Commercial real estate owners, brokers, and lenders need reliable real-time information to make informed investment decisions. Leading CRE firms are now leveraging geospatial data — primarily satellite, GPS and connected cars — as a way to develop novel insights for asset analysis and the broader market.
We’ve compiled the top three ways our customers in commercial real estate leverage our geospatial platform, Orbital Insight GO, to create novel investment-grade insights for acquisitions, brokerage, diligence and competitive intelligence.
1. Market Share
Location Intelligence at Your Area of Interest
Customer visitation is the underpinning of retail real estate asset performance and health. By measuring daily empirical foot traffic in your portfolio, acquisition targets, and competitive peer set you gain a decisive edge in investment decisions.
Orbital Insight GO customers have highly accurate foot traffic counts to evaluate site selection by comparing visitation at individual properties and the broader market. Orbital Insight GO provides advanced consumer insights into:
- Daily property visitation and seasonal trends
- Customer loyalty/revisit
- Cross-shopping analytics
- Time of Day/Day of Week Traffic Analysis
For example, in San Diego’s Gaslamp District, Orbital Insight’s foot traffic analysis was able to quantify foot traffic across the entire neighborhood and deliver an objective market share comparison by street. CRE professionals are able to better conduct site selection by comparing the effects of seasonal trends, promotions, holidays, and new tenant mixes with years of historical data.
2. Deriving True Trade Area
Real-time Site Characteristics
Trade area modeling allows owners to better select sites and forecast retail revenues.
Brokers are able to better market properties by determining the ‘draw’ of a center.
However, fixed radial trade areas based on government demographics are often outdated and do not represent actual patterns or customer bases.
Single store trade areas allow for optimal site selection and prevent customer cannibalization. Orbital Insight’s multiple sources of geospatial intelligence generate trusted real-time trade areas based on actual customers.
Orbital Insight GO customers leveraging geospatial data are now able to create highly accurate and even predictive trade area models using IoT device data, demographic data, and drive times. Using geospatial analytics, commercial real estate investments are powered by empirical data of a representative customer base and the travel routes they take. Orbital Insight GO provides advanced trade route analytics including:
- Spatial trade area visualizations
- Average distance traveled
- Traffic attribution by home and work locations
- Visualized traffic routes
Understand customer loyalty and cross-shopping behavior between your portfolio and competitor properties.
Determine the average travel distance of target assets compared to comps, portfolios or the general market. Orbital Insight’s travel distance algorithms update in real-time to show daily trends with years of historical coverage.
Understand where your customers live in relation to your existing or potential retail site with unprecedented accuracy and granularity.
Orbital Insight provides a true trade area with customer drive times, showing how long it takes for property visitors to reach your center each day.
3. Demographic Analyses
Take the ‘Census’ of a Property
Businesses use government data to develop site selection and marketing strategies regarding target customer home locations, income, and whether or not they have children. While government data is helpful, it is not always timely, like the U.S. Population and Housing Census which is taken every 10 years. Government data is also not representative of your store location.
Geospatial analytics provides a hyperlocal census into your target asset. Unlike Point of Sales data and customer loyalty programs, Orbital Insight GO can provide empirical demographics into properties outside of your portfolio, including acquisition candidates and comps. Using location-specific demographic trends, Orbital Insight can reveal any property’s demographics including:
- Median Household Income
- Per Capital Income
- Median Distance from Home Location
- Average Household Income
- % Bachelor’s and Graduate Degree
- 2023 Average Household Size
