Has this research process ever been automated to find real estate "hidden gems" around the US?
Serious real-estate investing is a wealth retention business with multi-generation timeframes.
Generally, it solves the problem of what do you do with several billion dollars. At the low end, maybe it's only a few hundred million, but that will be mostly dumb luck.
This means that serious real-estate investing and most of the money in it has full time staff evaluating options.
The criteria are not school districts but cash flow and traffic analysis.
Serious investors are not bargain shopping because the price of the busy corner doesn't matter when Walgreens wants to build two thousand feet of pharmacy surrounded by fifteen thousand feet of shit for sale just to get you in the door.
And the price of the other busy corner doesn't matter to CVS either because what was true for the Walgreens corner pretty much holds for it too.
All that to say that what you are talking about is building a tool for amateurs and amateurs don't spend the kind of money it would take to support it.
Because all real-estate is local.
Good luck.