Mobile devices are having a huge impact on data gathering for location analytics projects. Think of all of those “check-ins” on social media, photos taken that embed location data, and Wi-Fi routers that can collect data from your phone on where you go inside of a retail store. To determine your location, smart phones use a combination of GSP, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cell towers. To check to see if your photo has location coordinates, all you have to do is to look at the properties of the photo in windows for example under “Properties” and you will see the Latitude and Longitude under GPS. On a Mac you can do the same thing by selecting “Get info” and looking under more details.
The real estate industry has benefited greatly from the evolution and sophistication of mobile devices. Paul Amos, previously with the Wharton School Geospatial Initiative, states that:
Mobile devices are becoming more commonplace in the evaluation of real estate and business applications. Mobile devices can be used to collect information about locations which can be sent to the company for further analysis such as collecting customer intercept surveys as they shop at a store to determine why they traveled to shop at the particular store. Mobile devices are also a great medium for serving content to enable the real estate decision makers in the field to access information that a company feels is most pertinent for its real estate decision process. Accessing information from a company’s servers through a mobile device improves the speed and efficiency of the real estate professional by having access to information anytime and anywhere.
One great mobile app for real estate is Esri’s Business Analyst Online. This app allows users to evaluate sites, trade areas, and/or neighborhoods for 135+ countries. Users can tap into a large collection of demographic data sets, reports, and maps. This app also allows for collection of data in the field that can then be retrieved when back in the office. Another mobile app for real estate is the app we built for the Planned Grocery application. Figure 4.1 shows a screen shot of the Planned Grocery mobile application. Users can have the app display their location while moving and then the app shows them the nearby locations of grocery stores that are proposed, planned, under construction, and recently built.
Figure 4.1 Planned Grocery® mobile application