For Immediate Release: November 11, 2022
Miami, FL — Gridics LLC a provider of parcel-level zoning data and applications, announced a new capital raise of $1.5 million from a combination of existing investors and two large real estate investment funds, one a publicly held REIT. The capital will be used to kickstart a market expansion effort to add the zoning of cities in major metro areas across the US to their platform. As cities are implemented, over 30 data points such as setbacks, height, allowed uses, development capacity, and more will be available for every parcel in each city.
“Up to this point in our journey, we have only calibrated the zoning into our engine for cities and counties that adopt our municipal zoning information portal product and become customers,” says Jason Doyle, CEO of Gridics. “As the first company to create technology that applies the rules in zoning ordinance documents to every individual parcel, it was important to work with cities first to ensure our engine could properly account for the various zoning complexities. We are now setting out to calibrate the zoning of key markets throughout the US in order to eventually establish the first and only parcel-level data set of zoning attributes, allowed uses, and developable capacity covering the majority of the country.”
Zoning rules dictate how each property parcel can be used as well as what and how much can be built (such as residential units). The rules are outlined in a zoning and/or land use ordinance document that can be hundreds of pages long. The rules are typically set at a zone level which encompass large areas and many parcels. However, the way the rules are applied to each parcel can vary based on size, location, overlay districts, and many other geospatial factors.
“When a person or company is trying to interpret a zoning ordinance, they usually have a parcel or property in mind or they are trying to find a site that allows them to build something specific or open a specific type of business. Unfortunately there has never been the ability to look up an address and view what zoning allows on that parcel,” says Doyle.
To solve this problem, Gridics developed a geospatial zoning rules engine that outputs numerous data points for each parcel in a municipality. Since each city regulates their own zoning, the information must be gathered city by city. This is precisely why Gridics first developed a product that cities could adopt and make available to its citizens to look up the data rather than calling, emailing, and/or visiting the city to ask city planners. Some of their city customers include Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami Beach, FL as well as Cary, NC and Cupertino, CA, home of Apple HQ.
With the technology validated by city and county customers, Gridics is now setting out to expand its market coverage in order to make this data available to companies in the multi-trillion dollar real estate market.
“Large developers, brokers, lenders, and insurance companies will be able to license this data across numerous markets to integrate it into their existing systems. For local real estate professionals, we will make this data available via PropZone, our real estate search app that allows users to search for property using a combination of our calibrated parcel-level zoning development allowance data and tax assessor property data,” Doyle explains.
Gridics is actively raising additional strategic capital to support their efforts to establish this national zoning data layer.
“It’s a monumental effort, but we have literally cracked the code with our technology and are excited to make zoning easier for everyone to access, understand, and interpret in order to help us all build better communities for future generations,” says Doyle.
Gridics has already completed the Miami-Fort Lauderdale metro, Jacksonville, and Las Vegas markets and plans to complete cities in the Phoenix, Denver, and Los Angeles metro areas before year end.
