I have recently begun my final course to complete to receive my Master’s degree in GIS. There were a number of projects that I thought to focus on while at my role as GIS Analyst at Metro Commercial Real Estate. On top of my day to day responsibilities, I have a few additional projects that I have directed extra energy. I have been involved in changing the map component for our standard brochure, experimented with ESRI’s interactive HTML, and a few other smaller projects.
The large project that I am putting majority of my spare time towards is revitalizing the sales and lease comparisons (comps) database that is utilized by my team and brokers at Metro Commercial. This database contains sales and lease comparisons of commercial properties from competing real estate firms. The dataset contains various information including sales volume, sale price, rent price, rent type, square footage, parcel acreage, address, lease terms, and more. Currently, the comps database has over 1,500 entries which have been built up over the past few years. We collect the comps entries based on what brokers provide us. There are a number of issues with the comps database, mainly that many entries are incomplete and inconsistent.
The issue of being incomplete is inevitable, as often times brokers are sending whatever they can find to aid themselves in the future. The inconsistency comes from the turnover of analysts over the past few years. For example, the rental rate section has rates in forms of annually, monthly, per square foot, per sf per year. Many of the addresses are not geocoded, addressed are not complete, and many other inconsistencies.
The largest chunk of this project will be cleaning up the database and getting it to a consistent status. In my next blog post, I will describe my intentions with this database moving forward.
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