The importance of spatial awareness

If there is one expression in property that people are familiar with, it is “Location, location, location”. Where something is and how it relates to its surroundings are essential for every part of a building throughout its life cycle. As a result, it makes sense that as location is one of the most important factors in property decisions, geospatial or location data is one of the most important types of data to have as decisions become increasingly computer-driven. The importance of location data to the property sector is easy to see by flicking through the latest copy of EG or scrolling through the website. ]Maps are everywhere – from heatmaps displaying the latest market trends to a site map showing the position of a property or piece of land for sale. Maps are commonplace across the other parts of the building life cycle as well: they are a central part of planning permissions, for example, and are used for defining sales regions. But a map is nothing more than a visual representation of location data so that it can easily be interpreted by a human. Of course, digital maps do exist, but the most important element is the underlying location data itself. Geospatial and location data provide the digital world upon which we can make decisions. It is estimated by ESRI, a leading geospatial software company, that 80% of a company’s data has a location component. It would seem likely that this would be even higher for real estate companies. Assuming this is true, then as we increasingly rely on computer analysis to support us in our jobs, managing the location component of all of our data becomes ever more important. Address code A good example of this is address data. The property address is one of the simpler things that we need to capture to know where a building is. “The big building on the corner of the street next to the red building” may work well for an individual with local knowledge, but this is not something that can easily be understood by other people – and certainly not by a computer. It becomes essential to have a clean set of address data, or at least a common reference number in everything that we do. Without this, we can’t reliably plot our contracts, clients or properties on a map – let alone carry out more extensive analysis with other data sets. To allow us to fully analyse data, there needs to be a geospatial data layer upon which other datasets can sit. This can be considered as a key piece of digital infrastructure. The required specification of this will vary depending on the required use, but examples could include national approaches such as Great Britain’s Ordnance Survey, global approaches such as Google Maps or city-level examples such as VU.CITY. At Liquid REI, we recently authored a report for the British Property Federation which considered the environment for real estate digital transformation. A key finding was that one of the most important ingredients to enable digital transformation in a market where the UK is considered a leader is the available data infrastructure. The Liquid report considered a wide variety of data sets and factors, but the geospatial data infrastructure available in the UK was a big contributor to the UK’s high score. Having a high-quality geospatial framework and being able to combine, query and interpret geospatial data sets is essential for the future of the property sector, but it is sometimes easier said than done. Many companies have geographic information system (GIS) specialists who are able to carry out this sort of analysis on a customised basis and there are many new start-ups in this space. In the UK, Geovation, a joint initiative between Ordnance Survey and the Land Registry, is specifically focused on helping property and geospatial start-ups. Location data plays a key role in many of the newer technology companies that are becoming familiar names: LandInsight combines numerous geospatial data sets to help identify potential sites; Infabode collates market research and information, and helps people to find it all based on location; and Dutch company Geophy looks at the use of geospatial data to understand building value. The future is infrastructure Geospatial data is going to be one of the most important factors in the future of the property market. Access to a high-quality digital infrastructure, correctly managing the geospatial component of your own data and working with the right technology service providers will be an essential part of the successful real estate business of the future.