Maps!
I am a member of CoreNet Global, specifically the Northern California Chapter. It is the world’s leading professional association for corporate real estate (CRE) and workplace executives. I like Corenet because their membership consists of high level CRE people and companies as well as Service Providers like architects and other consultants. The Northern California Chapter is one of the largest chapters in the world.
CoreNet is really good about sending out real estate reports and market indicator reports to their members on a regular basis. These reports are sometimes available other places on the web and sometimes not, but either way, they do a great job of aggregating important information on the real estate market and distributing that to their members.
With the latest data deluge, I decided to play around with mapping some of the data using a website called GeoCommons. GeoCput ommons make it easy to put data onto a map. For instance, Colliers International releases reports on office vacancy every quarter. They include a table of data for 50 or markets showing various metrics such as vacancy rates, square footage under construction, etc. I took this table of data and put it into GeoCommons. I had to fumble around with pdf (I found a way to copy tabular data out of a pdf), Excel and another website called batchgeocode.com (I used this to take the cities provided in the report and obtain a lat/long value for each, since GeoCommons requires a lat and long).
The final result is below. Pretty cool, eh? I only put one layer of data in this map. I could have added any of the metrics found in the report, but it got messy quick with lots of transparent bubbles and such. You can still see those other metrics when you click on the cities.
I really like this tool and method of presenting data. However, I think the map would be more meaningful if there was a scale indicating a correspondance between bubble size and vacancy. IE, a 1/4" diameter circle indicates 5% vacancy. Also, since the bubbles are so large relative to the map, the overlap makes it very hard to determine which bubble corresponds to which city – at least when looking at the country as a whole. Once you zoom in, the differences become clear but you are then no longer able to see the country as a whole. Maybe small colored circles to indicate vacancy rate. green = 5%, yellow = 10%, red = 15% or some such thing..
What I really wanted to do was a heat map, similar to http://bit.ly/bJ75t or http://bit.ly/fyK2c. I think that would have given the effect you (and I) are looking for.
Here is another map I made: http://bit.ly/HqW8G for the Architect Top 50. The data is from Architect Magazine's May issue. I used the different colored circles for another map on the Architect Magazine's Top 50 poll from their May issue. I color coded each group of 10 together. Size of the circle (or square) is revenue, color is rank. What I found with that though is that for cities with multiple winners, the map loses meaning because circles are on top of squares on top of circles.