Does anyone use GIS? Interested to learning about GIS for both buy side and sell side

I'm a student in an Urban Development program (RE focused) in a top 10 Canadian school.

We use GIS (Geographical Information Systems/Science) in a lot of classes and assignments. Specifically ArcGIS. I know GIS is great at looking at data over geography, and I'm wondering if anyone has used this within the context of real estate. Whether it be for asset management, acquisitions, development, or anything else.

Thanks!!

11 Comments
 

Bump. I'm considering learning it or QGIS but wanted to see if anyone is using either and if it's seen as a value add.

Quant (ˈkwänt) n: An expert, someone who knows more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing.
 

We have a dedicated GIS guy at our shop (JLL, CBRE, C&W, Etc. in a Major Market. From my experience a lot of it seems to be drive time analysis, development maps, demographics, and some Google Earth stuff. Mostly utilized by tenant rep, industrial, and agency brokers.

 

I did a planning masters in Canada and never touched it, but then worked at a consulting firm and began using QGIS a lot. It's useful to be familiar with just to pull data, make maps, and represent your data visually, but any serious GIS work that was for more than routine demographic analysis would be done by a dedicated GIS person, a job which I would not wish on my worst enemy.

In short, be familiar with it and be able to draw a map but unless you want to be a dedicated 'specialist' be wary of how much you lean on it as some shops will pigeonhole you into that role. I also am Canadian and sounds like we have a similar background so feel free to PM me

 

I took a GIS courses in undergrad as well - It's an extremely powerful tool. I absolutely killed the course and thought I could leverage that in my interview. They were more impressed by the verbage I was throwing out than the fact that I could pick an ideal site for a winery.

From my experience working with an AM firm and now a developer, I haven't seen a trace of the program in industry. Besides the reasons mentioned in the comments above, I presume real estate divisions at large companies would also use GIS for site selection.

 

Is this true for all asset classes? Does anyone see learning GIS having more value in infrastructure for example?

Quant (ˈkwänt) n: An expert, someone who knows more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing.
 

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