For over half a century, Crescent Communities has created single family, commercial, mixed use and multifamily developments that cultivate communities, grow relationships and establish legacies. Based out of Charlotte, North Carolina, Crescent Communities’ offices and developments cross some of the most active real estate markets in the country, with over $1.2 billion in total assets throughout the Sunbelt and Mid-Atlantic markets.
One of Crescent’s signature communities, Palmetto Bluff, lies in the heart of South Carolina’s Low Country. It’s a vibrant residential and recreational preserve enriched by wilderness and wildlife, unspoiled rivers and salt marshes, and the sounds and smells of nature. No wonder Condé Nast named it the best resort in the U.S., and #11 in the world.
Data Lags Behind Development
From the beginning, it was clear that Palmetto Bluff was destined to be a special place, not just a project. With its natural beauty and rich coastal landscape, property in the Bluffton, South Carolina, community is well sought out. However, when it came to managing project inventory, creating internal schedules and understanding the lay of the land, Crescent’s Palmetto Bluff development, sales and accounting teams found themselves spending needless time gathering and analyzing property data, having to wait 2-3 days to answer simple questions about the landscape, inventory and trends.
Owning the Lay of the Land
Encompassing 20,000 acres and a planned 4,000 residential units, Palmetto Bluff is an expansive landscape to manage. Its development team needed a better way to understand and map critical environmental and property land data to make key land use planning decisions about new neighborhoods and villages. The team turned to geothinQ to enhance its processes through GIS mapping.
“geothinQ improves the [land planning] process dramatically,” said Troy Lucas, vice president of planning and operations for Crescent Communities. “Having all the property and land data at my fingertips speeds things up extremely and allows us to make faster, better decisions.”
geothinQ allowed Troy’s team to quickly run calculations on routine questions that used to take days to answer, like “How big is this area?” They can also answer “what if” scenarios and calculations to maximize the value of the land. This, in turn, helped the land development team decrease its go-to market time and make smarter land use planning decisions.
Benefits Extend Beyond Land Planning
Palmetto Bluff quickly realized that geothinQ could not only help make smarter, faster development decisions, obtaining property data that used to take days to analyze in as little as 20 minutes, but that it could also provide key insights into real estate analysis for accounting and sales.
Real-time inventory management through geothinQ allows both of these teams to have immediate access to the latest property data – with no more lag in information regarding what’s available, what’s sold and what’s coming. This data was previously available numerically, but being able to visualize it efficiently as GIS data allows the Palmetto Bluff team to better anticipate sales and near-term needs. Sales teams can also rapidly create property maps complete with property lines, infrastructure, land ownership, land use, sales data, and graphs that are easier for prospects, board members and other key stakeholders to understand.
“The benefits are really endless in terms of mapping,” said Troy. “Not only do I have all my data in one place in real-time, but I love being able to turn GIS layers of forest inventory, wildlife inventory, digital elevation models, etc., on and off at the click of a button. This makes planning and inventory management ten times easier and frees us up time for business development.”
geothinQ is a pioneer of an on-demand geographic land mapping and data visualization platform that is accelerating smart, data-driven decisions about valuable land like never before. To see how geothinQ accelerates land development decisions, start here.
