Do a home search on realtor.com. We did this when we were looking into moving to Michigan. We chose general areas of where we could wind up (company transfer with locations all over the state). By looking at the real estate that was available, it gave us an idea of what the cities would be like. If most of the properties were foreclosures or generally in states of disrepair, or selling for very low prices (ie: 1800 sqft home with 5+ acres priced at $29,000) we knew it wasn't an area that we wanted to relocate to. It also showed us what we size of home we could get in our price range. In some of the cities we were looking at, we could only afford a 1100 sq ft home with .25 acres and others we could get 2000 sqft with 2+ acres. Also, we did google searches of the towns and were able to find out information regarding schools (not info that we needed), general economics, population and crime rates. We were able to eliminate several cities that we had no interest in locating to.
Last edited by auntpiggylpn; 02-15-2014 at 06:04 PM.