Peer Market Research Inc

Peertrack is not just a project it's a change process that has taken contributions right from client, Innasite development team, Innasite marketing team and Innasite design team making it a truly collaborative effort.

So what is Peertrack? If I were to say that it is an application built for making the market research and data delivery process easier and highly customizable for the real estate markets, you would not understand the complexity of the complete application. We would go in in-depth into the application later in this document.

The customer
Lets start with understanding the business of Peermark Inc. Peermark is a US based firm providing market data on the Memphis and Nashville areas for commercial real estate professionals. It currently caters to the industrial, land, multifamily, office, retail and service sectors. Its business is to help local real estate professionals to provide timely and customized properties details to their clients. Lets say a commercial real estate agent is looking for some office properties for its client then he can subscribe to Peertrack and generate the list of properties with customized amount of detail for each property and present this same list to his client with his own logo and contact information. This is just one part of the solution; we would explore many more later in this document.

The need
Coming to the question of why such an application is needed. Real estate market was perhaps one of the first markets to realize the potential of web and to use it actively for its line of business. It is true for Peermark also, they already had an application where a subscriber could search for properties and generate lists. Then the obvious question pops up why change the existing application? Primarily because there were some constraints with the existing application, customers were asking for more customization, better searches and ability to get output in the different formats. Also Peermark frequently collects and updates the property information using a survey process and collating them into quarterly reports, this complete task was being performed out of an in-house filemaker tool which made the whole exercise very time consuming and extremely difficult to handle since a major set of activities were performed manually. So the challenge was also to automate the complete set of backend tasks. Competition also played a role in going for a new application, where Peermark found itself pitted against a competitor with a better application than theirs that was aggressively being upgraded and marketed. The most important reason for automating the complete process is that it gives the ability to Peermark to rapidly expand to other markets without adding extra manpower. This task would not have been possible with its previous application. So the bottom line was more customer pull, higher competitive pressures and the ability to rapidly expand to more markets led Peermark to go for a new application.

Why Choose Innasite
Perhaps this question will be best answered by Peermark but the obvious reasons are: onsite single point of contact from Innasite who had experience in the real estate market, testimonials from Innasite clients - Peermark management did call up and talk to references given by Innasite and it was the quality of previous work done by Innasite that led them to decide in its favor and also there was a lot of time spend studying the existing Peermark application and brainstorming with management to finalize the requirements before the start of the project. The question that still remains is "Offshore?" well India is one of the hottest offshore locations in the world because the Indian software companies have achieved the unique distinction of providing efficient software solutions with cost and quality advantage, using state-of-the-art technologies, having the capacity to handle large projects and, above all, the ability to execute timely deliveries. Communication plays the most important part of working with offshore development team, here it was a mix of internet communication tools like instant messengers and email that came handy coupled with face to face interaction with onsite point of contact.

The Solution
After careful collaboration, PeerTrack was designed as a suite of intelligent applications aimed at efficiently scheduling and retrieving property information from over 1200 property Managers, sending this information through the necessary PeerMark review process with little overhead, and distributing this information back to the subscriber base. In addition to this, modular based services were designed to allow greater functionality to subscribers while allowing complete control from site administrators.

Results
After the initial launch of the site, PeerMark immediately was able to gain a considerable market share in a territory that was “questionable” at first. In comparing PeerTrack’s capabilities to products provided by much larger Organizations, Subscribers prefer the ease if use and added functionality provided in PeerTrack. PeerMark’s major focus now is on providing additional modular based services to PeerTrack and to quickly move into to Market’s with the confidence of providing a truly best of breed application. Equipped with a system that provides automation and personalization, this dream is now a reality.

GIS (Geographical information system)
A GIS is mapping software that links information about where things are with information about what things are like. Unlike with a paper map, where “what you see is what you get,” a GIS map can combine many layers of information. As on the paper map, a digital map created by GIS has dots, or points, that represent features on the map such as cities; lines that represent features such as roads; and small areas that represent features such as lakes.

The difference is that this information comes from a database and is shown only if the user chooses to show it. The database stores where the point is located, how long the road is, and even how many square miles a lake occupies. Each piece of information in the map sits on a layer, and the users turn on or off the layers according to their needs. One layer could be made up of all the roads in an area. Another could represent all the lakes in the same area. Yet another could represent all the cities. Layerings provide the power to select the information you need to see according to what goal one are trying to achieve.

For Peermark the GIS solution is provided by a third party using which you can view a multiple property plotting on a map. Additionally the solution also offers you a visual search feature.