Google’s Latest Experiment
Welcome to the Real Estate Espresso podcast, your morning shot ~~shout~~ 📝 at what’s new in the world of real estate investing. I’m your host, Victor ~~Menasse~~ 📝 Menasce.
The world of big data involves taking information from disparate, unstructured sources and then relating them to one another. This is the opposite of a relational database, where everything is maintained in a highly structured environment. Think of your airline reservation system. That database maintains records of travelers, flights, ticketing options, baggage, seat assignments, meal options, cancellation insurance, frequent flier miles, and on and on. The data is highly organized and it’s built on extremely mature database technologies from the likes of Oracle or SAP.
Unstructured data is just like the term describes: it’s just data. It could be pictures, documents, videos, poetry, anything that could be described in digital form.
Now, real estate investors and developers have all kinds of new tools available to them through startup companies that overlay this kind of big data on top of ~~lined~~ 📝 land information. But these companies are startups, and we don’t know if they’re going to survive that wave of consolidation. It’s certainly going to happen as artificial intelligence startups gain traction in the market.
This week, a whole bunch of new capabilities were rolled out with no fanfare or announcements by none other than Google. These capabilities were rolled into Google Earth, where there’s a whole host of new layers that can be enabled. Some of them are included in the free offering and the rest require upgrade to either their Professional Service or their Pro Advanced Service. The Pro Account costs $75 a month per user and the Pro Advanced is priced at $150 a month.
I’m going to list the new features and try and do it in a way that’s not going to be just a boring list. The new features in the Standard offering include the municipal boundaries, census tracts, population, and population density by both census tract and by postal code. You also can get household income by the municipality or census tracts.
The Pro version gives you all of that, plus elevation contours measured every 20 meters, or about every 65 feet, and then the average surface temperature for the past six years during the summer months. That seems like a pretty high price for just that information.
Now, much of this data that’s contained in the Pro version is also available for free from the NOAA website in a different form. NOAA makes their LiDAR available for free in multiple data formats on the NOAA website.
Now the Pro ~~Advance~~ 📝 Advanced version gets you driveway counts. That’s interesting. EV charging station counts by census tract. EV charging station counts by postal code. And then, of course, EV charging station locations. It gives you inbound monthly vehicle trips by census tract, as well as outbound monthly vehicle trips, and then trips within the census tract. There’s apartment counts by census tract, solar reflectivity of rooftops, traffic signal level of service, tree canopy percentage, future land use zoning, and individual land parcels with zoning. So a really rich set of services. That’s for $150 a month.
Now, the rollout of these features is classified still as experimental, and Google is well known for rolling out all kinds of experiments. Sometimes those experiments become full-fledged products, and then others fade into oblivion when they fail to generate sufficient revenue or interest.
Some of these features are available by other means. For example, most municipalities do provide access to their zoning maps, which can be overlaid on top of satellite imagery for free. I can’t imagine why someone would pay $150 a month for something that can be accessed for free from each city individually.
If you want to know where to find an EV charger, there are numerous resources out there which will provide that information for free. I can’t see anyone paying extra to get that information as part of Google Earth.
The idea that much of this information is being packaged together by a trusted source is intriguing. These are all disparate systems from companies that don’t necessarily have a long reputation. Perhaps Google is banking on the notion that their brand will allow them to charge a premium for the convenience of packaging services that are absolutely available in other ways, often at a lower cost.
For example, there’s a startup company, ~~PAX IV~~ 📝 PAXIV, that offers three different pricing models where their price per user is under a $100 a month. The ~~PAX IV~~ 📝 PAXIV offering is far more comprehensive than the Google Earth offering, and it’s also far more useful for developers. For $93 a month, within a single state in the U.S., you can access 25 different reports a month, and you can get 25 A.I. searches a month and 25 skip traces a month, as well as maintaining 10 deal-room projects.
Their most comprehensive offering is a nationwide offering with 12 company users at $1,000 a month. That comes to about $83 per person, where they give you all kinds of different, unlimited search capabilities. This is truly the all-you-can-eat buffet of services.
Then there’s the ~~LAN.ID~~ 📝 Land ID offering, which we’ve talked about on this show before. That offering starts at $7 a month, which will give you access to a national private parcel database so you can find the ownership of any land in the U.S. It includes detailed nationwide maps with over forty layers that can be overlaid on top of the maps, and they include nationwide property summaries.
For $12 a month, you can create and share custom maps. For $33 a month, you can do all that plus create custom maps with your own branding that you can embed in other documents. And then these tools allow you to annotate the maps with photos, videos, and more. And for $66 a month, their highest offering, you can produce high-resolution printed maps, embed the deeds, include soil reports, and a whole bunch more.
So when I look at it objectively, the Google offering is noteworthy because it’s, in fact, being offered by Google. The offering is surprising because it’s so far behind what the other startups are offering in the market. Now, if Google wants to get serious about playing in the space, they certainly have the scale and the ability to compete. But the market for these types of services is pretty small, compared to the general consumer market that Google typically goes after. And for that reason, I doubt that Google is going to aim to dominate the space.
Nevertheless, it is indicative of the fast flow of new services that are going to be coming down the pipeline, on a regular basis, from unexpected places. So keep your eyes out. And as you think about that, have an awesome rest of your day. Go make some great things happen, and we’ll talk again tomorrow.
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