The NIC MAP Data Service recently unveiled its latest product enhancement to the NIC MAP Local Property Search tool as it introduced a new class of trade areas based on drive time or driving distance from a seniors housing, skilled nursing property or targeted location. Drive-time analysis allows a user to customize a trade area or primary market area (PMA) by selecting the number of minutes it takes to drive to a destination property or location, while selecting between three different traffic flow patterns, reflective of low, medium and high traffic conditions.
Fast and accurate drive-time estimates are helpful to:
To compensate for traffic patterns in drive-time analyses, our new trade area search parameters allow users to adjust driving distances using a traffic flow selection. The drive-time search parameters let the user generate polygon boundaries that represent the maximum distance that can be traveled along a road network from a given point within a user-defined drive time, (5, 10, 15 or 20 minutes).
Drive-time analysis is critical in property selection because adult children typically help choose a property for their aging parents. Feasibility studies often focus on the adult child’s role in helping select the appropriate property for aging parents. One key decision factor is the time it takes the adult child to drive to a property.
In addition to conducting a drive-time search, users will still have the ability to create a custom polygon or radius search with the added functionality of a dual-radius search – selecting between two radii to display on the interactive map. To help streamline this process, the trade area search parameters can be found under the Trade Area header in the Local Property Search tool.
Clients with access to the “Local Property Search” tool automatically saw these upgrades on December 14, 2017. If you would like to incorporate the Local Property Search tool into your product suite or learn more, please call NIC at 410-267-0504 or email support@nic.org, and you’ll be connected, with Client Services.