By B.C. Manion
A Pasco County company is working on a website that will provide relevant information about the development potential of industrial land throughout the county.
The website is being created by Insight Mapping Systems Inc., for use by the Pasco Economic Development Council, said Kevin Mazur, president of Insight Mapping Systems, a spin-off of Florida Design Consultants.
Although it will allow PEDC to use the website for free, the company is hoping the site will serve as a model of the kind of websites it can develop for paying customers such as economic development councils in other parts of the country.
The website will provide detailed information for all of Pasco County’s Master-Planned Unit Developments and Developments of Regional Impact that have industrial entitlements, which means they are ready to build on, explained Elizabeth Lyon-Hall, senior planner with Florida Design Consultants.
Industrial businesses are often targeted by the PEDC because of their potential for creating jobs in the county, said Lyon-Hall, who serves on the PEDC’s board of directors.
For each of the industrial sites listed on the website, there are layers of detailed information that can be turned on or off. Those layers will include data in categories including flood zones, land use, soils, topography and wetlands.
The website would provide useful technical information for prospective buyers, which can be available on their portable computer, as they’re walking a lot, Lyon-Hall said.
They also could preview a number of sites online and narrow down the list of sites they want to visit, she said.
The website also will enable PEDC to focus its efforts on targets that appear to be more serious about a potential move here, Lyon-Hall said.
“It helps them track whose looking at it and how serious the inquiries are. They’re not fielding 500 calls, now they’re targeting 200, but they’re more serious calls. So, it really helps them be more efficient with their time and focus on the more targeted inquiries,” she explained.
The website is just one example of the kinds of services the mapping company can provide, Mazur said.
It also can do customized searches for developers, builders or people who just want to buy land, he said. The information it provides may help companies to locate the property they want themselves, thereby potentially reducing the commission they’ll need to pay a real estate agent, he said.
The customer provides the criteria for the kind of site they need and Mazur’s company does a search to match that criteria, to the extent possible.
For instance, someone may tell his company they want a site that is within three miles of a school, two miles of a major intersection and is of a certain size, Mazur said.
These custom searches may be particularly useful to a company that lacks the resources or expertise to handle this kind of work on its own, Mazur said.
The company also offers an asset management service, he said.
“A lot of banks have no idea what they’ve foreclosed on. They have no system for tracking those, mapping those, marketing those properties,” Mazur said.
His company can map the properties and marry that database into a bank’s internal database or the information can be used for external marketing, or a client might want a combination of both, he said.
The company can also help to keep track of available and sold inventory in a new subdivision, Mazur said.
Instead of pushing color-coded pins into a map, the company can use color-coded digital maps, which are updated in real time as sales are closed.
“We’re trying to create a system that is always up to date,” he said. “It’s very new. Nobody that I know of has done that yet,” Mazur said.
Providing the industrial land website for the PEDC isn’t the company’s first contribution to the county’s economic development efforts.
Florida Design Consultants also donated a giant full-color topographical map hanging in the PEDC’s conference room.
The map shows the county’s topography, but also provides a visual of its relationships to other markets, such as Tampa and Orlando and the location of transportation systems, such as roads, rail, port and airports.
It’s a significant improvement over the old laminated street map that used to hang on the wall, Lyon-Hall said.
She said her company was pleased to provide the map.
“We always try to bring new opportunities to the county,” Lyon-Hall said.
For more information about Insight Mapping Systems, visit insightmappingsys.com or call (727) 569-0566.
