MapInfo generates complex block group density maps displaying Annual Household Expenditures by any of dozens of Retail Industries, or by any of hundreds of lines from demographic data reports.

Divaris Uses MapInfo & Claritas to Serve Clients

VIRGINIA BEACH, VIRGINIA -- It can be said that a retailers’ success depends upon customer development and retention. In this economy, no business can afford to miss the opportunity to identify sites with the highest potential for return on investment.  Luckily, there are powerful software programs available to assist in market analysis and commercial real estate experts, such as Divaris Real Estate, who are ready to put that software to work for its retail clients.

DRE has partnered with MapInfo and Claritas to provide its clients with the most comprehensive, accurate and up-to-date demographic and mapping models to generate customized presentations for each company’s specific decision-making needs.   A team of analytical specialists utilize state-of-the-art software with consumer, location and business-to-business databases to find anything from a single new site to maximizing performance in an entire market. 

The two programs utilized by the marketing and research department at DRE include a Claritas demographic database called iXPRESS on a platform of MapInfo street files. iXpress allows for the ranking of markets by sales potential using multiple success criteria to identify hot markets and prioritize them with site quality scores.

“We are using MapInfo and Claritas data to display competition in any given submarket, by any retail industry category.  A company’s market screening criteria can be used as a filter to identify suitable locations based on a desired population density or household income level.   Regional malls, major shopping centers, national big-box tenants and traffic counts can further support the strength of a proposed new site,” according to Dona L. Hall, director of marketing and research for Divaris Real Estate, Inc.

Founded in 1971, Claritas is widely regarded as the leading provider of precision marketing solutions.  The company supplies a wide array of marketing databases for analysis, planning and targeting people, households and businesses within any geographic area in the United States.  Claritas employs the best tools available including demographics, segmentation, market research, software and multiple databases.   The company was conceived by Jonathan Robbin, a scientist who is attributed with inventing geodemography, the linking of geography and demography to identify and map different subsets of the U.S. population.

Claritas, Inc. has purchased and absorbed several businesses including Strategic Mapping Corporation Urban Decisions Systems and National Decision Systems. 

MapInfo is headquartered in Troy, New York.  It was founded in 1986 and went public in 1994.   MapInfo has more than 600 employees worldwide in subsidiaries in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia and Japan.  This global company provides location-based solutions to help companies better understand their customers, citizens and markets. 

MapInfo software can help visualize and compare data on different locations with thematic density maps based on household income, population or consumer expenditure patterns. 

The study of location data such as customer addresses, store sites, and sales territories can bring valuable information such as customer buying patterns, demographic and lifestyle profiles, neighboring businesses, routing directions, traffic patterns and more.  In retail especially, knowing where your next customer and your competitors are is crucial.

Any list of addresses can be batch-geocoded to be efficiently viewed on street-level maps, which then can be overlayed with demographic information for the surrounding neighborhoods.

In addition to a powerful desktop mapping system in DRE’s Virginia Beach headquarters, the entire company has access to demographic reports and maps through a Claritas web site called Site Reports. 

To generate any of 35 reports and 15 maps,  the user chooses from radii around a map point as small as one-fourth of a mile and up to 30 miles or standard geographies such as city, county, state, or metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs). Geographic obstacles such as waterways, bridges and mountains can be avoided with the hand-drawn polygon option.

Current year and five-year projections depict various segments of a trade area, including population, households, median household income, and total retail sales. Other data such as housing costs, travel time to work and number of vehicles join some of the traditional demographic categories as gender, income, education and race.    Executive Summary reports compare an area’s labor pool and housing stock to national averages. 

Daytime populations can help track the number of employees working in an urban area where residential population figures may appear deceptively low. 

“For properties that we lease and manage, the basic set of reports, population, snapshot demographics, retail trends and executive summaries are included in every marketing package.  For those tenants we represent, the in-house, desktop system has more capability to geocode their existing databases, depict competition and define hot spots tailored to meet their specific site criteria,“ Hall says.