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 |  | Eye-in-the-Sky Zeroes In On Real Estate
By Daniel Sorid
Staff Writer
posted: 03:48 pm ET
12 July 2000
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Sharp images of Earth's features provided by a new privately owned spy satellite have given a boost to the snoop work of journalists, scientists and government officials. Now, the satellite is set to have an impact on another arena -- real estate.
Ikonos, an eye-in-the-sky owned by Colorado-based Space Imaging, can provide real-estate developers and brokers a new way to locate feasible building sites and show customers around their new neighborhoods.
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| The IKONOS image shows the downtown area around Mile High stadium in Denver, Colorado.
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The satellite provides the best view of Earth from space aside from spy satellites, with the ability to see objects as small as one square meter, or around 10 square feet. In one example of its power, the satellite exposed a secret launch site in North Korea in the best pictures ever released to the public.
At Foothill Associates, based in Sacramento, California, employees are seeing the benefits of Ikonos today. The consulting company for real estate developers uses satellite images of the city and surrounding areas to identify sites for future real-estate development, and also to warn against development that would require environmentally damaging construction.
The satellite shows "where you might want to cluster development to minimize construction costs and minimize impacts," said Kate Kirsh, vice president of operations at Foothill.
Ikonos can be used to identify types of plant life, and thus can be used to locate areas that the government would want to preserve.
"We have just recently reviewed some Ikonos imagery to help us try and classify different kinds of plant communities in preparation for looking at future development," Kirsh said. Vegetation in certain areas, she said, "are rare and protected. It's a way to try on a large regional scale to see where the resources are."
And while Ikonos is still new, having been launched in September 1999, the real-estate brokers may soon be able to take their clients on fly-through tours of a neighborhood, identifying roads and schools, as well as police and fire departments.
"The prospective buyer can visually see the placement of the home in a community," said Mark Brender, a spokesman for Space Imaging. "The benefits on the placement of the home is seen in an up-to-date geographical context."
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Already, many real-estate firms use aerial photography, but satellite imagery has a distinct advantage: it can take pictures of a much larger area at once, providing a real-time snapshot.
Ikonos image of a Denver fire.
"It's just more time efficient in terms of getting an understanding of what's happening on the ground," Kirsh said. "It's more effective and more cost efficient."
While Ikonos promises to help Foothill Associates, Kirsh said that the images the company received "weren't very good" because the color quality was poor, and that they have sent back the images to be redone. Still, she said she has faith in the satellite's abilities.
"It's got a tremendous amount of promise," Kirsh said," and for certain applications it's probably completely ready to go."
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