Datamap Intelligence housing market snapshots for the US and Canada
Written by Glenn Letham, GISuser
Monday, 23 June 2008
Imagine if you could have access to a GIS data product that shows you every new housing development planned in the US and Canada... wait no more.
An interesting new data product for the real estate professional... Datamap Intelligence has created a unique application that creates customized comprehensive snapshots of the entire new housing market across the United States. The application is powered by an extensive dataset that tracks all new home sites of the top 200+ builders (updated bi-monthly). Detailed search options place the interactive map of choice at ones fingertips.
Cutting-edge features provide powerful visual analysis benefits which affords businesses the ability to expand to uncharted sites and stay inform about prime developing areas pertaining to their line of business. See Datamap's application at www.datamapi.com which would allow one to perform a query to obtain desired results.
The company has also JUST rolled out a new division called NSD Maps. NSD Maps is the freshest “one stop shop” source for the most up to date new street location data. Its new street data is not available at any of the available mapping sources! Download highly accurate SHP files at www.nsdmaps.com .. indeed this is a way interesting data product!
So, how does it work? NSD Maps aggregates new street / housing location data from hundreds of builders. The kicker here is that the service tracks builder way before any of the other available sources with unrestricted coverage across the Unites States and Canada. NSD Maps tracks the precise location of the planned development and provides accurate imagery and vector data of the "under construction" developments so they can be immediately added to an existing basemap.
Have you ever driven around a new or under-development community only to have no up-to-date street data appear on your map, PND, or other location-service provider? This could be the solution you need.
About the data
NSD Maps collects the street layout of every newly created residential developments and converts them to Geospatial Vector Images available in shapefile format, in addition to a host of other data such as : Builder Name, Builder rank (year), Name of Development, Address, Latitude & Longitude coordinates, Country, Phone, eMail, Type of home, Size of home, Sq Ft, Price Range, Age of community, Number of homes.
A big caveat to this type of data is that they seem to only be working with 200 homebuilders across the country--most of which are likely only the public builders. This gives you a great snapshot from 100,00 feet but any investor or person entering a homebuilding market is going to want the local builders as well. I have to wonder how this firm is faring against MetroStudy, Hanley Wood, RL Brown, etc. who track similar information that are modeled the same way..
In Phoenix, there are several local guys that are doing this level of analysis with all of the builders in the marketplace and are doing similar mash-ups. Data is king right now... Another comment on DataMap--they do have a lot of competition: MetroStudy, Hanley Wood and RL Brown to name a few.
The NSDMap stuff is also interesting, but I have to wonder aloud if they are using site plans that are bubble plans from sales sites of public homebuilders assuming these are in active subdivisions the sites would have final plat approval with their respective municipalities? Interesting RtoV conversion stuff going on here but bubble plans are often a little off on the georeferencing side of things and in some cases could there be distressed subdivisions that get sold partially developed or left as paper lots that get re-planned as their plat expires? Could be an interesting lesson in this marketplace.(Ryan Arp)
Datamap has 75% coverage of all new homebuilders (regardless of builder size) in the US and 95% coverage in Canada. We are currently moving into the Australian market as well. We expect to have 100% coverage of the US by years end, at which time we will integrate “all” builders into our application.
We don’t view MetroStudy, Hanley Wood, RL Brown, etc. as direct competitors being that they are restricted to “markets”. If one would want a full picture of any given area they would need to purchase multiple markets at a very high cost. Datamap offers a “snapshot” of any area across the US at a rock bottom price. We don’t have any “markets”. If there are builders building homes then we are tracking them.
NSD Maps is the freshest “one stop shop” source for the most up to date new street location data. Our new street data is not available at any of the available mapping sources! The displayed site plan is just to give one a sense as to the layout of the subdivision. We do not use the site maps to create the street centerlines/shapefiles, rather utilized a collection of data to obtain an exact highly accurate geospatial image. Please feel free to download a sample at http://www.nsdmaps.com/sample-datasets.asp. NSD Maps monitors each and every developments and is aware of it status (weather build out or closed down) at all times. I hope this answers your questions/concerns. (Jason Woods)
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