Orbital Insight Launches its Real Estate Foot Traffic Analytics Product

Why Commercial Real Estate?

Commercial Real Estate is the largest asset class in the US, valued at over $15 Trillion, yet is one of the last remaining opaque markets. Only a fraction of the millions of America’s shopping centers, industrial assets, multi-family apartment buildings, warehouses, hotels, mixed-use, and specialty properties are reported in publicly-traded REITs or financed by securitized loans covered by the SEC. Despite the opacity properties still need to be sold, built, mortgaged, repurposed, and managed every day.

Innovative new data sources have made it possible for the first time to understand property visitation, demographic trends, and trade areas at scale in near real-time. Initial real estate customers such as Avison Young, CenterSquare, and Jamestown partnered with Orbital Insight to design an AI platform that could objectively create true trade areas, identify demographic shifts, and determine the best acquisition candidates.

That’s why we developed and today released GO Property - the industry’s first foot traffic analytics solution built for ALL asset classes.

Foot traffic is the leading indicator of property performance, and GO Property makes it possible to access this valuable data anywhere in the US with just a few clicks. In 10 minutes you’ll know:

• Near real-time property visitation levels on a daily basis
• True trade areas based on actual customer activity (Hint: They rarely look like concentric circles)
• Demographic trends and customer behavior

Best of all, you can get insight into any location - whether you want to look at your portfolio, comps, main street, the nearby highway, or the entire county! It’s a commitment to data quality, privacy and anonymity, and flexibility that makes us different.

Customer Use Cases

Commercial Real Estate is an inherently relationship-driven industry and we are honored to have launched our product with the advice and feedback from the early adopters and innovators in CRE. We would like to thank the many key partners who informed the use cases, data quality, and features needed to deliver a high-quality analytics product for the commercial real estate market.

Avison Young - Brokerage & Property Marketing

“In an industry where location strategy is the underlying theme of every decision, Orbital Insight’s GO Property App allows our team to extract deep geographic insights to provide best in class real estate due diligence and research for our clients.“ 

-Julian Adams, GIS Practice Lead

Avison Young, one of the world's leading Commercial Real Estate services and brokerage companies, is using Orbital Insight data as an input for their next-generation spatial tool - providing their brokers with a weekly view into the latest change in the property visitation, trade area, and demographic shifts for the entire collection of US properties they represent.

CenterSquare Investment Management - Acquisition Diligence & Asset Management

"Identifying high-quality properties requires reliable data that can expose evolving market trends. Orbital Insight's latest foot traffic and trade area trends allow us to quickly identify standout opportunities in our target markets as well as monitor daily changes in activity across our portfolio. These insights have contributed to our data-driven diligence and investment strategies in a significant manner.” 

-Joseph Rubino, Private Equity Associate

CenterSquare Investment Management is a real asset manager focused on listed real estate, private equity real estate, private real estate debt and listed infrastructure investments, accessed via U.S.-only and global strategies.  The company has pioneered a research driven platform utilizing geolocation technology to efficiently scout high volumes of retail assets for acquisition based on foot traffic, demographic shifts, and qualitative factors. their feedback was integral in the development of Orbital Insight's self-service real estate analytics product. CenterSquare is now exploring use cases for this data in additional property sectors such as industrial.

Jamestown - Acquisition Diligence & Asset Management

"Orbital Insight is helping us interpret real-time reopening and reactivation patterns so that we can continue to deliver property experiences that align to the changing needs of our tenants and communities. In a time where no one has a magic 8 ball, Orbital Insight can bring unbiased intelligence into our decision-making. Additionally, preserving anonymity and privacy is a top priority for Jamestown, and we were excited to work with a partner that aligns to those values.“

-Ginny Miller, VP of Technology and Innovation

Investment and management companies such as Jamestown turn towards digital transformation and innovative new data sources to discover insights and unlock property value that simply can’t be seen by traditional means. Jamestown's VP of Technology and Innovation, Ginny Miller, spoke to our team on how the company is using geospatial data for better real estate decision making and how PropTech and AI can support this vision. Feedback emphasizing the importance of data quality and a self-service product experience were key in the development of GO Property and the ability to answer questions such as:

• Where are people lingering?
• When does the property have downtime?
• Where are people coming from and going to?
• How do we compare to surrounding properties?
• What cross-traffic is there across spaces?
• Are events and activations successful?
• Can we tell tenants a story?

All Orbital Insight data accessed by Jamestown and our entire client base is anonymous and prioritizes individual protection.

See why data is important to Jamestown.

How it Works

Orbital Insight transforms billions of daily anonymized and aggregated mobile location data points to create daily foot traffic estimates and useful KPIs to quantify real estate property performance points such as the change in trade area, customer loyalty, revisit, and dwell time.

Most location data is captured by smartphones that report “lat/long” coordinates, offering insight into where a device is at the time it received GPS, WiFi or Bluetooth signals. These highly accurate signals can report within a meter’s accuracy, and Orbital Insight partners with the highest quality SDK developers to extract useful trends from a panel composing approximately 10% of US device traffic.

Orbital Insight is different from most location data firms, in our deep commitment to human capital, with over 30% of our R&D staff coming from Ph.D. background in statistical science. They develop the algorithms that account for the challenges associated with location data, such as the change in app usage, the number of apps covered by our SDK partners, changes in location settings, and the disparate patterns in location reporting that you would encounter in the raw data. They then compare the accuracy of normalization techniques to “ground truth” observations such as baseball game attendance.

We also take a vigilant approach to privacy, as a participant in the Department of Defense’s drafting of its AI ethics principles. Orbital Insight only works with the highest quality data suppliers that require double-opt in for data sharing. Orbital Insight does not receive Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and when you work with us, you know you will not receive any PII as well.

To get your property report you just need to select a location and time range and we do the rest in a few minutes. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to get value out of GO Property, but we have some on-hand that can explain the data science in greater detail if you’d like.

Looking Forward

In December 2019 we made three predictions on how CRE professionals will adopt PropTech in 2020:

1. Data quality
2. Values-driven business
3. An emphasis on scaling, not displacing professionals

As COVID rapidly changes how Americans interact with commercial real estate, we want to partner with you to help identify risks and opportunities.

How are office properties recovering? Will industrial assets have access to a local workforce? Which retailers are pulling from the widest trade area? These are just a few examples of how you can use data to tell a story and accelerate data-driven decisions in real estate.

Are you ready to get started? 

Tell us where you'd like to understand the latest foot traffic trends.