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.

The first visualization I could obtain without much effort is the number of LEED Accredited Professionals by state.  California leads the nation with over 11,300 LEED APs. New York comes in second with over 4,900 LEED APs.

However, when I normalized the data to display number of LEED APs per million people (based on 2007 census information), the picture changes quite a bit.

Washington, DC has a small population, but a relatively large LEED AP population with almost 2,300 LEED APs for every million people. California, on the other hand has 311 for every million people. A couple of things come to mind for why DC is so high:

• The USGBC keeps its headquarters in Washington, DC.  In 2006 they had 70 employees.
• Government LEED APs could skew the numbers.  GSA, US Dept of Interior, lobbyists, etc.
• A number of large architecture firms have offices in Washington DC (Gensler, HOK, Perkins + Will, RTKL, URS, etc.)

For the rest of the data, I am going to try and take this slow and dig through over the next couple of weeks.  I am interested to hear what type of charts you would like to see.  Make sure to leave a comment and I will see what I can do.