PRINT THIS STORY:

CHANGE TEXT SIZE:

VIEW FROM ABOVE

Google Earth brings brokers the world

By Dees Stribling

It’s hard to remember the Internet without the Google search engine, even though Google is less than a decade old. Will it become equally hard for retail developers and brokers to remember a time before Google Earth?

This geographic search engine is still so new that the retail industry is still discovering it. For the uninitiated, it works this way: A user types an address into the Google Earth engine and it delivers a satellite photo of the location within seconds. Early indications are that the tool is finding acceptance within the industry, but whether it will become as useful and ubiquitous as the original namesake engine is still unknown.

“For anyone involved in real estate, it can be useful,” said Lawrence Okrent, president of Chicago-based Okrent Associates, which provides urban-planning and aerial photography services. “It isn’t the be-all and end-all of research for any particular site, but it can point out neighboring sites or relationships between sites that you might not perceive from the ground. Aerial photos serve something of the same function, but Google Earth brings the images quickly to a desktop computer.”

Google Earth is an interactive atlas of the entire Earth. It began life as Earth Viewer, the creation of a California company called Keyhole. Google acquired Keyhole in 2004 and renamed the service last year, after merging it with Google Maps. With the panache of the Google name behind it, Google Earth became a gee-whiz Web site last summer, offering casual users the novelty of being able to “see” familiar places from above or from other angles, sometimes with astonishing clarity.

The product, which is currently available by download for most personal computers, overlays a variety of elements, including aerial photography and satellite imagery, onto a three-dimensional model of the Earth. This helps the user understand the natural or man-made features within the image as well as the invisible ones, such as borders. Not only do users get access to images, but in some cases also to layers of data associated with particular places, provided by Google or by other Web sites. A Google Earth map may link, for instance, to an external Web page displaying demographical, political or organizational subdivisions, such as zip codes, school district boundaries and the like.

These images, moreover, are not flat. Google Earth incorporates digital terrain model data collected by NASA, meaning that sites are visible in three dimensions and the perspectives can be manipulated so that a bird’s eye view is not the only option. Buildings in some 30 major American cities — so far — are visible in angle-adjustable 3-D.

There are limitations, of course. The U.S. urban-area images offer high resolution and a great deal of surface detail, but the resolution of remote locations may be considerably lower, causing those images to appear relatively unfocused. Beyond this, the coverage of areas outside the U.S. is generally less thorough.

Nevertheless, Google Earth seems to have considerable usefulness in retail real estate. Perhaps at its most basic level, at least for developers, it makes a good tool for grasping the lay of the land. “We use Google Earth to review prospective development,” said Robert G. Frazier, vice president of development at Boston-based S.R. Weiner & Associates, which has developed numerous shopping centers in New England. “It allows you to take a good look around sites without leaving your office — patterns of infrastructure and rooftops are visible if you spend a little time with it.”

The device is no substitute, however, for physically visiting the site itself at some point, says Frazier. “Google Earth serves as something of a screening function,” he said. “But once you’ve eliminated some sites because of obvious problems, which can be visible using something like Google Earth, it doesn’t take the place of looking around for yourself.”

Though in New England, at least, the resolution and detail levels of rural sites are far lower than those of such cities as Boston and Hartford, Conn., “the detail can be remarkable” even so, Frazier says. “And it will probably improve.”

Scott Choppin considers himself an early adopter of Google Earth. Choppin is the managing partner of Urban Pacific Builders, a Long Beach, Calif.-based development firm that specializes in mixed-use projects typically containing for-sale housing and as much as 50,000 square feet of retail. “The real estate industry isn’t known for its early adoption of new technologies, but I’m a tech freak,” Choppin said. “I came across it when it was Keyhole and started using it then, even though it still had some problems, some of which Google has resolved.”

Choppin agrees with Frazier that Google Earth serves best as a visual tool. “You can get a feel for what something looks like, and it’s easy to make a print to show to an architect or someone else you need to consult with on a project,” Choppin said. “It’s part of a site assessment and more accessible in some ways than sheets of aerial photos, because it’s more dynamic — you can move the frame around and look at things from different angles.”

Choppin says he thinks the current version of Google Earth, like any evolving technology, will probably become more useful in short order, not just because Google will modify it, but also because of the Internet phenomenon known as mashup. A mashup is an Internet site or application that integrates content from multiple sources. The data are exchanged by means of an API (application programming interface), such as are available through Google, Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo.

“You might combine an image from Google Earth with an applet [an application portable between operating systems] that overlays demographic data for the areas you’re looking at,” Choppin said. “So you’d have not only the detail of a high-resolution map, but also information that tends — in more conventional media — to be displayed separately. Mashups with Google Earth might conceivably be a way to create data-rich, but also easily grasped, images.”

Retail brokers, too, are using Google Earth, as a marketing tool. Some firms are including a “See the property on Google Earth” option on their Web sites, for example. “We have a couple of uses for Google Earth,” said Tifanie Riley, a commercial associate at the Lincoln Park Plaza office of Coldwell Banker, in Chicago. “On the proposal side, if someone requests more information about a property, we can pull up images on Google Earth, convert them to PDFs and e-mail them along with more-standard information, such as floor plans. The PDFs help people understand the property’s proximity to roads and other landmarks in an eye-friendly way.”

The firm also uses the service for listing its properties. “Images from Google Earth can become part of this listing, especially after we’ve added some elements, such as street names or other features, to orient a client,” Riley said.

At one such property, she says, a shopping center on Chicago’s North Side, the firm discovered that a Google Earth image was useful in demonstrating a key feature of the area — a neighboring Target — better than conventional photography. “From straight up, the Target wasn’t as noticeable,” she said. “But if you tilt the perspective, as you can with Google Earth, the proximity of that store became a lot more vivid. It was a good way to emphasize an important piece of information.”