Brendan Carroll ‘On’ Location: Research Ace Unites CRE, GIS

BOSTON—Brendan Carroll does not need to be told twice—let alone three times—that “location, location, location” is essential towards a successful real estate endeavor; in fact, it is a guiding tenet of Geosimulate, the acclaimed researcher’s CRE mapping and statistical consultant group using Geographic Information Systems technology around his narrative slogan that “A Great Real Estate Location Story Still Needs to Be Told.”

“The use of GIS has long made sense for real estate, though it is scarcely in practice,” Carroll tells Real Reporter, Geosimulate spun off from Respoke LLC which he launched in 2022, the predecessor helping tenants find buildings and districts near bicycle routes to access the youngish work force implied by such networks. “While a bike commuter myself and supporter of smart growth, the re-branding as Geosimulate better reflects being able to provide the wide array of clients our services and customize them to their needs,” Carroll says of a platform whose approach designing new mediums and programs fomented the “client-induced” menu of six current products whose most popular selection is an interactive imaging application employing “Zoom-Level Optimization,” Motion Maps a cartographic sleight of lens giving multiple iterations of one area or region. “It caught our audience by surprise, and they said, ‘Wait! Can you build a graphic like that for us?’” recounts Carroll, adding, “It wasn’t completely clear to us at the time, but Motion Maps had just been born!”

The latest version released in mid-July as Geosimulate’s “flagship product” anchors four selections employing mapping tools plus a pair of “analytical products” comprising the current menu with “a degree of certainty” those six will be the core offerings, though that is not set in stone, Carroll says.

“There will always be more work to do, though I believe our present line gives the landlord and owner side of the business an ability to approach the market with GIS-aided marketing tools,” says Carroll, further stating that, “We look to be an intermediary as we continue to build out tools for decision-making and analysis by the real estate business.”

Besides “site proponents” described in a glossary defining Geosimulate’s playbook as developers/landlords/owners, “our products can also be used by space-occupying businesses to make compelling arguments about their locations,” the founding principal relays with Motion Maps able to service myriad constituencies, enabling scale potential as a “major force” incorporating GIS intelligence into the equation when making real estate choices “from all directions.”

According to Carroll, “the location story is more important than ever before,” and segmented due to an emergence of new infill clusters and revitalized urban neighborhoods further muddled amidst “interpretations of post-Covid working patterns” and the ways younger workers and their changing tastes will evolve, sometimes with little rhyme or reason.

“It dominates the developer/landlord strategy and discussion with partners and potential tenants,” observes Carroll, who brings over two decades of experience leading CRE research groups for such global firms as Colliers, Cushman & Wakefield and Grubb & Ellis as well as entrepreneurial brokers including A.W. Perry Co. plus Richards Barry Joyce & Partners where Carroll became a prolific producer featuring dozens of quarterly and annual reports with customized studies and he was often called in to meet with clients to provide real-time information on demographics and regional leasing trends.

Those experiences including the front-line meetings helped form his view on “location” as a key element in leasing matters. “I have been in many tenant deliberations over the past 20 years . . . and location is the most important selection criteria, without even a close second,” Carroll stresses, yet “the marketing after development or acquisition on the ownership side is often hunch-based” such that “the vast majority” of developers and landlords do not incorporate GIS, “and the forming of Geosimulate is heavily influenced by my belief this is a glaring missed opportunity.”

Geosimulate, he says, “can help confirm or challenge those hunches, suggest new places, and help sell the dream with partners, financiers and tenants, all using real data, not just hunch-based marketing.”

Taking the place of static—aka still—images in digital media, presentations and websites, “or any other place where a location is geographically represented,” Motion Maps “are technically videos of 15 to 45 seconds that significantly increase” exposure to attributes of a given location,” according to Carroll, who provides methods from the self-made glossary including “Categorial Separation” showing bars/cafes/restaurant at one point, then fading to transportation terminals,” and “Story Sequencing” as in “this is a walk to a train station and then a ride from that train station to an ultimate destination,” plus the Zoom-Level Optimization tool incorporating differing zoom levels “to make separate points about desirable aspects of a location.”

“Motion Curiosity” is the capability of “catching users for a longer ‘dwell time’” on a website, reports Carroll, whose program also adheres to “Brand-Standard Compliance” in accordance with a client’s wishes, and features a customized “Statistical Overlay” to show relevant data in the map or a lower or upper panel area that can also appear as a caption. “Studies show this is the type of thing that causes the direct audience to better remember a point and in helping them make the point with others,” says Carroll, examples including number of restaurants in a three-minute walk; how many people with Bachelors degrees reside in a 15-minute walk of a one-seat ride: and those bike commuting patterns which were the inspiration for the erstwhile Respoke.

All of those may seem hypothetical but are actual talking points of import to new millennium employers, with Carroll reporting that while tenants universally have criteria to meet in a new venue, “when listening to each tenant, they define location differently,” some focused on nearby amenities; others wanting to cluster among like-minded companies or industries; and many intent on accessing current and future workforces. “There are even more variations, within the greater region, proximity to airports and (other transit nodes),” says Carroll, but “current maps generally make it more difficult to get the full vision of a location’s virtues so it is all about Zoom-Level Optimization and the ability to make many location points within the same digital space.”

