Integrating Gis and Real Estate Management Systems to Market and Manage Facilities on the Web

Abstract

Location drives the real estate industry. It is not just about finding any site but finding the best site. By analysing data around locations - demographics, aerial photographs, and amenities - real estate agents and potential home owners can find ideal locations for property based on preference. Use of GIS technology is particularly fitting to the application of real estate practice considering that property is geospatial in nature, its associated attributes are plentiful, and the relevance of location is a major factor in the assigning of value to a property. With the recent explosion in the use of the Internet in Kenya, mainly due to the increasing popularity of smartphones, the benefits that GIS offers in the realtor space is now capable of being placed in the hands of millions of prospective home owners. Having the right services and information available via the Internet is an important differentiator for real estate companies. Soon, those companies showing where a house is and displaying other important data such as school districts, social amenities, shops, crime data - using map-based viewers, finders, and transport links - will be far ahead of those that do not. Real estate management and marketing on the web has been done before (Keja Hunt, 2016), but there is yet to be a web application which successfully combines data from disparate Real Estate Management software and uses it to visualize data on a Geographic Information System on the Web in both 2D and 3D. The purpose of this project therefore was to design and develop a web based application that integrates GIS and Real Estate Management Systems and which can be used by a real estate company to improve its services, attract prospective clientele, and ultimately contribute to the company’s earnings. To this end, the output of this project meets a need that is present today such as convenient house hunting on the web, but also proves that real estate firms can enhance their operations by embedding GIS web maps – which provide value addition to their current systems - onto their software operations without having to overhaul their mode of operation.