April 30, 2007
Visual aids | A sampling of Maine companies that rely on the real estate and construction markets to build their businesses
By Joseph R. Thompson
Over the past decade, the way people view the world has undergone a seismic shift, especially in the real estate and construction industries. Gone are the days when a fuzzy snapshot taken by a foreman at a job site counted as an accurate representation of a half-million dollar construction project. And good luck to the real estate agent trying to sell a $250,000 fixer-upper with a washed out or blurry photo.
Fact is, today's consumers want more visuals ˆ more detailed digital maps and more high-resolution photos. And because of that demand, businesses around the country are finding their coffers filling in a direct relationship with their grasp of emerging technologies, and who can benefit from them.
According to Roxane A. Cole, co-founder of Portland commercial real estate firm Ram Harnden and president of the Maine Real Estate and Development Association, Maine is adapting to this visual change well. "Maine is very sophisticated that way," says Cole "[Brokers] have been doing virtual tours here for a long time. They're very good at what they do and they're expert at creating that visual field."
To better understand how companies are utilizing visual technologies to assist businesses and educate consumers, Mainebiz spoke with the owners of three companies that provide different forms of visual assistance to a variety of real estate and development companies. Their profiles follow.
Orbis LLC
19 Hyde Rd., Gray
Founders: Kirsten Boettcher and Rosemary Mosher
Founded: 2004
Employees: 2
Products: Customized mapping; land use investigations and historical forensics; predictive modeling
Annual Revenue: $70,000
Contact: 650-8730
www.orbismaps.com
What does a polygraph machine have in common with a team of cartographers from southern Maine? With the right data, they can both help nip potential legal issues in the bud. Take, for example, the work done by Orbis, a Maine-based digital mapping solutions company, for Entrix, an international environmental consulting firm based in Houston, Texas.
In the summer of 2005, Entrix hired Orbis to create site maps where a major petroleum company wanted to purchase land. In today's litigious world, the petroleum company needed to know everything about the area to get a better picture of the potential for lawsuits: the proximity of wetlands, critical habitat for rare species ˆ remember the spotted owl controversy in the Pacific Northwest? ˆ and the location of previous oil spills. The company even needed to know about sites with potential contamination from businesses in the area.
Based on some older maps, Entrix knew about some of the problem areas already. But, according to Kirsten Boettcher, co-founder and principal research consultant at Orbis, the maps Entrix brought to them were extremely out of date. "They were showing a forest where a new industrial center was," said Boettcher. "So, they came to us and said 'Can you remake these?'"
Boettcher and Rosemary Mosher, Orbis' co-founder, used geographic information system, or GIS, technology to study the region. The technology provides cartographers with a way to organize, analyze and assemble spatial information in a readable way. "We take numbers and turn them into pictures," says Mosher, Orbis' principle GIS consultant.
Using GIS, Boettcher and Mosher looked at how the petroleum company's land fit into the larger surrounding geography. As the team updated the aerial and land use maps, they discovered additional information, including a layer of previously unknown contamination sites. "Entrix was excited," said Mosher. "All they were looking for was a remake of these field maps. We don't just make maps, we solve problems." (In the end, though, the oil company ended up acquiring the property, says Mosher.)
Mosher and Boettcher first began working together while attending the University of Southern Maine in Gorham, where they collaborated on a cartography project in 1999. Shortly thereafter, they received their first contract to draft a series of historical maps for a book on the history of Maine's wilderness.
But the business really picked up when they incorporated in 2004. The company has landed a handful of projects, including a contract in December 2006 from the Maine Real Estate and Development Association to create maps showing the effect of Portland's hastily enacted formula business ban, which was repealed earlier this year.
Other projects taken on by Orbis include mapping local watersheds and producing maps to settle land ownership arguments. Currently, Orbis is working on maps showing areas of past border disputes for a book about the historical boundaries of Maine and Canada.
And it appears businesses and municipalities are responding to the team's efforts. In 2006, Orbis generated just $30,000 in revenues, but is on track this year, according to Mosher, to hit $70,000. Projects are priced at $90 per map layer and $75 per hour. Boettcher and Mosher have worked to increase their audience, scheduling regular talks at breakfast and lunch meetings for a variety of industries including law firms and banks. The pair speak and appear at conferences sponsored by organizations like MEREDA, of which they're members.
