A new Web site specializing in business is asking the provocative question: What would you do if you could see the future?
Would you change your business if you knew what your community would look like in five years? If you thought incomes were going up, would you advise sellers to hold at the upper range of their price bracket? If you thought incomes would be going down, would you advise your buyers to wait for a softer market.
If you saw numbers suggesting more African Americans would be moving in, and more whites moving out, would you try to change the racial mix on your staff?
Those kinds of questions are the kind of thing Demographicsnow.com believes it can help with.
At its core, the subscription Web site is a data sifter that believes if you collect enough numbers about a community for a long enough period in the past, you may be able to predict the community's future.
Creators of the site, SRC LLC, based in Orange, Calif., provide the standard breakouts: Population, male, female, how many whites, how many blacks, how many Hispanics. The site also offers community income averages
Going beyond that, however, "SRC enables brokers to instantly pinpoint properties and analyze the surrounding market at a micro level, as well as the overall market at a more macro level," says a spokesman.
It adds in data on crime, business, consumer purchases, roads and highways and property data, and puts out five year projections on what's going to happen in the community.
The average household income was $32,257 in 1990, but is expected to be $42,615 five years from now.
In 1990, 9.1 percent of the population was in the 18-to-24 year old age range - the group that changes residences most often. That group will have grown to 11 percent of the local population five years from now.
The next highest group of movers, those 25 to 34, the first time homebuyer market, represented 16.6 percent of the population in 1990, but will drop to 14.4 percent of the population in five years.
The purpose of the site is to help business people make critical decisions - not just on property values and real estate, but also on things like whether the community is going to need more schools or more nursing homes.
What makes the site even more useful, say spokesmen, is that its software can narrow the demographics down to a very small geographic area - allowing users to get an even better idea of neighborhood demographics. Such data can help developers know where to locate retail outlets or even office buildings.
Published: September 6, 2000
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