AI has become a cornerstone of modern technological evolution with widespread adoption in numerous fields. In real estate investing, AI empowers commercial investors with predictive analytics to identify lucrative opportunities and optimize portfolio performance through data-driven decision-making. Placer.ai is a reliable and accessible market leader in location analytics, providing commercial real estate (CRE) investors and professionals unprecedented visibility into consumer movement. However, its application is not limited to real estate investing, but cuts across diverse sectors, including retail, shopping centers, brokerage firms, government agencies, finance and hospitality.
Placer.ai furnishes you with accurate data on who’s visiting your location and their origin. Its visitation trends generate comprehensive foot traffic and dwell-time metrics based on consumer groups and seasonality. By analyzing cross-shopping habits, Placer.ai allows you to understand your clients better and identify ideal co-tenants. You can obtain ranking metrics demonstrating the strength of any site location by category on a local, state or national level, track numerous businesses’ yearly performance and recovery and analyze foot traffic trends by sector and state across the country.
You can analyze top-performing brands in diverse categories for any state, city or zip code. Placer.ai’s dashboard delivers detailed insights about competitors and audiences, helping you discover new business opportunities. The platform can help you recognize the impacts of marketing, holidays and events on your company. Is Placer.ai the perfect location intelligence software to turbocharge your real estate investments? Find out from Benzinga’s comprehensive review of the platform.
- Commercial real estate investors seeking real estate intelligence software to gain deeper insights into foot traffic patterns, consumer demographics and competitive benchmarks, enabling informed decision-making and strategic planning for property investments
- Retailers seeking an AI-powered SaaS platform to understand customer behavior better, optimize store locations and enhance overall retail performance through insights into foot traffic and consumer trends
- Hospitality companies seeking an advanced location analytics SaaS solution to optimize the siting of hotels, restaurants and entertainment venues by understanding visitor trends, enhancing customer experience and driving business success
- Intuitive and user-friendly interface for easy accessibility
- Unlimited SaaS dashboard access with complete analytical suites
- Real-time foot traffic tracking, analysis and insight, including visits, timing and benchmarks
- True trade areas, demographics and customer journey analytics
- Customizable reports, data feeds and APIs
- No individual seat licenses — licensing is geared towards companies and team Available only for U.S.-based businesses
- Subscriptions are on a 12-month commitment basis
- Limited integration with third-party software
- Might require a learning curve
Placer.ai Ratings at a Glance
Placer.ai Product Offering
At its core, Placer.ai is a real-world location intelligence software providing private and public businesses with consumer foot traffic analytics and insights that streamline decision-making. It facilitates constructive assessment of businesses' spread across a market and revenue potential by understanding customer insights and competitive benchmarking.
This can help you identify new business opportunities, boost market share, enhance customer satisfaction and improve efficiency. The platform uses data to create user-friendly and insightful visualizations for diverse industries, helping businesses build innovative products. Here's a comprehensive breakdown of Placer.ai's offerings.
Location Analytics
Placer.ai's location analytics features are all-encompassing and include visit trends, trade areas and demographics as the foundation for accurate analysis. For instance, you can access precise foot traffic counts and dwell time of customer visitation, with the ability to filter by time, weekday and customer segments to understand better how events, holidays and promotions impact your business.
You can discover where your ideal customers live and work through trade areas, focusing your market budget on those areas. Additionally, you can accurately forecast how new tenants will impact your reach. The platform's constructive area analysis provides detailed insights into happenings within your property, including traffic volumes for road segments, crime history near the property and a view of nearby real estate developments. And you can compare performance against local or distant competitors to measure your market share and regional dominance over time.
Placer.ai delivers exceptional customer insights; it lets you analyze aggregated customer demographics, including income, gender and other favorite shopping spots, to better understand your target customers for optimized engagement. Additionally, you can analyze industry trends to identify emerging brands and trends clearly by category and region. And best of all, your aggregated data is automatically exported for use by external services like internal BI tools, a CRM system or to build advanced prediction models.
API and Integration Tool
Placer.ai provides one of the world's most accurate location insight APIs for programmatic data access. With the API, developers and analysts can extract Placer.ai's aggregated data for use in any third-party application, enabling customers to customize, filter or combine it with their proprietary data for specific business requirements like custom dashboards, internal reporting and competitive analysis. You can search and find venues by category, address or chain, view the estimated number of unique customers and foot traffic, receive coordinates to map a polygon showing the origin of foot traffic to a location and more.
This information can, for instance, help you compare foot traffic to internal loyalty and sales or highlight the strength of a venue in marketing materials or a customer-facing website. Placer.ai also offers seamless integration with a few third-party tools like Snowflake, enabling you to deploy its best-in-class data within your existing workflow and analytics tools for seamless consumption and analysis.
