Real Estate GIS concerns all dimensions of real estate that can be better understood or operationalized by knowing its geospatial context. Improving real estate decisions via GIS and related geospatial technologies is now expected by management of all industries, as well as home-renters and home-buyers in the residential market. Real Estate GIS Specialists are individuals who have applied knowledge and skills across the disciplines of business geography, the practice of real estate, and the application of geospatial technologies to support decision making in this realm. There is a good reason why the mantra of “location, location, location” is a long-standing tenet within the business of real estate.
Where should a retail business occur or locate within a region? What would that trade area look like? Should a retail expansion occur and how would that affect sales of other nearby existing locations? Would a new retail location have the right demographic or socio-economic customer base to be profitable? These are important questions for retailers to consider. Within the evolving landscape of GIS, there is more geospatial data than ever before about the potential customer. In retail, the application of maps and mapping technology is growing to include commercial real estate, logistics, and marketing to name a few. There has been an increased momentum across commercial applications for geospatial technologies delivered in an easy to comprehend format for a variety of end users.
Geographic Information Systems and Technology are utilized extensively in the business sector and have become a strategic element for competition and partnering. Although the traditional digital map layers and tables remain at the core of business GIS, the spatial architecture in firms now includes location analytics, location intelligence, AI, machine learning, imagery, social media linkages. Cloud-based solutions provide platform flexibility, centralized data, and potential to roll out user-friendly webGIS across large segments of business users and customers. GIS is well suited to the digital transformations that are essential for firms, large and small. With these advances, GIS has become prominent and its function has moved upwards in companies’ organizational hierarchies, with enterprise GIS even being recognized in the C-suite. UPS is an example in which GIS is now a critical corporate competitive factor. In spite of these successes, a gap remains in the supply of skilled spatial workforce for companies. Business schools can contribute by changing by school leadership “getting it” about spatial, bringing GIS into the mainstream curricula, developing training for business faculty in teaching, conducting research in location analytics, and populating student body and alumni base with knowledge and enthusiasm for spatial thinking and management.
In this article, return on investment (ROI) calculations are applied to analyzing the current costs and financial benefits of geographic information systems (GIS) as a GIS management tool. How to develop GIS ROI methodologies to document the current financial value of GIS operations, as well as an outline of a ROI research design without and without GIS, are also included. Before the development and widespread use of GIS by government agencies and private enterprises, maps provided benefits and value to society. Early attempts to catalog the societal and financial benefits from mapping include examples related to geological mapping. An ROI analysis calculates the financial values of all the inputs into a system and all the outputs from the system, and then calculates the differences in value of the inputs and outputs. A key challenge to the growth of the emerging geospatial technology industry was to convince agencies and companies that GIS provided both societal and financial benefits. Companies and agencies often used benefit-cost analysis as a decision support tool when deciding to invest in GIS. But usually there was no effort or requirement by agencies to prove the ROI achieved after a project was completed and put into operation.