UrbanToronto has launched a new database of developments in the Greater Toronto Area.
If you’re looking to track real estate development in the GTA, this new database service is for anyone interested in development, planning and scouting for new locations.
Edward Skira, President/Co-Publisher of UrbanToronto.ca, said the website tracks development of all sorts in the GTA.
“It basically tracks everything from Burlington to Oshawa to Newmarket and everything within Toronto, Mississauga, Brampton and so forth,” he said. “We have our discussion forum. That’s how we started in 2002 and over time we built up a database of all the projects that are happening, all the companies that are attached to the projects and we are also a media site, so we do something like five to seven stories a day. They’re all focused on development one way or the other.
“We do about two million page views a month on UrbanToronto. We do about 300,000 unique visitors a month. We have very strong social numbers. And we have a newsletter with about 6,000 subscribers.”
“(The database) is a brand new addition to our offering,” said Skira. “We are a media company. So we do help with marketing and such. But in the last year or so we’ve become much more of a data driven organization. We have company listings and there’s about 200 subscribers to that. We have a newsletter that’s an industry-focused newsletter and it attracts development and that goes out every morning at 7 a.m. And we have about 130 subscribers to that and that’s a paid newsletter.
“UrbanToronto takes our database of projects and companies and allows subscribers to access it and take all the information on every project and every company and play with the day. So you can slice and dice the data in a million ways. You can track development in a very specific neighbourhood or across the entire GTA and that’s the brand new addition to the company.
“We’re tracking everything from a small townhouse development all the way to CIBC Square which is a massive office complex being constructed downtown right now. Everything within. We track residential, we track hotels, we track industrial, we track retail, we track offices. Every asset class.”
Skira said the database is geared for companies in the business who want to track what’s happening. It could be a developer who has a piece of land that they want to figure out what to do with. The platform has a map where you can draw a radius of a kilometre or four kilometres around that location and pull all the information about everything that is happening in that area.
Developers, architects, realtors, a bank, a grocery chain, retailers have all shown interest in the database.
Companies can create a report for a certain neighbourhood or address that would identify how many residential homes are being proposed for the area and the potential population growth in a specific area based on what development projects are there.
“It’s an important tool for anybody that wants to see where development is going. Retail, transit, school boards. You can do very specific stuff but you can also look overall. You can break it up by cities. You can do a report that’s just Toronto or you can do a report that’s just Toronto Ward 7. We have the tools to be able to slice and dice the data in all sorts of ways,” said Skira.
Skira said the database tracks all the city applications on a daily basis. There’s an update page where people can see all the new projects sorted by date.
“So those 2,500 projects in our database can be looked at in all sorts of different ways.”
