How Can Your Phone Help Your Due Diligence?

The Real Estate Espresso Podcast

Have you ever wondered how the mapping software on your phone can alert you to a traffic jam?

It doesn’t matter if you are using an android phone or an iPhone, the mapping software uses the same basic technique for determining what is happening in traffic. If your phone has location tracking turned on, then the operating system services will report back to Google or to Apple Maps the moving speed estimation of your phone and all of the other phones that are currently travelling along that stretch of highway.

By collecting the aggregate information, they can determine the average speed that phones are travelling along that stretch of freeway. Since most of those phones are located with their owners inside a vehicle, we can infer that the cars and trucks are traveling at the same speed as the phones. If the speed limit on that stretch of road is 60, and the average speed is 30, they will probably color code that section of freeway in yellow and if the average speed is 10, they will probably color code that section of freeway in red to denote a severe traffic jam.

Now you might be wondering why I’m telling you this on a real estate podcast. What the heck does this have to do with real estate?

Well, this same technology can be applied to other types of analysis that are extremely useful to real estate investors. Let’s imagine for a moment that you want to invest in retail real estate, maybe a shopping center. In this case you don’t care how fast the phone is traveling, you want to know where all the phones are going. Where are they stopping?

What if you could use this location information in a much more granular way. Let’s say that you wanted to open a shoe store in a particular mall, it might be useful to assess the foot traffic to the mall, to other shoe stores and other clothing stores in the area. This same technology can be used to tabulate the movement of cell phones according to location.

-------------

Host: Victor Menasce

email: [e-mail]