Kane County is ranked fifth in the state of Illinois in the amount of local business and residential investment, according to a report by SmartAsset, an online financial technology company.

“Local investment and economic expansion are positive signs for communities because of the inherent quality of life improvements they represent,” SmartAsset says.

In light of this, SmartAsset recently completed its second annual study on counties receiving the greatest amount of investment in their local economies.

Kane County is ranked among the top places in Illinois due to its performance across four categories: business establishment growth, GDP growth, new building permits, and municipal bond investment.Kane County ranked and how other counties stacked up against it:

Visit this link for a more in-depth look at the study and our methodology.

This free study is distributed annually to community leaders in the top locations.

Methodology

There are several ways individuals, governments and businesses can invest money in a county or region. SmartAsset.com’s study aims to capture the places across the country that are receiving the most incoming investments in business, real estate, government and the local economy as a whole. To do this, SmartAsset looked at four factors: business establishment growth, GDP growth, new building permits and municipal bond investment.

SmartAsset looked at the change in the number of businesses established in each location over a three-year period. This shows whether people are starting new business ventures in the county.

The second factor, GDP growth, used real growth (inflation adjusted) in the local economy.

SmartAsset looked at investment and development in the local residential real estate market. To measure this real estate growth, SmartAsset calculated the number of new building permits per 1,000 homes.

The final factor SmartAsset considered was investment in municipal bonds. SmartAsset found total municipal bond debt raised by a county over the last five years, which was divided by the population, giving a per capita look at investment in local government.

SmartAsset scored every county in its study on these four factors, weighting each factor equally, then combined those scores to create a final ranking of cities. With that ranking, SmartAsset created an index where the county with the most incoming investments was assigned a value of 100 and the county with the least investment activity received a zero.

SOURCE: SmartAsset.com