RealSource

Overview

RealSource Partners knew they had what it took to become one of the premier commercial real estate brokers in the country. The focus and personal investment they provided helped them quickly establish themselves as a force on the West Coast. RealSource specializes in investigating properties and facilities that would be good for their clients and summarizing the information for their leaders.

One of their biggest opportunities came when they acquired a major client who owned an international chain of fitness clubs. Pulling together a solid, fact-based presentation for every area of interest for the client would require RealSource to tap a variety of resources. They needed to give their fitness club client complete demographic pictures that included the following:

• Distance and drive time
• The competition in the area
• The flow of traffic around the location
• The availability and visibility of signage
• The economics for similar properties elsewhere
• Relevant data points on area residents

RealSource Partner’s Challenge

RealSource had always excelled at making the most out of their three-person workforce. But even the heroic efforts of their employees would need some help overcoming the challenges of tracking and updating their disparate data sources.

• Spreadsheets
• Individual databases
• PDF Reports stored on personal and company drives
• External system resources

The manual work required to pool the information into a workable summary for the client seemed overwhelming. RealSource also realized the limitations these labor-intensive workflows put on their ability to scale the business.

The geo-centric nature of handling real estate as a broker in Orange County was a big reason many of them failed at expansion efforts. The need to keep on top of demographics, what competitors were doing, how traffic flowed around businesses, etc., kept brokers from moving beyond the confines of the West Coast.

RealSource needed an application capable of giving them a birds-eye view of different geographic locations in California. They wanted to break free of any limitations keeping them from doing an in-depth analysis of potential sites for their fitness-club client. It also needed to adapt to the needs of clients anywhere in North America.

A Future-Facing Data Solution From Baytech

Baytech Consulting understood the importance of useful, interactive visualizations in helping RealSource pull together their summary presentations for clients. Those dashboards needed to be backed up by a reliable, secure backend that could pull in and parse information from any source within or outside the company.

Baytech made sure to address RealSource’s needs with the creation of Pulse, the company’s new web-based real estate development application. They put an emphasis on UX when designing a user-friendly web interface every RealSource employee felt comfortable using. The Pulse web architecture incorporated the strengths of both ASP.NET and Angular to give it the flexibility and power the broker required.

One-Stop Data Resource

Every piece of information housed within the company ended up in a SQL Server database. Baytech automated data gathering from all sources using backend spatial engines, third-party data sources, and organic data gathering tools.

Easy Area Targeting

RealSource’s three-person workforce could quickly research information on sites in various locations in an area. The new application dramatically reduced manual effort and improved internal workflows by allowing them to:

• Zoom into any metro area
• Look at different sites and competition in the region
• View demographic heat maps
• Look at the traffic counts around different locations
• Pull demographic information by selecting target areas on the interactive map
• Conduct Google searches within the map and apply the results to a given site
• Look at the driving distance and drive times along with related demographic stats for each
• Manipulate places on the map and automatically update the data with the changes

Employees could export clean site summaries containing all relevant metrics around a potential business location. These data points could be incorporated into presentations explaining the strengths and weaknesses of each site.

RealSource could also obtain more detailed statistics around a location that focused on the following:

• The median income of area residents
• The ethnic makeup of the population
• A breakdown of the highest education level achieved by residents.

Expanding From the West Coast

Pulse allowed RealSource to deliver everything its international fitness club client needed to make sound decisions on where to expand. It also proved to be the key they were looking for in their desire to expand beyond Orange County.

RealSource saw its revenue increase 800% within two years of moving to the new platform. Pulse gave the business something their competitors did not have. They could analyze any location, beyond the capabilities of brokers local to an area.

The brokerage firm’s site summaries were unmatched in detail and accuracy thanks to their ability to pull real-time information. Pulse helped RealSource become the primary brokerage firm for all of North America.

Baytech Consulting continues to provide updates to the platform as needed. We pride ourselves on understanding the unique needs of our clients. Success stories like RealSource underscore the importance of leveraging technology in ways that encourages companies to think beyond the immediate and embrace the future of their industry