The platform incorporates add-on solutions and data, including those that form part of its premium features like migration trends reports, retail sales reports and site selection reports, as well as those integrated into the platform from reputable third-party data providers. These include BusinessCounts from AGS, Landscape by STI, Mosaic by Experian and Census 2017 by the US Census Bureau, all of which enhance data analysis.
Placer XTRA
Placer XTRA is a tailored set of on-demand reports designed for specific industries and use cases. Some examples include the Day in the Life Animation, offering insights into space utilization and hourly foot traffic patterns; In-Center Heat Maps, visualizing foot traffic density within a center; and Same-Day Shared Audience for cross-shopping data analysis between properties. These reports aim to provide users with answers to challenging questions and convert detailed location and foot traffic information into actionable intelligence.
The Square — Free Tools
Placer.ai's Square is a centralized hub where the wider location analytics community can access free tools and content. You can access diverse data sets and tools for seamless analysis. This encompasses nationwide migration trends, COVID-19 recovery dashboards, return-to-office trends (recovery rate), brand dominance maps, top restaurant chains nationwide, and industry trends.. These comprehensive resources aid in making informed decisions, strategizing effectively and staying ahead in a dynamic real estate business landscape.
Educational and Research Resources
Placer.ai is the undisputed industry leader in education and research resources, with numerous learning contents available for users. The Blog offers engaging insights into specific events, industry trends and the impact on foot traffic, providing readers with a data-driven perspective on the intersection of such events and consumer behavior. Its carefully crafted articles can help you understand the real-world effects of various happenings, from sports championships to holiday menu launches, allowing you to glean valuable information and make informed decisions. At the same time, the White Papers function as in-depth guides, exploring crucial trends and valuable insights from data analysis, providing strategic perspectives that enable professionals across various sectors to navigate industry changes effectively.
Placer.ai's Webinars provide industry professionals with the latest insights into market trends, performance analysis and consumer behavior across different sectors such as real estate, retail, shopping centers and entertainment, enabling them to stay informed about market dynamics for data-driven decision-making. Another excellent learning resource are the Guides, which act as a go-to reference page, providing users with practical knowledge and the latest technological solutions, empowering them to perform data-driven analyses and make informed decisions in various industries while fostering continuous learning and research. Theyoffer valuable insights into efficient real estate market analysis, offline audience segmentation, leveraging geospatial data for business optimization, and more.
Additionally, the Case Studies provide real-world examples of how Placer.ai's insights have been instrumental in securing loans, guiding urban regeneration projects and assisting investment decisions in the real estate industry, offering valuable learning experiences for users. The Anchor is the perfect commercial real estate and retail industry intelligence hub. It features executive analyses on recent industry trends through the lens of location analytics, tackling multiple categories related to these sectors. To stay updated with the company's comprehensive news, you can check out the Newsroom. You can also check out Data for Good to understand how Placer.ai data various critical role in supporting local communities and driving social progress. These range from mitigating food disasters to battling blood shortages during rapid-response crises.
Placer.ai lacks a few customer support options, which is vital for a more efficient and reliable customer service experience. For instance, there are no LiveChat and phone channels to facilitate immediate complaint resolution by the support team. However, this might be a non-issue since customers get a dedicated customer manager who provides requisite assistance as needed. Besides that, to ask questions or file complaints, you can fill out an online ticket on the website or send a direct email. The company is responsive when you contact them via these channels. Additionally, you can find answers to commonly asked questions without contacting the support team by checking the FAQ.
Placer.ai also maintains an active presence on social networking platforms like LinkedIn, X and YouTube, and, providing an alternative means of contacting the support team and asking questions. The platform has a Cuspera rating of 4.0/5 from 365 reviewers and 4.8/5 from 646 reviewers on Featured Customers. Placer.ai's users' comments on these software review platforms were overwhelmingly positive, reflecting the depth of this feature-rich and user-friendly SaaS platform.
Placer.ai highly prioritizes the protection of user data. Personally identifiable information (PII) collected during account registration or signup is used strictly for improved and personalized service delivery, marketing communications and customer support. Placer.ai treats this data with the highest level of confidentiality, leveraging industry-standard data privacy protocols to prevent unauthorized access. The platform employs end-to-end encryption to protect data in transit and at rest via a centralized key management system and rotating keys.
The platform uses the Information Security Management System (ISMS) from ISO 27001, which encompasses a risk management program based on the ISO 31000 Risk Management Framework. Placer.ai does not sell or share your PII with third parties unless given consent or following judicial precedent. You maintain absolute rights over your data, including its restriction, rectification, erasure, transfer and amendment and can request such by contacting the team at privacy@placer.ai.
