Articles & Events

07May
2019
May 7, 2019: Finding the Top 50 Opportunity Zones for Real Estate Investment – Report
by Steve BazantPressLeave a comment

Download the full report via this link.

 

***REPORT EXCERPT***

Finding the Top 50 Opportunity Zones for Real Estate Investment

 

To better understand an investment strategy in Opportunity Zones, Webster Pacific examined various data related to each zone in the United States and Puerto Rico. Our objective was to identify which Opportunity Zones represent places where the value of a property investment would most likely continue to increase. To that end, our analysis of real estate values has shown that incomes and wealth correlate strongly with real estate value. We therefore asked the following question: “Of all 8,700 Opportunity Zones, where are incomes and wealth already growing the most?”

To answer this, we calculated the growth in the percentage of households earning $200,000 or more in each of the 8,700 Opportunity Zones. (The growth is measured between 2000 and 2017 and is adjusted for inflation. We excluded any tracts that were recently created, tracts whose boundaries were significantly altered, or tracts with fewer than 100 households. A similar methodology was used in one of our earlier studies, released in an article by Bloomberg[2].) We then found the fifty Opportunity Zones with the highest wealth growth and mapped them in Tableau by metropolitan area.

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***Download the full report via this link.

News Features:

Publication Link
The Real Deal
Bloomberg
Globe St
PropModo
Crain’s NY
Crain’s Cleveland
Crain’s Chicago Business
The Real Deal
GreenPointers Blog
Qualitas Properties
Yahoo Finance
Forbes
1 First Class Homes
Crain’s NY
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16Apr
2019
April 18, 2019: Pop-up Exhibit: 45 Maps of San Francisco
by Steve BazantEventsLeave a comment

45 maps, from 1507 to present, that tell the story of San Francisco.  Highlights include: first map of America, California as an island, the 1906 Earthquake, and the “fill” of San Francisco Bay.

Speakers:  Jim Schein and Tom Paper

PPT Presentation: via this link

Photos: via this link

Videos: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

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18Feb
2019
February 18, 2019: WHERE IS CHICAGOLAND’S BIGGEST GROWTH IN HIGH-EARNING HOUSEHOLDS?
by Steve BazantArticleLeave a comment

Written by Chicago Agent Magazine’s Scott Klocksin.  Published on Chicago Agent Mag on February 18, 2019.

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One of the things that drives real estate is the search for the next booming neighborhood. While there’s no easy way to know for sure where the next popular spot will be, sometimes the answer lies hidden in plain sight — in a spreadsheet.

With the help of data supplied by consulting firm Webster Pacific, we crunched the numbers on over 3,000 census tracts in Illinois and found the 10 in the Chicagoland area that saw the largest numerical increase in households with incomes of $200,000 or more (in 2017 dollars) between the year 2000 and 2017 — which is the most recent year with available data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

If you build it, they will come

As it happens, the tracts are evenly split at five apiece between the city and suburbs. One thing that nearly all of the census tracts that made the cut have in common is significant amounts of new development in the past two decades and a corresponding spike in total population. This was true in the city as well as the suburbs. In the South Loop, for example, Census Tract 3301 (No. 1 on our list for gains in households making $200,000 or more) saw a 279 percent jump in its number of total households from 2000 to 2017. More than 40 miles away, Census Tract 8545.01 — which covers parts of Geneva, most of Elburn and rural areas between the two towns — logged a 143 percent gain in household count from 2000 to 2017. That Kane County census tract ranks 9th on our list of tracts that saw the most growth in high-earning households.

*You can read the rest of the article on Chicago Agent Magazine, via this link.

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18Dec
2018
December 18, 2018: Americans Earning Over $200,000 Are Flocking to These Neighborhoods
by Steve BazantArticleLeave a comment

Written by Bloomberg’s Reade Pickert, Jonathan Levin, and Hannah Recht. Published on Bloomberg on December 18th, 2018.

U.S. unemployment is near a 50-year low, economic growth is brisk and the stock market—despite a disappointing 2018—has paid generous returns since the financial crisis of a decade ago.

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 But not for everyone. The chasm between rich and poor hasn’t been this wide since data collection began in the 1960s. Workers experience starkly different versions of America depending on which city or neighborhood they live in. One way to measure the economic fortunes of a place is by the concentration of households earning $200,000 or more, the highest threshold in the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

Nationally, 6.9 percent of American households bring in that much. What follows are the areas (known to the Census Bureau as tracts) that have shown the biggest increases in concentration of $200,000-and-up households since 2000, according to calculations by consulting firm Webster Pacific. It used data released on Dec. 6 and adjusted for inflation. (The ranking excludes recently created tracts, those defined as tracts of significant change and any tract with fewer than 100 households in either 2000 or 2017.)

