The Tampa leg of the Tampa-Orlando TUG corridor
The 85-mile stretch of Interstate 4 between Tampa Bay and Orlando is one of the hottest regions in the country for real estate development. Located close to almost half of Florida’s population, I-4 is home to more than 400 distribution centers, as well as scores of multifamily, mixed-use and other developments.
But while the corridor is growing quickly, getting information about the state of development there — or in any other area in the country — can be a slow, laborious process. It requires poring through dense public records or driving around an area to identify opportunities.
Artificial intelligence is changing that process.
With a few clicks, a developer using a new AI tool from real estate research lab Epum can obtain parcel-level data on commercial real estate projects in planning. This information includes application approval status and descriptions, the size of the project in number of units or land area, and the names of those involved with the project, including the developer-owner and the representing land use attorney or civil engineer. This helps users identify new opportunities while gaining a sense of how development-friendly the local elected officials might be.
Developments highlighted along the Tampa-Orlando TUG corridor with the Epum research platform.
Across the country, scores of transit-oriented urban growth corridors, or TUG corridors, like the I-4 connect two or more cities by highway and are identified by high concentrations of ongoing commercial and residential development projects. TUG corridor growth is fueled by access to transportation and essential infrastructure such as water and sewer, and their potential growth should be followed closely by the CRE community.
“TUG corridors are essential in the formation of urban agglomerations,” said Epum Chief R&D Officer Marvin Mc Cutchan, whose Ph.D. research focused on applying geospatial AI to forecast the growth of cities. “Land values typically increase significantly throughout these corridors as high development activity occurs over relatively short periods of time.”
Epum is a real estate research lab focused on studying urban growth. Within the Epum urban growth research platform, users can track, visualize and analyze CRE entitlement data for development projects anywhere in the United States, Epum CEO Royden Cooper said.
The Epum research platform allows access to information that had once been time-consuming to compile, whether it is where a project stood in the local approval process or a town’s plans to improve sewers and other infrastructure, he said.
“TUG corridors are valuable for developers since these areas will see the most CRE investment and development activity in the near term,” Cooper said. “This often causes land values to increase dramatically. Historically, this has been seen as buying/building in the path of growth.”
Epum draws its data directly from local municipal government planning and zoning commissions across the country — as if it is “listening in on their meetings,” Cooper said. With weekly data updates, Epum uses AI to read meeting documents and extract information about where CRE projects stand in the local approval process.
Through an intuitive interface, users can filter results by product type, approval status, approval date, land area and other information, such as the number of housing units in a multifamily development. The technology then georeferences the CRE project entitlement data to individual parcels, which are visualized on a map.
“CRE entitlement data, such as site plan approvals or approved rezonings, are the earliest sign of urban growth,” Cooper said. “Our technology can track, analyze and visualize urban growth across the U.S. in the form of CRE projects in planning or under construction, identifying acquisition opportunities or providing essential market intel for our users.”
Patrick Keltner, director of innovation for Houston-based developer and property manager Griffin Partners, said his firm uses the Epum platform to monitor project-level entitlement changes in submarkets of interest. In this way, it can locate parcels with development potential and assess how amenable local municipalities are to allowing new development projects of a certain type and scale.
“Without this extremely valuable resource, we would have to continue to be reactive instead of proactive, relying on an entirely manual process that involves spending a great deal of time and effort contacting specific municipalities to get documents,” Keltner said.
Cooper said Epum’s applications cross many different CRE disciplines. These include developers who are trying to source deals, brokers sourcing listing opportunities, and capital markets advisers looking for construction financing advisory opportunities. It can also expedite general market research into local urban growth trends.
Epum allows users to identify acquisition opportunities, sources of future CRE demand and the potential for competition, he added.
“If a lot of housing is being built in a certain location, then users know that there will be demand for a nearby retail strip center or self-storage facility,” Cooper said. “Or if users own a hotel where other hotels have been approved for development, then that could alert them to potential future impacts on their revenue per available room.”
While Florida’s I-4 between Tampa and Orlando is among the best known of the TUG corridors across the U.S., Cooper said that the Epum research platform allows users to identify other growth opportunities, whether they are in the booming San Antonio-to-Austin I-35 corridor in Texas, the Charlotte-to-Raleigh I-85 corridor in North Carolina or elsewhere in regions that might not yet be on a developer’s radar.
“If I know that two cities are increasingly connected and I have easy access to what’s happening at the ground level, then I can make better-informed decisions about buying or building property there,” Cooper said.
This article was produced in collaboration between Epum and Studio B. Bisnow news staff was not involved in the production of this content.
Studio B is Bisnow’s in-house content and design studio. To learn more about how Studio B can help your team, reach out to studio@bisnow.com.
