I'm looking at some investment property in a region of the country that I hypothesize is 'up-and-coming'.  I'd like to take a look at trends in the region (surrounding towns) and try to infer some important economic trends.  Where would be a good place to find data for things like:

1. commercial property tax income over, say, the last decade

2. new mortgage signings over the last decade

3. The types of businesses in the area over the last decade 
(restaurants, hotels, autobody shops, etc.)

3.  Residential Property tax trends over the last decade 
4.  Anything else?



I can search the town assessors sites, but the data-repositories vary from town to town, and some of the data is held in things like PDFs, so...not easily parsable as far as I know.

Is there a good place that centralizes information like this that a person new to this research wouldn't be aware of?