert Allen's books.  For instance: a philosophy of Allen's that I really like: never sell.  This avoids several problems, like the considerable costs of money, time and nerves of actually selling a house, stress about house prices, mistaking your house's equity for an ATM machine, and byzantine rules for capital gains tax mainly if you rent out the house, which vary dramatically by nation.  In fact the whole area of taxes needs careful study.  There's another side to the business of home ownership, and that's renting to others.  There's a whole set of economics there - and that is a factor in what you buy.  Now AirBNB adds a new wrinkle because there's some real money there.  Come to understand that market well enough to gauge whether a duplex or triplex will be a money maker.  Many regular folk like you have retired early and live off the rental income from their properties.  JoeTaxpayer has an interesting way of looking at the finances of housing: if a house doesn't make sense as a a rental unit, maybe it doesn't make sense as a live-in either.   So learn how to identify those fundamentals - the numbers.  And get in the habit of evaluating houses.  Work it regularly until it's second nature.  Then, yes, you'll see houses you fall in love with, partly because the numbers work.  It also helps to be handy.  It really, really changes the economics if you can do your own quality work, because you don't need to spend any money on labor to convert a dirty house into a clean house.  And lots of people do, and there's a whole SE just for that.  There is a huge difference between going down to the local building supply and getting the water pipe you need, vs. having to call a plumber.  And please deal with local businesses, please don't go to the Big Box stores, their service is abominable, they will cheerfully sell you a gadget salad of junk that doesn't work together, and I can't imagine a colder and less inviting scene to come up as a handy person." Google Finance will do all the bullet points in your list and a few more.  The only drawback is that you have to enter ALL buy and sell manually.  It has an import feature, but it does not work with all trading software. http://www.google.com/finance Let me know if it works.  Also, yahoo.com/finance has a good tool, but I still like better Google's application. Many real estate agents will assist with an apartment hunt, for a suitable fee. In a hot market that may be worth the money. Then again, my best finds were always through co-workers, after the first two. Hey, I suggest you check this place out: http://www.investopedia.com/university/  You can start from there and then read through the things you don't know about and move on from there. When using youtube, search for specific things rather than a general/broad search. For example here's a good youtube video relating to Candlestick Breakout Patterns: https://youtu.be/1fB3EF7XeXU I've seen this tool.  I'm just having a hard time finding where I can just get a list of all the companies.    For example, you can get up to 100 results at a time, if I just search latest filings for 10-K.  This isn't really an efficient way to go about what I want. Agree with some of the posts above - Barchart is a good source for finding unusual options activity and also open interest -https://www.barchart.com/options/open-interest-change You can use www.etfdb.com and search on geography. Yup. What I wanted to know was where they are pulling it up from. Have casually used Google finance for personal investments, but they suck at corp actions. Not sure if they provide free APIs, but that would probably suck too! :D To some travelers, the hotel is critical to the experience. We report on the newest, most noteworthy hotels; old classics we still love; or someplace fun and funky that reflects a special mood. Anything goes: prices range from modest to lavish. http://travelsquire.com/category/hotels/ SEC Form 3 and SEC Form 4 are filed when insiders make share/derivatives acquisitions, transfers, sells and buys There is a time limit AFTER the action where they can be filed, such as 12 business days, so this can be a substantial amount of time after the effect on the market, depending on your strategy. You can aggregate these forms from SEC sources or from third party websites and services. In some cases, types of insider trading are permissible at certain intervals, so if you learn about when certain shares become unlocked, you can try to predict what insider actions will be and share price movements around those times.