Effective today, we are providing an option to pay a monthly subscription for Site Identify starting at about $229/month.

Nothing changes for existing subscribers. Your current price will continue every year as long as you remain subscribed with auto renewal turned on.

Over the last 14 months, we only had an annual subscription starting at $2,500/year.  Having just one price point helped us simplify things — less bookkeeping for the back-end, simple UI for the design & client teams, no confusion while providing support, and clear communication while marketing the app.

However, some of our users wanted an option to pay monthly. They had their reasons — some wanted a flexible option while others said they couldn’t afford the upfront cost. Having a monthly option also lowers the entry barrier. Considering all these, we’ve decided to offer the monthly subscription option.

The monthly subscription is primarily for those who can’t afford the annual spend or commit for 12 months. But, we’d recommend you to choose yearly if possible. Here’s why --
​

1. You save money (~10% year over year)
2. You help us improve the product

• Committed revenue enables us to focus on improving the Site Identify experience  vs. monthly churn reduction

We hope the monthly subscription encourages more people to try Site Identify.  You’re not just paying for a good analytical tool; you’re investing in us.  Take a look at the updated pricing calculator to get a quick estimate today.

And as always... Happy Deal Hunting!

​Welcome to the September 2018 release of Site Identify.  Some of the key highlights of v1.5.0 include:

This month Site Identify has extended our market coverage to include Atlanta, GA and Portland, OR.  We've also added Snohomish County to the Seattle, WA market.

Demographic data has been updated to reflect 2018 estimates and 2023 projections.

​Welcome to the May 2018 release of Site Identify.  Some of the key highlights include:

Extended layer-list with visual cue for styling of the associated layer.

Users can now export search results to CSV format files.

Notes have been extended to accommodate up to 1000 characters.

Anybody in the real estate development industry knows that data is stored in silos. Sites can be affected by a myriad of factors including, but not limited to: environmental hazards, market conditions, easements, utility access, zoning, design overlays, floodplains, non-conducive soil types, hurricane zones, earthquake zones, deed restrictions, title restrictions, etc... Furthermore, development feasibility is also restricted by the appetites of the capital markets. For example, you might need to build to a 7% Yield to Cost in order to attract capital into a market that has a going-in cap rate of 5.5%. It is also restricted by the current cost to build. Usually in the beginning the cost is given as a rough $ per square foot estimate. Development costs are usually determined by the product type, which is shaped by the size of a site and whether or not the appropriate rent levels exist in the market. 

A developer figures all of these factors out at some point in the development process. Some factors will cost more money to figure out and some will be revealed later in the process. That being said, they will all be assessed. The information is out there, it just takes a very long time to retrieve. 

In our digital age, where data has almost become a new currency, data is more valuable than ever. What would happen if we were able to break through the data silos in the real estate industry? 

First off, the development proforma would be a lot easier to build. Market data would be automatically filled in for each product type, and the best use could be determined realistically. This market data combined with data on setbacks, zoning, height restrictions, etc... would determine the highest and best use for a site. Operating expenses would be calculated using a combination of benchmark data and real estate tax rates. Construction costs could be filled in for a suggested product type. All of these inputs would spit out one output: the residual land value of the parcel. 

With all of the data in one place, residual land values could be calculated instantly. A parcel's value would not be determined by its value to a multifamily developer or its value to a self-storage developer. A parcel's value would be analyzed by every major product type. The market constraints and product specific data would help to tell if a parcel is suitable to a hotel developer that can pay a lot of money for the site or a self-storage developer that can pay a minimal amount. Finally, a site could be analyzed by proximity factors. Walk scores, traffic counts, etc... could help add points to a site's development potential and overall value.

Now what if we combined this with 3D modeling? Imagine toggling a 3D building model onto a parcel map. The 3D building would represent the highest and best use of a site as determined by the automatic highest and best use/land residual analysis. Now imagine these 3D buildings on every parcel in your city. 

Also imagine the highest and best use as determined by regulations, vs the highest and best use determined by market forces. A city planner could very easily tell where the value of property is being restricted. For example, imagine seeing a parcel that zoning and market data tells you is best for a 5 story apartment project, but taking off zoning and seeing that the site is actually ideal for a 30 story office tower. Imagine looking at a parcel that is zoned for single family, and seeing that its higher and better use could be for smaller lot detached townhouses. The insights into the market would be invaluable from a development and city planning perspective. 

Finally, imagine what could happen if every parcel's residual land value was transparent. Could land become a commodity traded on the market? Could you securitize a parcel and make it more liquid? Could land ownership become as accessible as the stock or bond market?

​What do you think? 