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 *You can read the rest of the article on Bloomberg, via this link.
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15Dec
2018
December 15, 2018: Where do the richest people in Dubai live?
by Steve BazantArticleLeave a comment

Written by Khaleej Times’ Waheed Abbas. Published on Khaleej Times on December 15th, 2018.

Dubai is synonymous with the cities of the rich as the glamorous city is home to the highest number of high net worth individuals (HNWIs) in the region.

According to New World Wealth, there are approximately over 55,000 HNWIs with $1 million-plus assets, 2,590 multi-millionaires with $10-million assets and 10 billionaires who have made the emirate as their home. But where do most of these millionaires live in the emirate?

An analysis by the US-based Webster Pacific showed that the Jumeirah, Umm Suqeim and surrounding areas have the highest concentration of HNWIs, followed by the Al Karama, Al Raffa and Al Barsha areas.

*You can read the rest of the article on Khaleej Times, via this link.

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16Nov
2018
November 16, 2018: Here are the priciest real estate markets in the world
by Steve BazantArticleLeave a comment

Written by Inman News’ Gabriela Barkho. Published on Inman on November 16th, 2018.

This month, consulting firm Webster Pacific partnered with New World Wealth, a market research firm that focuses on wealth data, to release the top property indexes of where the priciest real estate markets are in the U.S. and internationally.

The firms tracked a few key apartments in major cities in prime, upscale neighborhoods. Here are the “Top 10 US cities/towns ranked by the dollar rate per square meter,” collected in June 2018:

  • New York City : $34,000
  • Pebble Beach, Monterey: $21,000
  • Los Angeles: $14,000

*You can read the rest of the article on Inman News, via this link.

 

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31Oct
2018
OCTOBER 31, 2019: NW GIS CONFERENCE – COMBINING DISPARATE DATASETS TO GET THE DATA YOU NEED
by Steve BazantEventsLeave a comment

Steve presented at the NorthWest GIS User Conference on the topic of combining disparate datasets in Bremerton, WA on October 31, 2018.

Abstract: Do you ever struggle to find the exact GIS data that you want? Do you get frustrated that available datasets aren’t granular enough or are redacted in a way that isn’t actionable? We live in the Big Data revolution, so why should we give up if we don’t find the exact GIS data that we are looking for? In this session, we will explore the idea that to get the GIS data you want, one dataset, you may need to employ and combine multiple datasets. To demonstrate this, we have a case study on enhancing international wealth and demographic data, although this approach can apply to any GIS dataset and to any GIS industry.

*You can read the rest of the abstract, here.

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18Apr
2018
April 18, 2018: So You Want To Be A Data Analyst?
by Tom PaperArticleLeave a comment

Written by Webster Pacific Managing Partner Tom Paper. Published on Medium on April 18th, 2018.

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I’ve hired and employed over 25 recent college grads since I graduated from Stanford Business School in 1990. The consulting practice, Webster Pacific, that my partner and I lead does strategy work that is highly data-intensive. We crunch massive amounts of data to answer our clients’ questions, many of which are in the K-12 private school business. The questions we answer include: Where should we open a new school? Where is the wealth in a market? Why are families leaving our school? How far do applicants typically live from our school? Why are teachers loyal to our school? To answer these questions, we analyze data…mountains of data. We currently employ six data analysts.

So here’s my advice to all recent grads interested in becoming a data analyst:

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19Mar
2018
March 19, 2018: US Data is Easy. International Data is Hard.
by Tom PaperArticleLeave a comment

Written by Webster Pacific Managing Partner Tom Paper. Published on Medium on March 19th, 2018.

Getting US data is easy. Getting international data is hard. For many reasons, US data about demographics and wealth is easy to find, even on a micro-geographic basis, but in virtually every other country in the world, finding data about demographics and wealth is very hard.

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09Mar
2018
March 7-9, 2018: NAIS Conference, Mission-driven data visualization- Compelling dashboards that transform student learning in real time
by Daniel SaniskiEvents

Conference Workshop Presented by Webster Pacific Consultant Daniel Saniski

Many schools possess extensive data, but struggle to produce insights that fuel student success. At Avenues: The World School, we have codified our goals by defining the essential skills of a graduate, and use a wide variety of data to measure these goals in a systematic fashion. Our dashboarding system, co-created with Webster Pacific, is used to report student performance and growth against these goals in real time, allowing us to visually measure success across many years, answer important research questions, and communicate effectively with diverse audiences. In this session, we’ll show how we use data visualization to create actionable insights from our data.

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