While not its own product, geodata is widely used in many commercial internet applications like Yelp, Google Maps, Twitter, Foursquare, and Factual. These web services use geodata to match your phone’s location to their own mapping programs. This same relationship between geodata and the connected internet may enhance your own real estate business.

For CRE applications, in the field, it’s routine to take pictures of different properties that create a trail of images on the exact route the pictures were taken.  One basic use is to create a map of property which uses point data to link to other property details. Location is an intuitive way to organize real estate data. Instead of presenting property in a spreadsheet or tabular format, I often give the customer a map so they can click through to the various points.
Geodata comes with many mathematical functions—the most familiar is radius search. For any listing you are marketing, it’s easy to record all your tenant data using GPS. This allows you to target a market based on various distances from your listing and focus on those tenants closest to the property. Thasos is a data company that uses location to enhance hedge fund knowledge. One of their popular applications is to use geofencing to predict shopping mall traffic. Similar point data is used to measure truck traffic to find the busiest freight nodes to evaluate warehouse locations.

For SIORS, once you link point data to your Customer Relationship Manager (CRM), you can visualize other data sets like size, SIC, and vacancies. The most value comes from using location data to find deals.  When a mobile GPS application is linked to your database, you can take a picture and the coordinates will seamlessly connect to your data, saving the time to record, search, and communicate. Geodata is an underappreciated real estate tool because it takes a small amount of technical expertise to master. Location data is a free and ubiquitous protocol that works perfectly with property. Mobile applications allow you to be in the field and serve up real time location data to make more deals. Because of the ease in matching mobile images to maps, more innovative programs are being developed to archive, present and transact using geodata.