Professionals in commercial real estate, retail, economic development, urban planning, public safety, and financial services can now create even more detailed analyses with the new data reports, imagery, and features added to the robust content already available with Business Analyst Online, Esri's on-demand analysis tool. Workforce and skills, crime, and traffic congestion information for the United States, along with demographic, consumer spending, and purchasing power data for European markets, complements the existing market profiles, demographics, segmentation, and spending data reports.

Sample traffic map showing average daily traffic volume. Left report: The Financial and Back Office and Middle Office Occupation Profile. Right report: A sample of the CrimeRisk Profile report.

Comprehensive workforce and skills data for the United States is available from Business Analyst Online in three summary reports, six Geo-Skills reports, a Workforce Occupation Profile, a Top Occupation Profile, a High-Tech Occupation Profile, and six industry-specific reports. Workforce Strategies, Inc., an experienced provider of workforce and labor market data for more than 20 years, provided the information for these reports. Industry employment, business counts, and comprehensive skills data provides detail at state, county, census tract, and block group geographies. This data will provide a comprehensive view of local workforce populations and types of labor available by employee demographics, skills, training, experience, and occupations. Analysts can use this information to identify labor shortages and increased competition for workers, create strategies to optimize an area's labor force, better understand a local labor force, and market the strengths of local labor by skill sets.

Three new reports—Business Locator, Businesses by Sales Volume, and Businesses by Employee Size—complement the existing Business Summary business data report on Business Analyst Online. These reports, developed with data from Infogroup and combined with a selection of the Business Analyst Online labor force reports and Esri's Retail MarketPlace report, can accurately describe business activity in any U.S. market area. Economic developers, urban planners, retailers, and commercial real estate professionals can use this data to view the vibrancy of a business environment, define the types of businesses to recruit to an area, and promote an area's strengths to business prospects.

Understanding safety issues in a market is a critical element of any trade area analysis. CrimeRisk data from AGS provides information about personal and property crimes, such as murder, rape, robbery, assault, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft. Statistics for the U.S., state, county, census tract, block group, ZIP Code, place, and core-based statistical area geographies are available in the CrimeRisk Profile report that can be illustrated with a CrimeRisk thematic map from Business Analyst Online. The CrimeRisk Profile provides totals and indexes for 10 crime categories that are illustrated with a chart for easy interpretation. CrimeRisk thematic maps are also available for each of the 10 categories. Urban planners; public safety officials; and economic development, retail, and commercial real estate professionals can use this data to better understand crime activity by trade area, plan marketing strategies, and provide information for sales and staff presentations.

Traffic patterns and ease of access can be strong selling points for sites; however, a study of traffic congestion during certain periods of the day provides a different perspective on this element of a trade area analysis. Traffic congestion data from LandSonar includes information for nonholiday weekday periods by median expected road speed conditions on interstates, major highways, and selected major roads in the continental United States. This data is available from Business Analyst Online in four traffic congestion maps—morning (7:00 a.m.�8:00 a.m.), noon (noon�1:00 p.m.), afternoon (5:00 p.m.�6:00 p.m.), and evening (7:00 p.m.�8:00 p.m.). This data, combined with traffic volume data from MPSI/DataMetrix in the Traffic Profile Report from Business Analyst Online, provides a complete picture of traffic activity around current and prospective sites. Public safety officials can use this data to determine the best routes for emergency evacuations, economic developers and urban planners need this information to define optimal sites by traffic flow, and commercial real estate staff and retailers should include this data in their site evaluations.

A new version of Business Analyst Online, Business Analyst Online Europe, expands the capabilities of Business Analyst Online into European markets by providing demographic, consumer expenditure, and purchasing power data for a single country, groups of countries, or the entire Pan-European area. Data is readily available and standardized at the postal code or administrative boundary level, enabling users to compare sales and growth results in a single area to the national figures. Four reports—the Market Profile, Demographic and Income Profile, Household Budget Expenditures Report, and Retail Goods and Expenditures Report—are compiled from data provided by Michael Bauer Research GmbH. The site will continue to evolve as new data, maps, and imagery are added.

Organizations planning to expand into European markets or those who are already operating there can access the information on Business Analyst Online Europe to assess purchasing power by product and service category, accurately evaluate and select sites, identify profitable customer types, reach target markets, and analyze trade areas.

More Information

For more information about Business Analyst Online, visit www.esri.com/bao.