Commercial Real Estate Investments
Commercial real estate developers are looking at long time horizons. They’re developing buildings that are going to be only in place in a few years, if not decades and hypothetically operational for decades to come.
You’re looking at a property to ultimately build something on, and you want to make sure it’s going to be around for the next few decades.
For example, if you are trying to build a commercial real estate development on Miami Beach, how do you know that Miami Beach coastline will be the same in 10 years time as it is today?
As a commercial real estate developer, you’d want to know that your facility is safe for the next X number of years.
If you look at something like coastal erosion, which is easily able to be monitored via satellite imagery, you could be able to get a good sense as to what your location will look like in 5, 10, 20 years time.
We have many customers monitoring coastal erosion across the globe to understand the impact of climate change and ultimately, from a commercial real estate developers perspective how it would affect their bottom line.
The investment community is always looking for a competitive edge and satellite imagery can actually offer that in space.
Lumber Production, Livestock Tracking and Electric Vehicles
One of the most interesting applications is in something like lumber where you would be able to track specific lumber production across various mills in North America.
We saw this be particularly apparent in 2021 with the influx of lumber pricing and we actually had a lot of customers coming onto the platform for that specific use case
These types of use cases are able to give investors a competitive edge when they’re looking at public markets.
Electric vehicle production is another interesting use case where people can see the week by week progression on, say, Tesla factories producing Tesla vehicles.
What this gives a sense of is the downstream implications for that production and how that would influence something like Tesla stock price.
Satellite imagery can be used to track a wide range of commodities and production facilities.
Global Supply Chain Monitoring
Another area being disrupted by satellite imagery is the global supply chain.
What we can do with satellite imagery is monitor each individual part of the supply chain and better understand how it’s functioning.
As an example in 2021 there was a significant number of ships outside Long Beach port.
We had an influx of customers asking for data to count the ships to understand how many ships are there, trying to get access to trucks and offload their goods.
These are just a few of the examples of how customers are leveraging observation data.
There is an infinite number of possibilities, and ultimately, what we want to enable here at SkyWatch is for you to look at the Earth a little bit differently from space.