Property investment is very much a numbers game. That is something I learned very early on in my career, when I spent the bulk of time buried in Excel spreadsheets! If you think about the decisions made throughout the investment life cycle, they all involve some level of quantitative analysis.
Thankfully, Australia is one of the most transparent real estate markets in the world. It is one of the key factors that drives cross-border investment in our country, and it is a great complement to our diverse economy, growing population and positive market fundamentals. The challenge this transparency presents for those of us in the investment universe, however, is the sheer amount of data we handle every day. Sales data, leasing data, vacancy, land supply, yields, capital values, the list goes on. And most of the time, this data comes to us in different forms from different sources and it’s almost impossible to keep track of it all. That was until GIS came along.
GIS is a spatial system that creates, manages, analyses and maps all types of data. It connects data to a map, integrating location data (where things are) with all types of descriptive information (what things are like there). It is quite literally a game changer for anyone in the property world – and most other industries for that matter. The chances are you’ve seen and interacted with one before – it’s not new technology, just rapidly evolving.
I first came across the genius that is the Geographic Information System when I was working in agency at Colliers.