Overview

A property technology company based out of the UK provides solutions to the real estate market on property maintenance and development, site selections, and market and property expansion. They have enhanced the real estate market by making each and every property better through planning applications and technological solutions.

This fast-growing PropTech company approached Xtract.io to assist in providing site selection decisions via our accurate polygons. They wanted us to extract property-related datasets from planning documents and images obtained from planning applications and zoning websites.

Challenges

The company wanted to understand the nature of the land around a specific region, visualize the barren lands and classify them into different categories based on how soon these barren lands can be converted into construction sites.

Additionally, based on the above categories, the polygons of each site had to be classified into Positive, Negative, and Neutral based on the outcome of it. With limited information, extracting data, creating polygons, and classifying the sites was challenging.

Solution

Our team of GIS experts researched and discovered that councils and counties in England often publish city planning policy documents on their respective council websites. These documents contain information such as legal and environmental constraints, along with interactive maps.The team extracted digital maps from these PDFs and geo-referenced them using OpenStreetMap or Google Maps. They were further digitized, and polygons for these locations were created in QGIS applications, as shown below.

Results

After creating the polygons, they were categorized according to the parameters mentioned above and tagged with outcomes indicating whether the site was positive, negative, or neutral. The QA assurance team performed a quality check on the polygons, achieving a 95% quality rating in their review, surpassing both industry standards and customer expectations. Xtract.io effectively assisted the company in identifying the most viable options for constructing, expanding, and reconstructing properties based on their development and market status.