From Esri to In-House Platforms: A 20-Year Look at Location Intelligence

When I started working in GIS in the early 2000s, the toolset was straightforward. You had Esri software, you had data you cleaned by hand, and you produced maps that got printed or attached to reports. The work was technical, painstaking, and largely invisible to the people making business decisions.

Twenty years later, location intelligence is a completely different discipline. And watching it change from the inside has been one of the more interesting professional experiences I could have asked for.

The first big shift was data. Early in my career, getting good spatial data meant either buying it from a vendor or building it yourself through fieldwork. I spent years on boats running hydrographic surveys, collecting depth measurements point by point across lake bottoms to build bathymetric models. That work was valuable. It was also slow, expensive, and inaccessible to most organizations.

Today that kind of data is often freely available, continuously updated, and accessible through an API call. The barrier shifted from data acquisition to data interpretation. Anyone can get the data. The competitive advantage now belongs to whoever can make sense of it fastest.

The second shift was platforms. For most of my career, GIS meant desktop software. Esri's ArcGIS was the standard and for good reason. It was powerful. It was also specialized, expensive, and required dedicated expertise to operate. The analysis happened in a back office and the results got handed off to decision makers in a format they could not interact with.

What we have built at National Land Realty is the opposite of that model. Our agents interact directly with spatial data through platforms we designed specifically for how they work. They do not need to know what a coordinate system is. They need to see which comparable sales happened within ten miles of a listing in the last eighteen months, and they need to see it in thirty seconds.

Getting from the Esri desktop model to that kind of embedded, accessible intelligence took years of rethinking what the technology was actually for. The tools changed. The data changed. But the biggest change was the question we were trying to answer.

We stopped asking what the GIS could do. We started asking what the business needed to know. That reframe made all the difference.

Location intelligence is still underutilized in most traditional industries. The organizations that figure it out in the next five years are going to have an advantage that is very hard to replicate. The data is available. The platforms exist. The missing ingredient is usually leadership that understands what is possible and knows how to build toward it.

That is the part I find most interesting. It always has been.