Will This Tool Be a Real Estate Developer's Best Friend?

• September 17th 2014

by Lark Turner

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A new tool called Create aims to speed up the real estate development process while making it a lot easier at the same time. It will make its debut in DC later this year.

Create, from 29-year-old real estate development analyst Stefan Martinovic, uses 3-D mapping software and a host of data tools to help developers figure out whether or not a given piece of real estate is feasible for development.

“It’ll streamline the development process,” Martinovic told UrbanTurf. “Basic site feasibility, site selection, high-level budgeting and financial analysis, all those things are really done more or less automatically in our software.”

Create pulls in data from about a dozen different sources to help make an analysis about a given property address, including everything from zoning and entitlement information to environmental and demographic data. The data can be used to help developers figure out whether a site is feasible and, later in the process, what a unit mix might look like, how much parking individual households would need and more.

Martinovic said he’s targeting real estate developers and brokerage firms with the software, but hopes to expand to architecture, engineering and construction over time as the software develops. He says Create will be able to allow users to visualize buildings in 3D, mapping out what design decisions look like and determining how they impact the project’s economics.

Martinovic is launching a test version of the app in DC because he used to work in real estate development here, and also likes the complexity of the market.

“It’s a really good space and a complicated market for us to stress-test a lot of what we need to deal with,” Martinovic said.

If it works the way he wants it to, Martinovic thinks that Create, which he hopes to have ready for a public release by the end of the year, could drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to complete a development project.

“It could substantially reduce the amount of time that projects take to complete, by a factor of months in some cases,” he said.

This article originally published at http://dc.urbanturf.production.logicbrush.com/articles/blog/new_tool_aims_to_speed_up_the_development_process/8980.