Why Real Estate Search and Valuation Companies Rely on Location Data

Success in real estate is driven by a keen understanding of market dynamics. Historically, that has required a very high level of commitment in the local market. It has meant staying close to the action, asking a lot of questions, and collecting detailed information on what’s happening in and around a specific property or neighborhood.

Location data is changing that, making it possible to identify market opportunities across multiple geographies, evaluate potential investments, and respond quickly without all the legwork that has traditionally been associated with real estate.

Retail site selection, for example, requires decision-makers to understand the detailed traffic patterns associated with a specific location. They must be aware of the broader trends within a particular area as well. Spotting shifts in demographic data for a specific neighborhood, for example, may prompt investors to get a head-start on potential competitors, moving quickly on acquiring properties in up-and-coming areas.

With location data, real estate investors have access to vast amounts of detail – much more than ever before. The right geospatial data can provide a highly accurate and granular understanding of properties, neighborhoods, retail locations, and the people who visit them.

Let’s look at some of the ways that location data is giving smart commercial real estate investors an edge.

Analyzing foot traffic with location data

Imagine you’re evaluating sites for a potential new retail store. You’ll want to know the footfall patterns for each potential site. In the old days, that meant being on location physically, observing foot traffic, and building projections based on your data samples. Today, you have far more detailed information about the volume of visitors to a specific location at various times, the duration of stay, and the frequency of return visits.

When you combine that information with detailed demographic information about groups of target consumers in the area of interest, decision-makers can act confidently, knowing their conclusions are backed up by hard data.

It’s one thing to know, for example, that a particular block downtown sees a particular volume of foot traffic every weekday during lunch hours. It’s even better, though, to understand the precise mix of visitors to the area, including their income levels and lifestyle preferences. If you are selecting a location for an upscale eatery aimed at high earners, that level of detail is extraordinarily valuable. Mobility data gives you that detail, assisting businesses with site selection and giving real estate companies a clear view of the earning potential of a property for specific types of buyers or tenants.

Detailed location data offers insight into your competitive environment as well. Real estate reveals details about traffic at a competitor’s locations, including volume, timing, repeat visits, and the demographic profile of a store’s patrons. This can help business leaders better understand competitive dynamics, develop strategies to draw business away from nearby competitors, or strategically locate the company’s own retail locations to optimize their own store traffic.

Spotting the bigger trends with location data

You’ve seen examples of neighborhoods that took a turn for the better, seemingly overnight. After years of being underappreciated and undervalued, real estate in these areas can quickly become hot commodities, showing sharp increases in property valuations very rapidly.

For long-time real estate investors, those changes are usually apparent before the rest of the world catches on. If you’re keeping a close watch on local market dynamics, you can spot those opportunities before values go up. Now there’s an even better way to track market trends, though.

Location data provides insights that reveal important patterns even earlier. Data about property owners, tenants, and area businesses provide a highly detailed picture of a neighborhood and the changes that take place there over time. The consistent upward trend in the income levels of tenants and owner-occupants, for example, could indicate gentrification. Real estate investors who are able to identify that trend early can potentially buy into the neighborhood just before those property values go up.

Real estate property data can help to identify negative or downward trends as well. Steady increases in crime rates, for example, could indicate that it’s time to sell. An influx of business closures, likewise, could be an early indication that values may be trending downward.

Improving the accuracy of real estate analysis and predictions

For years, leaders in commercial and residential real estate have been making decisions based on a combination of intuition and data. Most property investors work with local real estate professionals to stay informed about what’s happening in each community. That’s just table stakes; your competitors have access to much of the same information. True local intelligence that comes from accurate and up-to-date real estate data, on the other hand, is distinctly valuable.

With the influx of new and interesting data points available, you have a better capacity than ever before to gain a detailed understanding of specific properties and their surroundings. Knowing where to acquire property and when to develop it calls for the ability to spot patterns and better predict when those patterns may reoccur. Trusted real estate data improves the accuracy of predictions and analysis in real estate.

Despite that opportunity, real estate investors and developers are often frustrated by the disconnect between the amount of property and location data available to them and the difficulty of harnessing it for quick, actionable insights.  The PreciselyID is a unique and persistent identifier. You can use it to join Precisely real estate and analytics data with other first-party and vendor data, which empowers you to make more accurate and informed real estate decisions with readily available and easy-to-consume property data.

With an expertly curated real estate data portfolio combined with the power of PreciselyID, Precisely offers you a way to turn property and location data into location intelligence. We provide commercial and consumer buyers with the tools they need to better understand the real estate market, discern trends at an address-to-address level, and stay ahead of their competition.

Read our Data Guide to learn about the datasets most commonly used within the Real Estate sector and how you can differentiate your business with data to drive every real estate decision and transaction.