A major part of Orbis' message is to explain the role of the cartographer during this computerized age. With GIS mapping available to any grade school student who can turn on a computer, isn't it counterintuitive to invest time and energy nurturing a company that focuses on GIS mapping? The answer is no, according to Mosher, who adds that Orbis offers something that GIS services provided by Yahoo and Google can't yet match: analysis. "GIS makes it faster and easier than ever before to make really crappy maps," said Mosher. "Our job is to use the data to not make crappy maps."
Northstar Aerial Photo
85 Brixham Road, York
CEO: David A. Hamel
Founded: 2004
Employees: 1
Products: High-resolution digital and film aerial photography, fine-art photography
Annual Revenue: Less than $100,000
Contact: 475-8128
www.northstar-aerial.com
During the winter, David Hamel spends most of his time running a medical consulting business out of his York home. But from May to December, Hamel can often be found in the air, aloft in his Cessna 172 Skyhawk with his 12.8 megapixel digital camera at the ready.
In 2004, Hamel turned his flying and photography hobbies into Northstar Aerial Photo, a firm that has built a growing roster of clients among Maine's real estate and construction industry. The company provides aerial photography to commercial real estate businesses and construction firms looking to show off their properties. Last summer, for example, Hamel was hired to photograph the end stages of construction at a Poland Spring bottling plant being built in Hollis so Poland Spring's parent company, Nestlé Waters North America, could follow the construction progress.
But for Hamel, explaining his services to potential clients can be a challenge. What he definitely does not do is aerial mapping of the kind that shows up in Google Maps. "I'm not trying to compete with the satellites, which from a very high-up altitude give you nice two dimensional map-like images," says Hamel. "What I try to provide to my clients are low-altitude oblique images."
Hamel aims for clear, crisp images with more depth than found in grainy satellite photos, and more definition than amateur 35-millimeter shots taken from a plane's window. From a thousand feet up, Hamel uses the autopilot to put his plane on a steady trajectory that takes him past his subject which he shoots through an open window. "There's definitely a skill to it that takes practice," says Hamel.
Hamel's aerial photography packages start at $450 and increase by distance and how the client plans on using the photo. For example, a one-time shot of a Portland construction site might cost $500, but a real estate agent who wants to reprint the photo in brochures and magazines might run a tab of up to $1,000.
But while aerial photography isn't uncommon in the state, Hamel says he has to educate people on the benefits of such shots. Aerial photography, says Hamel, allows consumers to see a property in relation to its surroundings in a way that ground-level snapshots can't do. On the commercial end, Hamel is educating consumers on the variety of quality available. Many developers, foremen, and other people in the construction industry already use aerial photography to show how much work has been done on a site by a specific time. But the quality of these shots, often grainy and taken through a plane window with a 35-millimeter camera, is mixed.
At the MEREDA conference in Portland in January, Hamel took some time to look at the aerial photography being used by some of the vendors and contractors to display their development work. The result? Lots of potential work for his company. "A lot of it was not very well done," says Hamel.
Homeowners and residential real estate agents are often surprised when Hamel turns down a job, as he does a quarter of the time, when there were too many trees surrounding the house or the lighting just didn't work. But, when the site is aerial photography appropriate, his photographs are able to convey a lot of information about a particular piece of property. "[Real estate agents] are finding you just can't put a crappy out of focus snapshot and expect it to sell," says Hamel. "Say you have a high-end car to sell, would you put a photo like that in a [magazine] to sell it? No way."
My Digital Tours
PO Box 4198, Presque Isle
Founders: Karin and Patrick Gilbert
Founded: 2006
Employees: 4
Product: Virtual tours
Annual Revenue: Less than $100,000
Contact: 227-9013
www.mydigitaltours.com
Suppose somebody in San Francisco, Calif. is contemplating a stay at the Waters Edge RV Resort and Camp in Sinclair ˆ a 3,200 mile drive across the country. Ten years ago, that potential customer would be able to check out a glossy brochure, or maybe a few snapshots scanned and uploaded to a Web page. Five years ago, maybe he could see an online slideshow of the grounds. But today, with a bit of help from technology, that RV enthusiast can stand at the edge of the water and take a full, 360-degree look around. He can zoom in and out to get the details of the land, and then take a tour through the site's duplexes, arcade, trading post and laundry room. Best of all, he could do it all from the comfort of his San Francisco apartment.