Motion Maps are custom-generated by Geosimulate cartographic designers and can be coordinated with social media campaigns and movie productions, and for those who like one-stop shopping, the other three marketing products gel well with Motion Maps and the firm’s analytical products, outlines Carroll. Social Maps and GeoStudio are deemed “natural extensions” of Motion Maps by its creator, the latter “a complete, several minute video” perhaps for promotion of a new development or investment fund. “GeoStudio has also been used, with great effectiveness, to help where a concise and perfect video can (draw full attention from) a room of people” such as a tenant presentation or community meeting where the client is attempting to make a series of points sans interruptions.

Social Maps have Motion Maps elements, but “are optimized” for social media channels and specifically designed to meet those mediums such as Instagram, with Geosimulate adept at delivering a layout safe from being “cut out” to fit layouts and screens, while type of content and the “fun” element are addressed to benefit the client.

The fourth marketing product offers a hint of old school—Static Maps—that being “a solution for cases where a still, non-moving image is needed or preferable,” and “will generally be used in combination with other Geosimulate products as part of a Map Campaign,” details Carroll, and as such will have styling in sync with kindred products for the same client and may include QR codes linking to other products or sites.

Make no mistake about it, though: Carroll declares himself “All-In” on Motion Maps, partly due to the positive response among clients, but also from his own experience interacting with “both sides of the aisle” in landlords and space users.

Site proponents are constantly being challenged to create the right location story to attract tenants, increasingly in pioneering locations, and the successful instances of this, in turn, puts pressure on established locations to address the features of emerging locations that find favor in the market,” explains Carroll, and says “Motion Maps allow them to quickly and efficiently communicate a property’s uniqueness in the way they see it and rely far less on an audience’s pre-existing knowledge of a geography or ability to maneuver a self-contained interactive map.”

While “extremely grateful” for the responses to its mapping products and capabilities, Carroll does concur his background as a veteran CRE researcher and consultant to landlords and tenants in an expanded role of that profession make him uniquely qualified to guide Geosimulate going forward beyond computer acumen, that exposure software that can be infused into the hardware components.

“I have been involved in the analysis of the Boston real estate markets, with a specific focus on good data, intepretations of that data and appealing delivery of this intelligence through visual mediums, and I have been in rooms where many of the market’s biggest tenants have deliberated major occupancy decisions, and that logic is absolutely reflected in a ‘What Tenants Want’ kind of way.”

To wit, analytical tools Map Facts and Map Tabs will help visualize data and negotiation experiences, Map Facts provides GIS language and document review for financial and legal filings, plus real estate marketing. “Map Facts helps organizations make meaningful, specific and fact-based statistical points for important filings and marketing materials,” Carroll relays.

Map Tabs uses a “criteria tree” methodology whose sub-criteria of trunks, limbs and branches “enable us to give sound decision-making tools to real estate investors and occupying businesses, and marketing tools for owners looking to make their case” on a given asset.” For example, if professional talent is a location decision’s driving goal, that would be a “trunk,” then people who presently work for the tenant might be one “limb,” and another is potential future hires. “Future hire limbs’ could then extend out to levels of skills as one branch or likely commuting pattern as another.

A longtime colleague who knows of Carroll’s capacity to produce original, informative material is Robert Richards, a namesake founding principal of the Richards Barry Joyce & Partners brokerage firm which Carroll joined soon after the independent group launched in Boston and became a leading brokerage firm on a 10-year run that culminated in being bought by international firm Transwestern.

Richards says he is “very proud” for having recruited Carroll to build the firm’s research capabilities from scratch with “impressive and instant” results whose components were soon being incorporated at rival groups and remain industry standards today.

“The creativity and credibility Brendan brought to the position was unparalleled to what other firms were doing back then,” recalls Richards, today a leading life sciences expert at JLL. “It was way beyond what we could have expected even though I had a really good feeling the minute I met with Brendan,” says Richards, “And I am very proud I was the one who made that decision . . . It helped us stand out in that area, and brought a lot of weight to our own (presentations).”

Apprised of the firm’s evolving shift to Geosimulate, Richards says he is “extremely confident” Carroll can handle the rapid growth. “If we did not have Brendan, it would have taken three people to match what he was able to produce for us, and the quality of the work would be even harder to achieve . . . I’ll be excited to see what he does to take it to another level, and I am sure his rivals will be trying (to copy) whatever it is.”

Carroll encourages interested parties to visit the Geosimulate website, on which one can find demonstration products and links to other sites where elements are featured, including linked-in, Instagram and youtube.com. The company does have registered patents and trademarks on certain intellectual property, but in the spirit of its origins, he says “our main focus is to continue innovating and to continually enhance our offerings,” opining that “the best protection against any groups that may want to compete with us, we believe, is to continually aim past our present status.”

Ripe on his firm’s mind, as with everyone else, is how AI might reshape the information services and GIS landscapes, and whether aspects might find their way into the Geosimulate operations “I am probably middle-of-the-road in terms of excitement and/or concern when it comes to AI,” he says with his firm’s designed cartography products intending “to make pinpoint arguments and have a lot of nuance,” adding “we don’t see a near-term product that will be competitive with what we can do for our clients,” with any near-term AI challenge more likely on the analytics side, “though our goal will be to continue to improve our offerings, and incorporate AI (when appropriate) to remain top-of-market.”

According to Carroll, AI normally would not be used to produce a complete design element by his firm, “but we will occasionally take some inspiration from what it can produce,” including AI methodologies to enhance “a more basic level mapping product.”

Brendan Carroll

Robert Richards