​

Texas is booming. Over the last decade, Texas led the nation in population growth, growing by approximately 3.1 million people, according to the US Census. Most of the growth is happening in the large metropolitan areas. Between 2014 and 2015, the four big Texas metros: Austin, Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio saw an increase of over 400,000 people, and if those four cities were their own state, they would have been the second fastest growing state in the country, second only to Texas as a whole.


People are being born in Texas, people are migrating from other states into Texas, and people are immigrating to Texas. Houston recently became the most diverse city in the United States. Texas recently tied New York in the size of its immigrant population, and although Texas has a large population of unskilled immigrants, most likely due to unauthorized immigration, Texas has a relatively large amount of highly skilled immigrants, as well.
 
Jobs are growing in Texas. Texas has the 2nd most corporate headquarters in the United States. New York has 55 corporate headquarters, Texas has 54, and California has 53. Texas created nearly 1/3rd of the highest income jobs in the United States between 2002 to 2011, according to this Time Magazine article, which claims that: “Texas is our Future”.
 
So what is going on in Texas? What is making it such an economic powerhouse? How do we explain the growth of the state in simple terms?
 
I think the easiest explanation for Texas’ recent growth is that both high-skilled immigrants and migrants and low-skilled immigrants and migrants are attracted to the state due to its low cost of living, and its job offerings. Companies are interested in the state due to the fact that they can pay lower wages, while still giving their employees access to a high quality of life. When a software engineer from India has the choice between two jobs, one that pays more but will offer a lower-middle class lifestyle in California, and one that pays less but will offer an upper middle-class to upper-class lifestyle in Texas, the choice seems pretty simple. Not only does the software engineer win, the company wins as well. Paying $15,000 less per year per employee, while still allowing them to have an incredible lifestyle, adds up, especially when you are talking about thousands of employees. The same rings true for a lower-skilled employee.
 
The energy industry provided strong economic growth that allowed the state to diversify its economy, and then the state’s abundance of land, favorable business climate, and investments in world-class research universities, created an environment to attract and grow human capital. The Dallas Fed says that there are three factors contributing to the decline of the middle-class. The middle class has struggled because wages have not kept up with the rapid rise in housing costs, healthcare, and higher education. Healthcare is expensive all across the country, but Texas has low housing costs and relatively affordable institutions of higher education. This provides opportunities, since you can come to Texas with low-skills and low-income, attend an affordable university, and then be high skilled when you enter the job market. The rungs on Texas’ ladder are closer together than they might be in other parts of the country.
 
Texas still has a lot of work to do. Managing the fine line between being business friendly, while also providing necessary services is a difficult task. That being said, the state has an incredibly bright future ahead. Texas is rising.
 
**If you are a real estate developer that is looking to get involved in the rising Texas markets, please feel free to check out our software, Site Identify. Site Identify makes it easy to find and analyze real estate development sites. What used to take months to get to intimately know a market now takes days with Site Identify. Get unique insights and exposure to incredible off-market opportunities, instantly, with Site Identify. Schedule a demo at http://www.siteidentify.com/demo.html.
 

When most developers and brokers think of GIS software, they think about the mapping tools provided by a particular city. Although these maps serve their purpose to the general public, the tools are often slow and highly limited in functionality. Despite this, the underlying data can be useful when properly filtered or manipulated. For example, what if you could instantly identify off-market properties of a certain size, zoning, and value, while quickly being able to determine whether the property was in a tax incentive zone, an overlay district, or in the flood plain? What if all of this data was in one place? 

The good thing is that most of this data is free to add to your own applications, if you know where or how to find it. Most public entities are required by law to be transparent with the data they collect. The only time they can justify charging you to access this data is when it takes a laborious process to collect. Thus, they are charging you for the labor to retrieve the data, rather than the data itself. Since public entities do not profit off of these charges, they really aren't incentivized to make their data difficult to access, and most entities fully support open data initiatives and are making their data easier to access than ever before.

Now, cities and other public entities are regularly publishing their GIS data files, and they are typically easy to find and download. For example, here is a link to San Antonio's GIS data page and here is a link to Austin's. If the data is not easily accessible, you may have to submit an information request. In Texas, I typically make a reference to the Texas Public Information Act, and if I am requesting data from a Federal entity, I mention the Freedom of Information Act. In both cases, I am looking to get the information in a .SHP file format (shapefile). 

Shapefiles can be opened up using any GIS platform, but most GIS platforms are not very user friendly. It could take hours and hours just to make sure your underlying base map (like google maps) and your shapefile data are matched up on the same coordinate system. Overall, it is very complex, and developers and brokers shouldn't have to worry about it, since their most important task is to make great real estate deals. 

With Site Identify, we wanted to give developers and brokers the power of both advanced geospatial analytics and GIS, without burdening them with the complexities of a traditional GIS platform. We provide the most difficult to store and retrieve data and standardize it into one format. Then, we provide developers with cloud storage and tools to upload their own custom data layers. Now, real estate firms that want the power of GIS don't need to hire a GIS specialist for $75,000 to do so. They can instead, simply, give Site Identify to their analysts and land acquisition teams.