The tour, created by husband and wife team Karin and Patrick Gilbert, owners of My Digital Tours in Presque Isle, is just one of the many hosted on their company's website. The tours show potential visitors just how clear the water really is on Mud Lake in Sinclair, or allow potential home buyers to go beyond the property listing to get a broader view of a particular property. "People can read about it all day long," says Patrick Gilbert. "But what we do is allow you to stand in the middle of that property and let you know that you are there."
The Gilberts incorporated My Digital Tours in February 2006 after Brock Price, their friend and silent partner, introduced them to the software in the fall of 2005. "When I saw this and I saw how nice it is to see something online with out having to be there first, I thought 'Wow,'" said Patrick Gilbert. "This has a lot of possibility and not just in the real estate field." According to Karin Gilbert, tour packages for real estate agents begin at $125.00, which include up to five "spins," or rotating views of an area. For other clients, prices are contingent on the length and complexity of the tour. (The Gilberts declined to discuss My Digital Tours' revenue figures, but noted that annual revenues last year were under $100,000.)
Indeed, the company has completed tours for resorts like Waters Edge and 5 Lakes Lodge in Millinocket, as well as for companies like Bangor-based Carden Kennels, which hired My Digital Tours to create a virtual tour of its facility. "I wrote it from a puppy perspective," says Karin Gilbert. "They absolutely loved it. It's just a comic little thing."
According to a 2004 survey by the Washington, D.C.-based Pew Internet & American Life Project on virtual tours, it's hard to say whether virtual tours are becoming more widely used. But the survey did note that broader access to fast Internet connections makes it easier for tour designers to create more in-depth and sophisticated tours, and for the online community to view those tours.
And, according to the survey, the tours aren't just for young techies. While real estate is a major use of these tours, they increasingly are being used to plan vacations, visit museums and tour cultural monuments like the Taj Mahal or the White House. Additionally, of the 54 million Americans calculated to have taken an online tour, 49% are from the Baby Boom generation.
While most of the Gilberts' clients are real estate brokers, they say the possibilities for virtual tours are virtually untapped. "There are so many places we can touch that it's hard to know where to start," says Karin Gilbert.
Fact is, today's consumers want more visuals ˆ more detailed digital maps and more high-resolution photos. And because of that demand, businesses around the country are finding their coffers filling in a direct relationship with their grasp of emerging technologies, and who can benefit from them.
According to Roxane A. Cole, co-founder of Portland commercial real estate firm Ram Harnden and president of the Maine Real Estate and Development Association, Maine is adapting to this visual change well. "Maine is very sophisticated that way," says Cole "[Brokers] have been doing virtual tours here for a long time. They're very good at what they do and they're expert at creating that visual field."
To better understand how companies are utilizing visual technologies to assist businesses and educate consumers, Mainebiz spoke with the owners of three companies that provide different forms of visual assistance to a variety of real estate and development companies. Their profiles follow.
Orbis LLC
19 Hyde Rd., Gray
Founders: Kirsten Boettcher and Rosemary Mosher
Founded: 2004
Employees: 2
Products: Customized mapping; land use investigations and historical forensics; predictive modeling
Annual Revenue: $70,000
Contact: 650-8730
www.orbismaps.com
What does a polygraph machine have in common with a team of cartographers from southern Maine? With the right data, they can both help nip potential legal issues in the bud. Take, for example, the work done by Orbis, a Maine-based digital mapping solutions company, for Entrix, an international environmental consulting firm based in Houston, Texas.
In the summer of 2005, Entrix hired Orbis to create site maps where a major petroleum company wanted to purchase land. In today's litigious world, the petroleum company needed to know everything about the area to get a better picture of the potential for lawsuits: the proximity of wetlands, critical habitat for rare species ˆ remember the spotted owl controversy in the Pacific Northwest? ˆ and the location of previous oil spills. The company even needed to know about sites with potential contamination from businesses in the area.
