There is no doubt that there are some pretty comprehensive tools for analyzing Commercial Real Estate virtually. It is pretty unlikely that you would ever lease or purchase Commercial Real Estate without actually visiting the project. However, these new tools are making it very easy to get a sense of the project before ever visiting and in some cases they are compelling enough to help narrow the field of prospects before the actual site visits.

Despite the variety of digital tools available there are still an inordinate amount of Commercial Real Estate professionals who still rely only on the traditional methods of site analysis such as getting in the car and driving across town or jumping in a plane and flying to another city to physically tour the project. As mentioned earlier, physical inspection is still mandatory for any transaction of significant value. With that being said, it makes no sense to ignore the multitude of new sophisticated tools that are making their way to our industry.

During the past thirty days, we have learned about two new services being offered by general Internet providers that might have some relevance and value in reviewing potential real estate projects. The first is a mapping system now offered by Amazon.com. When we first heard about this (thanks to Paul Ehrlich of the Building Intelligence Group) we thought how strange that Amazon would be offering something like this. After all, Amazon sells books and other things, why would they be offering a service like this? After a quick look we were surprised at this compelling new technology and still not quite sure why Amazon was getting into this or convinced that there may be some value to Commercial Real Estate professionals.

The service that Amazon is offering is a yellow pages sort of application. Lets use pizza as an example. Put in the city and the service you are looking for and a map quickly comes up showing you all the locations, addresses, phone numbers, etc, on a very easy to read legible map. The one big difference is that they also show you a picture of the front of the store. From here you can walk up and down the street viewing all the stores on the block. This technology combines state of the art GPS and vendor directory databases combined with an imaging technology that uses high-resolution cameras mounted in vans.

We are no way suggesting that this would be the only tool used in a site selection process, but for a quick look at the neighborhood it is pretty compelling. We suggest you take a look and see for yourselves. Amazon.com / Services / Yellow Pages / NYC / Pizza / Lombardi's
Amazon.com

Another site we discovered recently (thanks to Kelly Keener of REApplications) was the beta site for Google's new mapping system. Just like the Amazon site (pictures excluded), Google is making it very easy for consumers to locate products and services by simply typing in a location and product/service into the Google bar. It is so easy that one is suspect as to weather or not it is going to work. We tried it in our local towns and sure enough the answers were quick, easy, accurate and useful. Fully understanding that there are a variety of demographic and other selection tools available it would not make sense to simply rely on these consumer tools. However, if one were opening a pizza store in Laguna Beach, a quick search on these two systems would not be a bad place to start.
www.maps.google.com

Finally, a product which has been around for quite some time (we introduced it at Realcomm 2001) is Keyhole. For those Commercial Real Estate professionals who are still not aware of this product you need to stop what you are doing and go to this site immediately. Keyhole allows you to simply put in an address of a property in a major metropolitan area (many secondary cities now also included) and within seconds you are looking at the rooftop of the projects. You can zoom, circle, move left, right, up, down and basically get a perspective of the property as if you were in a helicopter. It still amazes us how many Real Estate professionals are not aware of this product and worse yet, those who are aware and do not use it every hour of every day. Proximity to transportation, water, shopping, density, ingress and egress are all issues that can be analyzed using this product. Then add on the demographic capabilities, show the gas stations, hotels, golf courses, etc and you now get a full analysis overlay. There are a host of other features such as measure, (yes you can measure a parcel or check the distance to the intersection), tour (which you can organize a tour a various projects ahead of time by bookmarking them) which make this product a must in every digital toolkit. In case you wonder how well this product is being accepted in the general consumer marketplace, that little company Google, just purchased them and by everything we can tell, they are a pretty smart company.
www.keyhole.com

These are just a few of the great new technologies which are coming into our marketplace and it is pretty safe to say that the digitization of the information used in our industry is just going to get better. We are excited about these new advancements and will continue to keep our eye on the streets and will be prepared to present all the great new ideas and innovations at Realcomm 2005 in Anaheim.