Why Every Real Estate Firm Needs a Mapping Analytics Platform

Real estate investors, lenders, developers, and brokers rely heavily on Excel to store and analyze their decision-critical data.

But good real estate analysis is more than rows and columns in a spreadsheet; it depends on knowing where buildings, tenants, and competitors are in relation to one another, whether they’re across the street or across town. If mapping is essential to real estate analysis, what tools do these firms have to visualize and, more importantly, analyze their spatial data?

One tool that many people use to map data is BatchGeo.

After pasting a list of addresses into the website, you get a map with points drawn at each location. While this is an effective, simple tool to make a map, it is not an ANALYTICS solution. You can only make one static map at a time and cannot update the information or search across it for buildings of a certain size or tenants with a certain expiration date. Needless to say, a static map cannot identify trends such as buildings that are underpriced or markets that are primed for rent growth.

Another tool, top of the line mapping solutions called GIS (Geographic Information Systems) programs, are rarely mentioned in the real estate world. If you’ve never heard of GIS, imagine Excel but, instead of the data being stored as numbers and letters in rows and columns, the data are stored and displayed on a map. And, if you’ve never heard of these in the context of real estate investments, it’s for a reason: GIS software is extremely complex, expensive, and time-consuming to learn and operate.

With GIS, you can run extremely complex analyses, but the software is highly-specialized and requires experts to set up and maintain the systems, let alone conduct analyses.

If one set of mapping tools is too simple for real estate analytics, while the other is overly complex and expensive, what map-based analytics solution is in the sweet spot for real estate firms?

Predictre is the ideal, map-based intelligence platform for the commercial real estate industry. By consolidating, visualizing, and analyzing all the information real estate firms utilize to make acquisitions, leasing, and capital allocation decisions, Predictre empowers companies with cutting-edge analytics and actionable insights based on their decision-critical data. If you are ready to implement a spatial analytics platform for your commercial real estate firm, I hope you will reach out to us at www.predictre.ai