Based on some older maps, Entrix knew about some of the problem areas already. But, according to Kirsten Boettcher, co-founder and principal research consultant at Orbis, the maps Entrix brought to them were extremely out of date. "They were showing a forest where a new industrial center was," said Boettcher. "So, they came to us and said 'Can you remake these?'"
Boettcher and Rosemary Mosher, Orbis' co-founder, used geographic information system, or GIS, technology to study the region. The technology provides cartographers with a way to organize, analyze and assemble spatial information in a readable way. "We take numbers and turn them into pictures," says Mosher, Orbis' principle GIS consultant.
Using GIS, Boettcher and Mosher looked at how the petroleum company's land fit into the larger surrounding geography. As the team updated the aerial and land use maps, they discovered additional information, including a layer of previously unknown contamination sites. "Entrix was excited," said Mosher. "All they were looking for was a remake of these field maps. We don't just make maps, we solve problems." (In the end, though, the oil company ended up acquiring the property, says Mosher.)
Mosher and Boettcher first began working together while attending the University of Southern Maine in Gorham, where they collaborated on a cartography project in 1999. Shortly thereafter, they received their first contract to draft a series of historical maps for a book on the history of Maine's wilderness.
But the business really picked up when they incorporated in 2004. The company has landed a handful of projects, including a contract in December 2006 from the Maine Real Estate and Development Association to create maps showing the effect of Portland's hastily enacted formula business ban, which was repealed earlier this year.
Other projects taken on by Orbis include mapping local watersheds and producing maps to settle land ownership arguments. Currently, Orbis is working on maps showing areas of past border disputes for a book about the historical boundaries of Maine and Canada.
And it appears businesses and municipalities are responding to the team's efforts. In 2006, Orbis generated just $30,000 in revenues, but is on track this year, according to Mosher, to hit $70,000. Projects are priced at $90 per map layer and $75 per hour. Boettcher and Mosher have worked to increase their audience, scheduling regular talks at breakfast and lunch meetings for a variety of industries including law firms and banks. The pair speak and appear at conferences sponsored by organizations like MEREDA, of which they're members.
A major part of Orbis' message is to explain the role of the cartographer during this computerized age. With GIS mapping available to any grade school student who can turn on a computer, isn't it counterintuitive to invest time and energy nurturing a company that focuses on GIS mapping? The answer is no, according to Mosher, who adds that Orbis offers something that GIS services provided by Yahoo and Google can't yet match: analysis. "GIS makes it faster and easier than ever before to make really crappy maps," said Mosher. "Our job is to use the data to not make crappy maps."
Northstar Aerial Photo
85 Brixham Road, York
CEO: David A. Hamel
Founded: 2004
Employees: 1
Products: High-resolution digital and film aerial photography, fine-art photography
Annual Revenue: Less than $100,000
Contact: 475-8128
www.northstar-aerial.com
During the winter, David Hamel spends most of his time running a medical consulting business out of his York home. But from May to December, Hamel can often be found in the air, aloft in his Cessna 172 Skyhawk with his 12.8 megapixel digital camera at the ready.
In 2004, Hamel turned his flying and photography hobbies into Northstar Aerial Photo, a firm that has built a growing roster of clients among Maine's real estate and construction industry. The company provides aerial photography to commercial real estate businesses and construction firms looking to show off their properties. Last summer, for example, Hamel was hired to photograph the end stages of construction at a Poland Spring bottling plant being built in Hollis so Poland Spring's parent company, Nestlé Waters North America, could follow the construction progress.
But for Hamel, explaining his services to potential clients can be a challenge. What he definitely does not do is aerial mapping of the kind that shows up in Google Maps. "I'm not trying to compete with the satellites, which from a very high-up altitude give you nice two dimensional map-like images," says Hamel. "What I try to provide to my clients are low-altitude oblique images."
Hamel aims for clear, crisp images with more depth than found in grainy satellite photos, and more definition than amateur 35-millimeter shots taken from a plane's window. From a thousand feet up, Hamel uses the autopilot to put his plane on a steady trajectory that takes him past his subject which he shoots through an open window. "There's definitely a skill to it that takes practice," says Hamel.
Hamel's aerial photography packages start at $450 and increase by distance and how the client plans on using the photo. For example, a one-time shot of a Portland construction site might cost $500, but a real estate agent who wants to reprint the photo in brochures and magazines might run a tab of up to $1,000.
