CenterPoint Properties

Real-Estate Developer Uses Geographic Data Visualization to Enhance Decision Making

Industrial real-estate developer CenterPoint needed a way to quickly and accurately assess both properties it owns and potential acquisitions. The company met that need with Microsoft® Virtual Earth™, an integrated mapping platform that enables users to plot properties on a map and overlay the images with data from multiple sources. Such data visualization has increased produc¬tivity and enhanced decision making, helping CenterPoint to accelerate business growth.

Business Needs

For CenterPoint Properties, reinventing itself as a developer of intermodal real-estate solutions required the alignment of business and IT strategy on a scale that was unprece-dented in the real-estate industry. To meet that challenge, the company built its CenterPoint Universal Business System (CUB), which integrates with the company’s back-end financial system and other data sources to provide a single tool that supports the entire property life cycle.

When market and census data is layered on maps and images, the result is a complete and up-to-date picture of an asset—worth at least a thousand words—that is communicated with clarity and precision. Scott Zimmerman Chief Information Officer, CenterPoint Properties

In developing CUB, CenterPoint placed a heavy emphasis on how the tool could enhance user productivity and improve decision making. For the commercial real-estate developer, that meant finding a way to quickly and accurately assess both owned properties and potential acquisitions. “In our industry, we tend to think and speak geographically, such as ‘near the freeway interchange,’ so we wanted to integrate mapping and aerial images as much as possible,” says Scott Zimmerman, Chief Information Officer for CenterPoint Properties. “To optimize decision making, we had to augment those images with data from multiple sources.”

Solution

CenterPoint met its data visualization needs by augmenting CUB with Microsoft® Virtual Earth™, which enables users to plot a given property on a map using aerial or hybrid imagery. Users can choose to add properties being considered for acquisition or those in the company’s existing portfolio. Users can then layer information from multiple sources onto the map to create a color-coded “heat map” that includes:

• Data from the company’s financial system, such as financial performance and occupancy.
• Market data such as vacancy, rents, sale prices, absorption, and new construction.
• Census data, such as population growth, median age, and income.

In addition, because CUB retains historical data, users also can visualize trends over time—for example, examining occupancy rates from one quarter to the next to see whether the local market for a given property is heating up or cooling down.

Also helpful in assessing properties is the Virtual Earth bird’s-eye view, which provides valuable additional information because its images are taken from an airplane at a 45-degree angle (as opposed to top-down satellite images). “The bird’s-eye view really helps people ‘get closer’ to the building,” says Zimmerman. “We can use it to examine a building from different angles—or even to count the doors on a loading dock.”

Benefits

By integrating Microsoft Virtual Earth mapping software into CUB, CenterPoint has enabled its employees to easily visualize data, leading to increased productivity and improved decision making. “Whether it’s executives analyzing a new acquisition or a property manager studying an existing asset, they can use maps and aerial images to assess the asset in its environment,” says Zimmerman. “When market and census data is layered on maps and images, the result is a complete and up-to-date picture of an asset—worth at least a thousand words—that is communicated with clarity and precision.”

In turn, those improvements in productivity and decision making have helped CenterPoint cut the length of its biweekly deal pipeline meetings in half and increase the turnover rate for properties from an average of five or six years to about three, thereby enabling the company to increase annual transaction volumes from 10–15 percent of its portfolio to 30–40 percent. “In the past few years, we’ve boosted our investment volumes by 80 percent and maintained our compounded annual growth rate of 15 to 20 percent—all without an increase in staff,” says Jim Clewlow, Chief Investment Officer at CenterPoint.