Winston County

Winston County, Mississippi sits at a median home price of $147,837 with a 4.28% year-over-year price gain, landing it at the 98th percentile nationally out of 1,000 counties ranked and first in the state among 80 counties. The affordability index of 98 out of 100 signals that homes here are accessible relative to local incomes, which matters both for entry cost and for the tenant pool's ability to pay rent. The tool does not return cap rate or cash-on-cash figures for this county, which tells you the data needed to model those outputs cleanly, specifically reliable rent comparables, is thin. That alone is a signal: Winston is a small, lightly transacted market where the numbers you underwrite will depend heavily on your own rent survey rather than aggregated data.

The appreciation score of 84 and the 4.28% annual price gain are the headline story here. This is not a cash-flow market you can underwrite on a spreadsheet and close remotely. It is an appreciation-and-affordability play suited to an investor who is already operating in rural Mississippi, knows how to pull rents from local property managers, and is buying at $147,837 partly because they believe that price compresses further upside risk. The cash-flow score is listed as zero, meaning the tool cannot confirm positive spread at this price point. A value-add operator who can acquire distressed assets below the median, force appreciation through renovation, and then rent at market rates has more to work with here than a passive buyer expecting day-one yield.

The tax and insurance carry on a median-priced purchase runs $161 per month combined, $1,197 annually in property tax and $739 in insurance. That insurance figure reflects Mississippi's elevated exposure to wind and storm events, and $739 is not trivial relative to rents in a county at this price tier. The property tax rate of 0.81% sits in the normal range and does not warrant a special line on your underwrite, though the caveat applies: 0.81% is a state-average effective rate from Tax Foundation 2024 data, and your actual county or township levy may differ, so verify with the Winston County assessor before closing. Combined, $161 a month in tax and insurance on a mortgage-free asset would need to be covered by rent that also absorbs maintenance, vacancy, and any management fee, so margin discipline matters.

The economic context for Winston County is a 17,741-person population without specific employer anchors in the provided data, so the underlying drivers of rental demand here are not quantifiable from this dataset. What the population figure does tell you is that the tenant pool is narrow. A 1% vacancy swing in a county this size can meaningfully change your actual occupancy versus your modeled occupancy, and tenant replacement times in small rural markets can run longer than in metro areas. Underwrite vacancy conservatively.

The primary risks here are market depth and concentration. With fewer than 18,000 residents, a single employer contraction or population outflow event moves the needle in ways that a diversified metro market absorbs more easily. There are no regulatory or short-term rental restriction flags in the provided data, so that is not a current concern, but demographic trajectory and employment concentration in rural Mississippi are risks that the numbers available here cannot fully quantify. An investor without local contacts and a property manager already operating in the county is taking on more execution risk than the attractive percentile ranking alone suggests.

Against its neighbors, Winston's $147,837 median sits between the lower-priced Scott County at $123,939 and Holmes County at $84,259 on one side, and Monroe County at $160,564 and Lee County at $196,256 on the other. The one neighbor with a rent-to-price ratio that can be directly compared is Hinds County at 0.1285, which implies meaningfully better gross yield on its $125,430 median than Winston's unquantified rent picture suggests. Lee County's rent-to-price ratio of 0.0777 on a $196,256 median is the weakest yield signal in the peer group. Winston scores two to three points higher overall than Lee, Monroe, Scott, and Hinds, all of which cluster at 73 to 76. Choose Winston over its neighbors when your thesis is low entry price with appreciation momentum and you have local rental market intelligence. Choose Hinds County instead if you want a rent-to-price ratio you can actually model today, despite the higher crime and management complexity that a Jackson-area market typically carries.