But while aerial photography isn't uncommon in the state, Hamel says he has to educate people on the benefits of such shots. Aerial photography, says Hamel, allows consumers to see a property in relation to its surroundings in a way that ground-level snapshots can't do. On the commercial end, Hamel is educating consumers on the variety of quality available. Many developers, foremen, and other people in the construction industry already use aerial photography to show how much work has been done on a site by a specific time. But the quality of these shots, often grainy and taken through a plane window with a 35-millimeter camera, is mixed.
At the MEREDA conference in Portland in January, Hamel took some time to look at the aerial photography being used by some of the vendors and contractors to display their development work. The result? Lots of potential work for his company. "A lot of it was not very well done," says Hamel.
Homeowners and residential real estate agents are often surprised when Hamel turns down a job, as he does a quarter of the time, when there were too many trees surrounding the house or the lighting just didn't work. But, when the site is aerial photography appropriate, his photographs are able to convey a lot of information about a particular piece of property. "[Real estate agents] are finding you just can't put a crappy out of focus snapshot and expect it to sell," says Hamel. "Say you have a high-end car to sell, would you put a photo like that in a [magazine] to sell it? No way."
My Digital Tours
PO Box 4198, Presque Isle
Founders: Karin and Patrick Gilbert
Founded: 2006
Employees: 4
Product: Virtual tours
Annual Revenue: Less than $100,000
Contact: 227-9013
www.mydigitaltours.com
Suppose somebody in San Francisco, Calif. is contemplating a stay at the Waters Edge RV Resort and Camp in Sinclair ˆ a 3,200 mile drive across the country. Ten years ago, that potential customer would be able to check out a glossy brochure, or maybe a few snapshots scanned and uploaded to a Web page. Five years ago, maybe he could see an online slideshow of the grounds. But today, with a bit of help from technology, that RV enthusiast can stand at the edge of the water and take a full, 360-degree look around. He can zoom in and out to get the details of the land, and then take a tour through the site's duplexes, arcade, trading post and laundry room. Best of all, he could do it all from the comfort of his San Francisco apartment.
The tour, created by husband and wife team Karin and Patrick Gilbert, owners of My Digital Tours in Presque Isle, is just one of the many hosted on their company's website. The tours show potential visitors just how clear the water really is on Mud Lake in Sinclair, or allow potential home buyers to go beyond the property listing to get a broader view of a particular property. "People can read about it all day long," says Patrick Gilbert. "But what we do is allow you to stand in the middle of that property and let you know that you are there."
The Gilberts incorporated My Digital Tours in February 2006 after Brock Price, their friend and silent partner, introduced them to the software in the fall of 2005. "When I saw this and I saw how nice it is to see something online with out having to be there first, I thought 'Wow,'" said Patrick Gilbert. "This has a lot of possibility and not just in the real estate field." According to Karin Gilbert, tour packages for real estate agents begin at $125.00, which include up to five "spins," or rotating views of an area. For other clients, prices are contingent on the length and complexity of the tour. (The Gilberts declined to discuss My Digital Tours' revenue figures, but noted that annual revenues last year were under $100,000.)
Indeed, the company has completed tours for resorts like Waters Edge and 5 Lakes Lodge in Millinocket, as well as for companies like Bangor-based Carden Kennels, which hired My Digital Tours to create a virtual tour of its facility. "I wrote it from a puppy perspective," says Karin Gilbert. "They absolutely loved it. It's just a comic little thing."
According to a 2004 survey by the Washington, D.C.-based Pew Internet & American Life Project on virtual tours, it's hard to say whether virtual tours are becoming more widely used. But the survey did note that broader access to fast Internet connections makes it easier for tour designers to create more in-depth and sophisticated tours, and for the online community to view those tours.
And, according to the survey, the tours aren't just for young techies. While real estate is a major use of these tours, they increasingly are being used to plan vacations, visit museums and tour cultural monuments like the Taj Mahal or the White House. Additionally, of the 54 million Americans calculated to have taken an online tour, 49% are from the Baby Boom generation.
While most of the Gilberts' clients are real estate brokers, they say the possibilities for virtual tours are virtually untapped. "There are so many places we can touch that it's hard to know where to start," says Karin Gilbert.
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