Meridian Awards 2012

PROFILE

CB Richard Ellis is the global leader in commercial real estate services. With over 29,000 employees, the Company serves real estate owners, investors and occupiers through more than 300 offices worldwide (excluding affiliate offices). CB Richard Ellis offers strategic advice and execution for property sales and leasing; corporate services; property, facilities and project management; mortgage banking; appraisal and valuation; development services; investment management; and research and consulting. CB Richard Ellis is the only commercial real estate company named one of the 50 “best in class” companies by BusinessWeek, and was also named one of the 100 fastest growing companies by Fortune. In Canada, CB Richard Ellis employs over 1,600 people in 20 offices from coast to coast. Using its strength, resources and passion, CB Richard Ellis helps clients successfully anticipate market opportunities, seize competitive advantages and achieve their real estate objectives.

INTRODUCTION

CB Richard Ellis has invested heavily into Geographic Information Systems (GIS), allowing access to cadastral data, aerial imagery, market analysis and timely demographic data. A GISsystem enables us to create available property maps, employee distribution analysis, demographic analysis, thematic maps, as well as drive time and location maps.
This project is designed to establish new web application using GIStechnology and will be used with MapInfo to provide Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists within the company to carry out spatial queries with high emphasis on data consistency and data integrity.

CHALLENGE

Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists spend numerous hours carrying out analysis using spatial data. These queries are tabular based and do not provide the users with any form of spatial perspective. It is a time consuming process to analyze the data without the use of GIS-enabled query tools. With this application, the users will have the ability to retrieve and process large amount of company data and to provide an easy-to-use tool for multiple end users.

SOLUTION

A new web map application was developed with interoperability capability to work with MapInfo. This application ties with the company’s database to process large amount of data and is thus accessed securely using company’s intranet. MapInfo is used to process raw data by assigning spatial reference, prepare data from secondary sources and prepare for publishing to web services.

RESULTS ACHIEVED

Using this new application, the users can Buffer, Select Within and do other spatial queries to be more productive and efficient. The tools within the application provide numerous functionalities for the users to view and query data without making references to the secondary sources. This has streamlined the workflow by reducing complicated procedures to retrieve necessary spatial information for mapping purposes.