10 Great Media Sites: Pro.Housing Intelligence

By Charlotte Woolard

The Market Intelligence division of Hanley Wood transformed legacy software that served less than 15% of the builders in the U.S. housing market into a subscription-based, online tool that provides data that covers more than 95% of the national residential real estate market.

The online architecture features a completely redesigned interface, expanded data sets and new visualization tools that help investors make decisions based on long- and short-term real estate trends. Subscribers can use Pro.Housing-Intelligence.com to generate reports, create heat maps, conduct spatial analysis and otherwise dissect data at the national, state, metropolitan or county level.

The custom research tool has fueled more than client reports. “We have started to migrate legacy software products onto the Web, and, as part of that transition, integrate those products into other websites as well,” said Andy Reid, president of Hanley Wood's Market Intelligence unit.

Hanley Wood Business Media generates content teasers based on its own crunches of the housing data and allows visitors at sites like BuilderOnline.com to access subsets of information for free. The sharing not only provides an editorial resource for the media brands, but also demonstrates the value of the data, driving traffic to the paid site, Reid said.