Placer.ai subscription is based on a 12-month commitment or contract. The platform customizes subscription packages on a client-by-client basis. It does not offer fixed pricing, so there are no minimum pricing or entry barriers. The fees vary greatly based on your industry, scale, functionality and other parameters. Typically, the bigger your team and the functionalities or features you need, the higher the subscription fees. To get a quote, select your industry, partners or number of employees and provide additional information about your company's data needs.
The revenue team will follow up with a plan based on your unique needs. While this indicates a lack of transparency in pricing, such an approach is popular among similar SaaS platforms, except for a few that charge a fixed annual fee regardless of your industry and scale of partners. Placer.ai does not offer free trials for its full edition. However, you can leverage the free edition to understand better how the platform works and the type of insights available. You can email the sales team for a comprehensive virtual tour of the full version.
Placer.ai delivers an exciting user experience that blends ease of use, powerful features and excellent educational and research tools. While users might require learning curves to master its numerous features, the platform's highly intuitive and user-friendly interface makes navigation a breeze. You can seamlessly access critical information like customer insights, foot-traffic data and competitive benchmarking without hassles. The analytics dashboard is designed for clarity, enabling users to measure visitation, track trends and perform in-depth analyses.
Its educational and research resources are top-notch, facilitating speedy learning. Placer.ai's custom reports, data feeds and API options add flexibility for users with specific reporting needs. The platform's simplicity makes it accessible to a broad audience, from retailers and commercial real estate professionals to investors and municipalities. Placer.ai's ease of use contributes to its appeal for making informed decisions in various industries. Benzinga considers Placer.ai highly recommendable.
Placer.ai vs. Competitors
Placer.ai has many competitors, including Near, Huq and SmartMarket. Near leverages AI and data from 1.6 billion people across 44 countries to provide instant human movement insights, which help businesses understand consumer behavior and analyze places for data-driven decision-making. With Near, you can identify high- and low-performing competitor stores by comparing footfall trends and visitation patterns, identify high-value customers, boost revenue via personalized offerings and evaluate the sales potentials of stores from footfall analysis.
From daily footfall volumes to live catchment areas, visit frequency and visit dwell time, Huq delivers quality and backtested insights that streamline decision-making for retailers, government agencies and commercial real estate professionals. SmartMarket provides location data and analytic solutions alongside market insights for small to enterprise-level businesses, facilitating the identification of key market parameters that help such businesses understand demographics and formulate a holistic retail strategy with optimal site selection. Placer.ai has more compelling features and offers superior service compared to SmartMarket and Huq. Huq has more affordable pricing at 1,000 pounds per year; however, it serves mainly U.K. and European businesses.
SmartMarket charges $32,000 per year, which may be higher depending on your business when compared to Placer.ai. Placer.ai pricing varies considerably based on industry, partner scale, functionality and other parameters. SmartMarket is based in India. Near is the closest competitor to Placer.ai; both are U.S.-based SaaS platforms with similar features regarding competitive intelligence, location intelligence, data analysis and foot traffic data. However, Placer.ai leans heavily towards AI real estate, compared to B2B data for Near. Placer.ai also offers more comprehensive and research resources.
Must be accredited investing a minimum of $25,000.
Placer.ai is a must-have location intelligence software if you're a commercial real estate investor or developer seeking to optimize strategies, enhance customer relationships and make data-driven decisions, thanks to its AI-powered foot-traffic analytics and quality insights. It leverages its comprehensive features suite to give users powerful visibility into places, markets and consumer trends, including sales estimation, demographics, business counts, planned development, psychographics, social media, online consumer expenditures and climate data. Retailers, CPG companies, investors and municipalities can also leverage the software to measure visitation, track trends, benchmark competition and make informed decisions.
Placer.ai's analytics dashboard, API, data feeds and custom reporting empower these businesses to understand physical world dynamics and gain a competitive edge. The platform's impressive feature is backed up by comprehensive learning and research resources to help users narrow the learning curve and gain valuable insight into trends driving retail performance and consumer behavior. However, you must consider the size of your business and the specific features you want when subscribing, as these factors significantly influence the pricing.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Placer.ai work?
Placer.ai uses accurate property-level polygons, de-identified panel data and advanced data science to provide businesses with insights into consumer foot traffic, demographics, competitive benchmarks and various market dynamics.
Placer.ai leverages de-identified location data from a panel of tens of millions of mobile devices, upon which the company leverages industry-leading AI and machine learning capabilities to make estimations about overall visits to any location.
How does foot traffic impact commercial real estate?
Foot-traffic data helps commercial real estate investors and businesses evaluate specific locations’ performance, trends and potential, informing their decisions about property investment, tenant selection and market strategies.
Who needs information on real estate placement?
Diverse stakeholders such as retailers, commercial real estate professionals, consumer goods companies, investors and municipalities seek information on real estate placement to make informed decisions, understand market dynamics and optimize their strategies.
