Urban development is a high-stakes game that is often built on cold hard facts.
Square feet, the number of storeys, site location, and material logistics are all important factors, but what if you could better match your next project to the people who will live there for a greater return on your investment?
Traditional site research data such as census results can be years out of date, and previous local successes and good old-fashioned hunches may not work anymore in today’s fast-moving, digital-based world.
One company is taking a more measured, data-based approach to building thriving communities.
Using social and behavioural data, Melbourne-based Neighbourlytics is filling in the gaps in how people use their surroundings so developers and organisations can better tailor the built environment to their target market.
It’s a strategy designed to de-risk investment.
Neighbourlytics co-founder Lucinda Hartley says they combine a “range of big data sets”, which are benchmarked against other popular locations, to ensure the amenities will attract and retain locals and visitors.
“We include mobile phone location, posts on social media, point-of-interest and business information, ratings and reviews, check-ins, ‘likes’ and some other demographic and population data together to describe a holistic picture of the behaviour and the lifestyle of particular locations,” she says.
“We look at where the hot spots of activity are, where people come to, where they go from what their values and interests are based on topic analysis, and what people talk about.
“So we look at different measures of urban life to help us understand that social element of a place.”
And the figures are impressive.
“Over the past four years our analytics have been leveraged to inform over $4.86 billion in asset management decisions,” Hartley says.
“This shows a growing maturity of the industry to prioritise leaving a legacy of great people and places, not just buildings.”
“We have proprietary methods of analysing this social data that you can’t get anywhere else, particularly around some of our measures of urban life which come from those very unique data sources.”
Hartley says what makes a neighbourhood successful depends on what sort of neighbourhood it is. For example, the indicators for a successful residential development would be different from the CBD.
Each neighbourhood is different, she says, however, the realms of key directions that customers can learn from the data are:
- Unique customer insights to understand who is using the neighbourhood and their lifestyle behaviours, so planners can weigh up if the development or initiative is likely to thrive and be fit for purpose
- Customer insights to help target marketing messaging for new sales and leasing and uncover previously invisible points of difference or unique attractors which have sped up the development process
- Answer what do customers need? By looking at amenity strengths and gaps (is the mix right, based on the customer target or community, what could be done to improve attraction?)
“This last was point leveraged by a developer in south-east Queensland who used the data to build a business case for a new park that quickly became the fastest selling development in the corridor,” Hartley says.
However, he company considers some common denominators.
“It’s really relevant to look at the volume of activity, so how much activity there is; the variety, so how diverse – great places have a diversity of reasons to visit and spend and stay – we look at the vitality, which is how clustered the places are together because great places will have good connectivity, of place activity, not just different hot spots.
“We also look at the rhythm, which is the day/night, weekday/weekend, so we have a well-rounded activity over time, and relevance is the last, one and that’s about if people care about those places – are they important for people to who use those places?”
And it’s not just new developments, Neighbourlytics also advises on how existing built environments can be better utilised.
We’ve all seen footage of run-down sporting complexes that have been left wastefully neglected after major world events such as the Olympics despite millions being spent on their construction, but it doesn’t always have to be so.
Neighbourlytics recently advised on how best to integrate some of the sporting infrastructure built for last year’s FIFA World Cup in Qatar, specifically in an area called Education City, a centre of education, and research home to several university campuses, tech start-ups and residential areas.
Qatar offered some unique parameters and high up on the list was the climate.
“One of the challenges of a place like Qatar is that there is a good portion of the year that it’s really, really difficult to be outside, so we can’t necessarily transport ideas from a different climate zone and expect them to work in a hot arid climate,” Hartley says.
And she has some advice for the upcoming Olympics in Brisbane and Commonwealth Games in Victoria, saying it’s important to meet the short-term needs but also to manage that investment for long-term change.
“Data is a huge part of the solution because if we think only about how to make a place work for a million people over the two weeks, we are asking the wrong question,” she says.
“We need to be thinking about how we create long-term benefits for the whole neighbourhood.
And to have those long-term benefits we need to understand, who’s there, what’s there, what’s missing, what are we going to do and what levers are going to drive for these outcomes, and that’s where data can really help us pinpoint the most effective investments.”
Some predictions for the built environment in the post-pandemic world.
“Cities will reinvent themselves, they always have, but the concept of a CBD as a destination for office work, with home in another location has already shifted,” Hartley says.
While cities will remain an activity centre, hospitality, events and public spaces will overtake business as a reason to visit CBDs.
“We need to see CBDs as villages, encourage more housing, schools and services so they become liveable neighbourhoods,” she says.
Three big trends:
Hartley says the three biggest trends she predicts for the future of the built environment are:
Hyper-local – people living locally (even in the CBD) more than ever before, which means having everything you need to support daily life in walking distance is more important than ever. With many people working from home – and not just remote work, also running businesses from home – standard residential developments are no longer fit for purpose.
Digital – the digital transformation means we need to consider the internet and digital spaces – such as the internet of things (IOT) as a core service and a core public good – like water supply
Social – people want to leave the house to connect and socialise but not to buy groceries and go to work. So we need to think about how we’re incorporating public spaces and hospitality at every scale
Neighbourlytics has had a stellar rise
Established in 2017 by Ms Hartley and Jessica Christiansen-Franks, it has since been named in the 2019 Deloitte Rising Star List and 2019 Victorian Start-Up of the Year in the Australian Information Industry Association’s iAwards.
It kicked off with some seed funding from SheStarts, a company established to support women in business with tech guidance, training advisors and funding.
And recently Neighbourlytics garnered Pre-Series A funding of $1.3 million from ALIAVIA Ventures, a Californian-based firm that focuses on US and Australian female-lead enterprise and consumer tech companies.
Along with other investments, the funding will be used to add depth to Neighbourlytics’ staffing in product development, sales and marketing and IT.
The company currently has 15 staff and is planning on expanding in Australian this year and working on launching in the US in 2024.
Data that will help us understand where we live and why we live there and why we may wish to leave.