What impact will a proposed landfill, wind farm, quarry, aquaculture, electrical transmission line, high rise apartment complex, airport, etc. have on prices, rental values and occupancy of properties in the neighbourhood? We cut through the rhetoric to advise the developer, property owners, municipality, province or Federal government on the facts.
We have undertaken many of these types of assignments. There are often as many opinions as there are people… many of them contradictory. Tolerance of smell, visual intrusion, noise, electromagnetic field, flies, traffic, crime, etc. varies by individual and this colours their opinion of injurious affection. NIMBY, though understandable, may be driven more by fear rather than fact. We cut through the rhetoric using our Geographic Information System (GIS) and property sales and rental data bases to establish the facts.
We undertake Impact Analysis for any type of development that impacts the surrounding area:
Having defined, through consultation with our client, the scope of the assignment, we proceed through a sequence of research, analysis and conclusion.
(1) Since the impact of the proposed (or existing) development on surrounding property values will usually vary with distance, sight lines, noise buffers and traffic from the project we use our Geographic Information System (GIS), research and ground truthing to delineate the primary, secondary and tertiary impacted areas. If it is a proposed, rather than an existing project, we use our GIS to identify similar, existing developments and their impact areas. We then utilise that information to calibrate the boundaries of the impacted areas for the proposed development.
(2) In order to measure the impact of the proposed (or existing) development we compare property price, rental and occupancy in the primary, secondary and tertiary impacted areas, with a control group (an otherwise similar neighbourhood that is impacted by this type of development). This analysis is reversed if the development already exists. We are able to draw on a variety of resources. CompuVal® our proprietary, information technology platform, acquires, processes, refines, integrates and analyses data from multiple diverse sources. It currently contains information on over 300,000 sales and lease transactions together with assessment information on 39,000 commercial properties, in Atlantic Canada and Western Ontario. We also maintain and have access to MLS® residential sales databases in the Region, together with short term rental listing data on 17,000 unique properties from AirDNA. We access Demographic data from Statistics Canada and household spending data from Environics Analytics. In addition to our proprietary software, we utilise ESRI and MapInfo GIS tools, the SPSS statistical suite, building cost and other real estate software.
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