The real estate industry is a highly competitive market, posing significant challenges for both emerging and established agents. Traditionally, the key to selling real estate has been building reputable portfolios and possessing excellent interpersonal skills. However, the landscape is evolving as homeowners increasingly seek streamlined buying and selling property processes.
New digital companies, such as Zillow and Trulia, have emerged in response to this demand for simplicity. These platforms empower homeowners to estimate and list their properties directly from the comfort of their homes, understanding the potential cost for their property and region.
Today, agencies must pivot to appeal more to the new digital market. This shift requires a heightened focus on leveraging digital tools to support their understanding of the region and historical geographic changes, helping real estate better adapt to an area’s new market conditions and buyers’ needs.
How GIS solutions can help the real estate industry
Leveraging Geographic Information System (GIS) technology, there is an opportunity for realtors to gain practical insights into an area and its changing market conditions. For example, how the weather has impacted the region — such as flooding or wildfires — how many new developments were constructed, and what other businesses have popped up in the neighborhood. Needing this data and historical context is part of why we’re building our digital map at Navigate — designed to provide continuously updated views of the world uploaded by contributors.
User-contributed maps can offer practical insights to real estate agents navigating the housing market in specific areas and aid the industry in accessing valuable information about properties. For example, it could equip agents with relevant details about listed properties, including their physical attributes and location-specific data. This data can be used for further app development that supports agents’ needs for accuracy, overall helping them make informed decisions based on a more complete understanding of the local real estate landscape. This data, coupled with AI, can provide a future-forward outlook and better support agents and their projections.
GIS and its value beyond real estate
Beyond its applications in real estate, a user-contributed map can assist insurance agencies by leveraging the data collected by contributors. Currently, insurance agencies navigate through unique, time-consuming procedures to assess the risk levels of properties. Often, they send agents to conduct on-site evaluations and surveys for accurate data, a process that can be both costly and time-consuming.
Insurance companies can also gain a more comprehensive understanding of properties’ geographical and physical attributes by harnessing fresh GIS data in areas of interest to their company. Coupled with AI, this approach can make the assessment process faster and more cost-effective, ensuring that insurance agencies provide accurate and fair rate assessments.
Looking forward
GIS data and AI already play a huge role in the real estate industry, and this will only continue to grow. As this space continuously evolves, unlocking vast amounts of new and novel insights will be critical to companies operating in this space.
