Cube Cities Blog

The Cube Cities Blog

30 April 2013

Sign In To Search All 3D Commercial Listings on Cube Cities

Cube Cities search results for Downtown Calgary
Searching all commercial real estate listings on Cube Cities now requires users to sign up. When we know more about our users we can provide special features, such as Flights, that make it easy to create automatic tours of commercial listings, as well as Grids, a 3D markup tool for buildings that allows anyone to annotate and share building information, precisely indicating window-level details.



Once signed in, you'll see a new user menu appear. Here's a description of the revealed functionality:



28 April 2013

Instant 3D Building Information with Cube Cities Skylines

Now you can find property data for any building in our 3D building information tool called Skylines. Visit Skylines here: www.cubecities.com/skylines

Skylines Start Message
Central Park South
Skylines provides information on over twelve thousand buildings in 20 cities, categorized by 24 building types and classes. Selecting any building in Skylines reveals an information balloon detailing the proper building name and address, number of stories, square footage, management company and year built. Plus, every commercial property has a link to check office and retail leasing activity on the Cube Cities website. Here's a look at some of the largest markets in North America:

(clockwise) New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Vancouver, Philadelphia, Seattle, Toronto, Boston
Click to Expand
Skylines Information Balloons
Skylines is a publicly available information tool for building data. There is a link on every building that will open the property in Cube Cities to give commercial leasing information. Please send us feature ideas and help make this tool the best way to look at building data.

Explore Skylines here: www.cubecities.com/skylines


25 April 2013

Understanding the Ivanhoé Cambridge Office Portfolio using Cube Cities


Ivanhoé Cambridge is a world-class real estate company that leverages its high-level expertise in all aspects of real estate including investment, development, asset management, leasing and operations, to deliver an optimal return for its institutional investors. The video below is a look at 16 of Ivanhoé Cambridge's trophy office properties distributed over 10 major markets and 3 countries. Cube Cities has visualized each office tower with a floor-level grid, color coded by building class. We've included a look at 73 properties recently acquired by Ivanhoé Cambridge in Silicon Valley with partners TPG and DivcoWest. 

In this visualization Cube Cities has included the portfolio's current space availabilities and highlighted the exact floor location of all available space in each office tower. This portfolio management solution is available for any large commercial real estate organization.


Fullscreen, high resolution link


Here's a more detailed look at many of the Silicon Valley properties, including a visualization illustrating the age of the buildings:


Fullscreen, high resolution link

18 April 2013

3D Buildings Without Google: New Technology From the Taipei City Government

3D Taipei - From Local Government
The Urban Planning Department at the Taipei City Government has recently launched an innovative Google Earth website for exploring Taipei's urban fabric. The application uses a low-texturing technique for mass generation of 3D building models. Their concept is to use as few different image textures as possible to keep the models file size small enough to load and unload rapidly as the user flies through the city. As demonstrated in the video below, the buildings flash onto the screen in white and are quickly rendered with simple textures. In fact, the textures are so simple they could be said to resemble a low-pixel video game like Mindcraft. The simple texturing is just enough to appreciate the building materials and most architectural elements. This technique is combined with an implementation of data regionating that intelligently draws only the 3D buildings within the user's range of view.

The user experience is an effective street-level understanding of neighbourhoods, but the trade off is not having the ability to sense urban density by gazing across the virtual skylines found in Google's 3D building imagery. The Urban Planning Department has also included a purple massing layer that illustrates urban density and allows users to click any building and find data points on structural height and building type.

Low Texture, High Efficiency 3D Building Models in Taipei 

Taipei Massing Model
Sample user experience:



Find a link to the Urban Planning Department's 3D mapping website here. Note that it is built on a Microsoft platform that uses web elements specific to Microsoft's ASP framework and works only with Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox do not work. The site is entirely in Chinese but is easily navigable.

17 April 2013

Marking Up Manhattan with Google's New 3D Imagery

Sunset over Midtown Manhattan with Building Floor Markers



Fullscreen, high resolution link.

Google released new and extensive 3D building imagery for New York City this week. Instantly, Cube Cities was able to use our technology to map every building in Manhattan on a floor level. Watch the video above to see all of these floor markers come to life, each one clickable to show data. This visualization of Manhattan sets the stage for precise city analysis, giving everyone access to transparent building information. Interested building energy and water usage on a floor level? In cities like New York where property managers disclose this information to the public, we're there.

2 April 2013

The Chicago Loop Skyline as a 3D Bar Chart for Buildings

3D Building Bar Charts throughout the Chicago Loop
Another style of 3D Bar Charts, over Chicago's East Loop
We've created timelapsed, building-specific 3D building bar charts. Perfect for delivering building information transparency in real time, or any historic point or timespan. Go inside the visualization here:



Fullscreen, high resolution link

At Cube Cities we're using 3D Bar Charts to compare building performance against peer buildings in the market. These versatile 3D bar charts give our users instant access to every property detail.

Current market conditions? Conditions at the same time last year? Asking rent across the portfolio? Total available area? Water and energy consumption? We provide these visualization services on request using our Verticode platform.

Available now in the following cities:
  • New York City
  • Chicago
  • San Francisco & Bay Area*
  • Toronto
  • Los Angeles*
  • Houston
  • Boston*
  • Philadelphia*
  • Miami
  • Seattle*
  • San Diego*
  • Denver*
  • Charlotte*
  • Vancouver
  • Calgary
  • Edmonton
  • Montréal
  • Ottawa
  • Sydney, AU
*Available for Google Earth on iPad and Android

Contact us for a demonstration.