by Kent Jennings Brockwell
Staff Writer
For the past few weeks, a suspicious-looking black van with dark tinted windows has been slinking through the streets of downtown Jacksonville. Every now and then it stops on the side of the road and a digital camera slowly pops out of the roof like a submarine’s periscope.
When it has been raised about 20 feet in the air, the camera swivels around, snaps a few photos and then descends back into the van. After a few minutes parked on the street, the van darts off to take more photos in another part of town.
Though it isn’t taking spy photos or looking for suspected terrorists, the van would look like something from the CIA’s motor pool if it weren’t for the bright yellow lettering on the doors and hood that says “CoStar Group Research.”
The van is actually remapping all of the commercial real estate in northeast Florida for CoStar Group Inc., a major Internet-based information gathering resource for commercial real estate professionals.
Jon Metzger is the Jacksonville-based field researcher for CoStar Group and operates one of the new custom-designed Dodge Sprinter research vans. Though Metzger has been with CoStar full-time for about a year, he has only been working out of the specially designed van for a few weeks. Before, he took photos of local commercial real estate from the tailgate of his pickup truck and then loaded them onto a laptop computer on his passenger seat.
Now, after he finds a good place to park, Metzger is able to take and edit his photos from the air conditioned comfort of his new office on wheels. According to CoStar Group, Metzger’s van is one of 48 custom-designed Dodge Sprinter vans CoStar has distributed to its field researchers in the major real estate markets around the United States.
Besides the remote controlled, high-resolution digital camera mounted on the 24-foot retractable mast, the CoStar vans are fully loaded for real estate research. The vans’ cargo areas are set up like a cubicle on wheels with a desk, two mounted swivel chairs and multiple flat screen televisions that are hooked up to global positioning satellite systems, laptops and the boom-mounted camera. Various switches and control boxes for the mast and the sunroof are also mounted on the desk along with a speaker phone system for the company cell phone. There is even an alarm that tells the operator if they are within 10 feet of a power line, a safety feature Metzger said he holds quite dear.
“It doesn’t tell me about trees or overhangs so I still have to look up. But it really helps,” he said.
Up by the driver’s seat, Metzger has even more controls and monitors. There is a GPS system mounted on the dashboard, which helps him find the way to the next location. And mounted on the ceiling between the driver’s and passenger’s seats is another flat screen monitor connected to the computer in the back. The vans even have satellite radio installed, a feature Metzger said really helps to liven up the work day.
On the computer screen above his head, there is an image of a downtown Jacksonville street map that is covered with hundreds of small red dots. Each red dot represents a building that needs to be photographed. Besides taking the photographs, Metzger also edits the photos and verifies physical information about the building. Though the process for each building takes about 20 minutes, Metzger said the process is much easier now that he has the high-tech van.
Averaging about 28 buildings per day, Metzger said he will be done with downtown Jacksonville in a few weeks but his job will not end there. Actually, he will probably never run out of red dots.
“As big as Jacksonville is growing, it will not happen,” Metzger said. “There is just so much commercial real estate going up right now.”
Fast-growing areas like Jacksonville are the exact reason CoStar Group decided to acquire the fleet of custom-designed vans, said Jennifer Kitchen, CoStar’s vice president of field research.
“The Dodge Sprinter vans are an integral part of our research model,” Kitchen said. “They are our eyes and ears in the research marketplace. The (vans) are really set up for exactly what we need in Jacksonville, which is going after potential and existing commercial real estate.”
Kitchen said that Metzger is one of CoStar Group’s 120 full-time and 140 part-time researchers around the country who are constantly monitoring and documenting the national real estate market — a market she says never stops growing.
“It is never-ending,” Kitchen said. “Commercial real estate is a constantly evolving cycle. You never finish photographing a market. Buildings are always being built, they are always being torn down. It is constantly changing.”
Metzger can attest to that. After editing and saving a photo of the Bank of America building, he scrolls through a long list of pending assignments, which are broken down into small groups of properties located close to one another. One assignment has 30 properties, another has 50 and one has more than 500. After browsing through about a dozen assignments, Metzger finds himself looking at more than 1,000 properties to photograph, and that is just scratching the surface.
“As you can see,” he said, glancing at a screen full of about 500 red dots in a Southside neighborhood, “I have a lot of work to do.”