Do you want to turn your analysts and associates into revenue producers? With custom layers in Site Identify, the time it takes to do a basic site analysis can be reduced 50-75%. The time spent on analysis is now up-front, in the retrieval of data, rather than ad hoc on every individual real estate site brought to the team. Your team is now empowered to proactively find sites by creatively searching and filtering, which will result in more deals for your firm.

If you are interested in learning more about Site Identify, please click here to schedule a web demonstration, or go to www.siteidentify.com to learn more about how Site Identify can empower you to control your pipeline.

​We’re pleased to announce the availability of the latest enhancements to Site Identify. Whether you’re a power user or new to the product, there is a lot you’ll like. This latest release offers the following:

Crossfit gyms are the tell-tale sign of a neighborhood in transition because crossfit gyms are looking to pay a minimal lease amount in areas that are still convenient to their target demographic. What are the demographics of crossfit members? 

According to data from Quantcast Analytics, over 43% of crossfit members are between the ages of 25 and 34. Only ~13% of the United States population is between 25 and 34, so crossfit overwhelmingly caters to this demographic. The Quantcast Analytics data also determined that over 50% of crossfit members make over $150,000 in annual income, and over 40% of crossfit members have post graduate degrees.

Crossfit gyms take a minimal amount of capital to start, and a minimal amount of capital to operate. Gold's Gym has recently started their own crossfit program, and some of these classes take place in their parking lot. Other crossfit gyms are basically garages with some tires, ropes, and kettle bells. Because of the minimal investment required, crossfit gyms have spread like wildfire. The low barriers to entry in the crossfit market can lead to market saturation, and an individual gym cannot command a premium over its competitors unless it is significantly differentiated. The difficulty to command a premium keeps prices low for members, but the lower prices means crossfit gyms must be located in low rent, underdeveloped properties. As neighborhoods develop and get more expensive, crossfit gyms have to look for the next low rent and underdeveloped area to survive. 

So if you want to find the next transitioning area that has low land prices and is still attractive to a high income, young professional, demographic, keep your eye out for groups of people shuffling tires and doing crunches in parking lots. They could indicate that a crossfit gym is nearby, and thus an opportunity.

In this article, we are going to show you how you can hone in on ideal neighborhoods for residential development using census projections and Housing and Urban Development indices. We are going to use projected population growth, median household income, school proficiency, and proximity to jobs, to find these ideal neighborhoods.

Site Identify's new scan function can help you target neighborhoods based on demographic, and other, characteristics. In this article, we are going to scan for target areas in the San Antonio, TX market. 

First, we will open the scan function located on the left hand side of the tool bar. Second, we will click on the estimates and projections (red tab) to choose census data projections. In this section, we will want to search for block groups with a projected population growth of 10%. We will also want to look for areas with median household incomes of $50,000 or more. Once we have filled in this criteria, we will hit search to scan for these areas (see below).

Second, we will scroll down and click on the green tab to access HUD indices. These indices are percentiles between 1 and 100. Since we are looking for areas with decent schools and great access to employment, we will want to search for areas with schools that are ranked in the 75th percentile and above, and we will want to search for areas with job proximity ranked in the 90th percentile above. Once these are filled out we will want to again hit search. The areas that meet the criteria of the HUD indices will be outlined in green (see below).

Now we will want to see if the areas with high median household income and projected population growth overlap with the areas that have decent schools and great proximity to jobs. To do this we will click on the "Overlaps" symbol at the top of the scan bar (see below). 

In this specific search, there are actually no overlaps in the San Antonio, TX market. That being said, we can still hone in on ideal neighborhoods. In this case, we have zoomed in on an area that met our criteria for schools and jobs that is surrounded by areas with high household incomes and projected population growth (see below).

If I click on the news articles in these areas, I can see pretty quickly that they are being targeted for residential development (see below).

Here at Site Identify we believe in iterations and our last few have been a slingshot into building capabilities that reflect our commitment to provide features that will make life a bit easier for our end users.  Here's a summary of the latest features you can expect to see when searching for that new real estate development site at Site Identify this morning.

Gone are the days of setting up your market with the perfect custom layer set and symbology just to have to do so again when you come back to that market the next day.  By popular demand, we've now expanded the custom layers module to store your layer setup per market by default.

We've extended our market news layer to include local/regional sources in addition to the national level ones you've grown accustom to.

The pipeline module has been extended to include advanced pipeline management features to enable you to know who is working on what deals and where each deal is in the land acquisition process. 

The search module has been extended to include the ability to search by Owner Address.  Additionally, a new search results list has been added so you can now view both map/tabular results