A Collaborative Approach: Defining the Date with Site To Do Business

Site To Do Business is often associated with retail brokers, but our team has the pleasure of communicating with all our users, including professionals working in commercial real estate in all specialties. The suite of tools in Site To Do Business can be used by your whole team to help close deals. For this case study, we speak with Julianne Locke, Client Services Coordinator at Cresa Minneapolis Commercial Real Estate. She uses Site To Do Business to help her team and clients understand data visually and enhance their decision making.

How does Cresa use Site To Do Business?

One of the ways that Cresa uses Site To Do Business is to provide complex maps that help clients understand how demographic data affects their site selection. Some of the factors these maps analyze: where their future employees are located, where their competitors are located, where their current employees are located, drive-time analyses for site relocation, and more! 

How does Site To Do Business help you in your current role?  

Site To Do Business helps me contribute market-related materials to the advisors/brokers in the office. My focus is to take their data and use the interactive mapping tools from Site To Do Business to synthesize this data for clients to easily consume. These maps help clients understand important information about current and future market conditions. 
 
What is your favorite tool/capability within the Site To Do Business platform?

Color coding by variables, then drive times, geographic center, and reporting feature such as demographic and population information.

Why is mapping by variables your favorite capability?  

I love the ability to take the variables important in each deal and visually display them with maps that are color-coded by variable. Clients are always amazed at this capability, as it brings the data alive for our clients. Instead of a spreadsheet, they see information in a tangible way. Site To Do Business makes this process painless and is a tool that is essential to our proposals. 

Can you tell us about a time where Site To Do Business made a difference in your business?  

We were approached by a wholesale retailer of pet products that was looking to relocate their headquarters. They needed a five-state location study in the southeast area of the U.S. and wanted to understand the implications of each location.  

Some of the factors they were concerned with were logistics, drive times, competing business locations, and of course, potential customers and their buying patterns. Based on the demographics and competitor information Cresa provided with Site To Do Business, our client was able to see which of the five states we reviewed would 
best suit their expansion plans.  

After the initial analysis was complete, the Cresa team began sourcing specific locations and is working to help our client finalize the move into a space that fits their business needs.

How does/has Site To Do Business Suite of Tools help you save money/do more deals?  

If we didn’t have mapping software that could provide this kind of data and analyses, we’d have to outsource these maps to our headquarters marketing department, which can cost hundreds of dollars. In every pitch, the maps that we provide help our team stand out as the experts with a data-driven approach.  

Clients regularly comment on our maps and are appreciative of the effort put into each presentation and how these maps help them digest information. Site To Do Business is a key to our office’s success and provides us with an unmatched market advantage.  

We hope that through seeing how other commercial real estate professionals are putting Site To Do Business to work in their business, you can be inspired to use it in yours. We would like to take a moment and thank Julianne Locke for taking the time to answer our questions and provide background information on using Site To Do Business in her work with Cresa.

Content contributor: 
Julianne Locke | Client Services Coordinator | Cresa