Cube Cities Vis Quiz: Mystery Business District

Use the poll on the right to participate in this vis quiz:

Where is this Major Business District?

Floor 31 in a Mystery Building in a Mystery Business District

Where in the world is this major business district? It's one of the world's most important financial zones, containing over 14,000,000 square feet of office space. Rental rates here run upwards of $60 USD-equivalent per square foot and A-class office properties are over 90% occupied. Here's a rotating video of the skyline:

Fullscreen, high resolution link.

Is it Frankfurt? London? Denver? Paris? Minneapolis? Cast your vote with the poll on the right side of the page. The answer will be revealed on June 3rd at 12pm MST.

ANSWER: Canary Wharf

NEW! Rich Building Information Now Available

Find property data with the new Building Information option (click to expand)

We've introduced a new data menu to our city search that reveals building statistics for every commercial property in our database. This menu is now accessible to all users before or after a visual search for commercial space. Simply check the Building Information box and small red points will appear on the rooftop of every building. Mouseover the points and the building name will appear, click to see the details such as building type & class, number of floors, office and retail square footage, building architect, property manager, operating costs and more. Here's a video illustrating building information points in Toronto, Chicago and Manhattan.

Fullscreen, high resolution link

Keep watching the building information windows, we'll be adding new property data soon. Sign up with Cube Cities to explore this new data source.

Building Information covering Downtown San Francisco (click to expand)

Uptown Charlotte's Largest Blocks of Office Space: Charlotte Business Journal

Cube Cities + Charlotte Business Journal Website Slideshow

The office market downtown Charlotte is tight. Especially for tenants looking for available spaces larger than 50,000 sqft. The Charlotte Business Journal recently ran a story on the 7 buildings with the largest amount of available space now and whats coming to market over the next several months. Cube Cities has produced a sequenced video that shows exactly where these spaces are located in each building, flying from space to space in concert with the article's slideshow.

Here's a video featuring every available space:

Fullscreen, high resolution link.

It's easy for Cube Cities users to produce videos like the one above for any large city in North America. Sign up on our website to create your own flight of available office space options.

Uptown Charlotte's 7 largest blocks of office space (click to expand)

Update: Charlotte Business Journal Writer Will Boye responds to our data visualization of his article, read it here.

CBRE Office Market Snapshot: Sydney City Core

Sydney's City Core showing available CBRE office space, Governor Philip Tower highlighted (click to expand)

Here's a look at CBRE's available office space in Sydney's city core, as of May 11th 2013. Missing 3D buildings are illustrated with our versatile Cube Cities visualization platform.

Space highlighted in 120 Sussex Street

Video:

Fullscreen, high resolution link

Explore the Sydney office market interactively with Cube Cities here.

Brookfield Office Properties in 3D: Manhattan

Here's an example of the traditional presentation format for commercial real estate data:

Brookfield Office Properties, Mortgage Information Sheet

Examining buildings with Cube Cities makes more sense. Our visualizations are the high bandwidth means of understanding building data and the stories behind land economics. Here's a look at the Brookfield Office Properties portfolio in Manhattan, including the current space availabilities in every building.

Brookfield's 10 major commercial properties in Manhattan

Brookfield Place: 8 million square feet

The Grace Building: 1.6 million square feet

All buildings visualized in this video:

Fullscreen, high resolution link

Brookfield Office Properties in 3D: Downtown Toronto

Downtown Toronto buildings owned by Brookfield Office Properties showing available office space

Available space in First Canadian Place

Here's a look at Brookfield Office Properties downtown Toronto portfolio. The video below is a Cube Cities flyover of the portfolio's buildings. The video provides a look at the current office space available downtown Toronto,  including the current available space in the Brookfield portfolio. The video demonstrates several Cube Cities data elements, including a fade-out of the photo-textured buildings to reveal the internal floors in First Canadian Place, Canada's tallest building.



Fullscreen, high resolution link

Contact us for portfolio visualizations of other large commercial real estate companies in Canada and the United States and see how they compare to the market.

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:

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

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

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.