5 Property Data Platforms Shaping the Next Generation of Green Cities
With 60% of the global population expected to live in urban areas by 2030, demand for more sustainable, efficient, greener cities continues to grow.
As of 2024, around 20% of cities with more than 500,000 inhabitants have pledged net zero targets, with global spending on smart city technologies and developments estimated to have eclipsed $327 billion in recent years.
As green cities become more widespread, the tools, technologies, and techniques leveraged by developers grow more advanced, with city planners around the world now making smart use of intelligent software and AI-driven tools to design forward-thinking urban environments.
For more insight into how the cities of the future are being developed, in this post, we take a closer look at 5 of the top property data platforms shaping the next generation of green cities.
1. PropertyShark – Real Estate Data and Research Platform
PropertyShark is a comprehensive real estate data and research platform that provides city planners and investors with in-depth data on residential and commercial properties. The site uses up-to-date government and proprietary data to create detailed property reports that city planners can use to identify key insights, including tax, zoning, building characteristics, and sales data.
Decision makers use PropertyShark to identify properties and areas of land primed for green development, for example, developers can use the platform to identify LEED buildings which are marked in the site’s search function. City planners use PropertyShark data to identify vacant, underutilized, and distressed lots best suited for sustainable redevelopment initiatives.
By providing city planners with granular, up-to-date, and well-defined property and land-use data, PropertyShark helps developers direct capital toward impactful, sustainable adaptive reuse and infill projects that can form the foundation of forward-thinking green cities, enabling developers to build walkable, transit-adjacent, energy-efficient spaces for urban populations.
2. ArcGIS Urban – Planning, Design and Development Software
ArcGIS Urban is a web-based, data-driven application built to help city planners streamline urban development initiatives. Through the platform, stakeholders can evaluate the potential impacts of wide-ranging development, zoning, and land-use scenarios by exploring detailed 3D visualizations (digital twins) of existing cities built using high-quality urban analytics data.
ArcGIS Urban empowers stakeholders across multiple aspects of city planning to view and assess proposed developments collaboratively and remotely. Planners can assess the environmental impacts of development plans by simulating real-world scenarios in 3D space, enabling stakeholders to optimize design elements to best meet sustainability targets.
Modern city planners are using ArcGIS Urban to ensure projects meet key environmental metrics, such as green space per capita, and to visualize the impact of novel developments on existing green spaces. In addition, the application can be used to identify unused public spaces primed for green infrastructure to help repurpose underutilized land more sustainably.
3. UMI (MIT) – Urban Modelling Interface
The Urban Modeling Interface (UMI) is an intelligent urban modeling solution developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sustainable Design Lab that planners can use to evaluate the environmental performance of green developments. Through UMI, users can measure green metrics such as embodied energy use, walkability, and access to daylight.
UMI leverages specialized virtual modules to assess operational energy, embodied energy, walkability, and solar radiation metrics associated with green city plans, enabling users to examine how factors such as building density and urban design are likely to affect energy use.
UMI is helping stakeholders optimize novel green city initiatives by enabling designers to model and calculate energy use across hundreds of buildings simultaneously. Guided by high-quality property and geographic data, UMI helps city planners make smart design choices to encourage sustainable transport use and minimize energy waste.
4. CitySim – Urban Energy Planning Software
CitySim is a powerful urban energy planning solution designed to help stakeholders reduce the use of non-renewable energy in green city developments. Planners can use the software to simulate energy demand, generation, and usage at neighborhood and city-wide scales, as well as analyze complex energy behaviors in urban spaces to inform sustainable decisions.
Modern city planners leverage the platform to model existing and proposed buildings, as well as surrounding urban green spaces, in interactive 3D environments. Developers can use these maps to analyze key metrics like the thermal performance and renewable energy potential of specific infrastructure, then use this data to reduce non-renewable energy use in green cities.
By enabling planners to evaluate comprehensive micro-simulations of property energy flows and the impact of the surrounding urban environment on realistic energy demands, CitySim helps stakeholders to best identify appropriate areas for sustainable property developments and minimize the costs of implementing and operating green energy infrastructure over time.
5. ProptechOS – Property Technology Operating System
ProptechOS is a cloud-based, AI-driven operating system for modern real estate that allows operators to intelligently control smart building technologies. IoT-enabled devices such as heat, occupancy, and air quality sensors are key to developing sustainable infrastructure in green cities; ProptechOS helps stakeholders design and effectively manage these technologies.
Through the ProptechOS platform, operators can collect real-time and historical data from disparate building management systems across large geographic areas to efficiently monitor and adjust green energy infrastructure. The platform also leverages agentic AI tools to help operators automate key tasks, such as energy optimization and HVAC control.
ProptechOS and similar intelligent building management solutions are factored into planning initiatives to help ensure proposed green infrastructure can function sustainably over time. By demonstrating to stakeholders how energy utilization and building management efficiencies will be sustained during normal operation, planners can move forward with green initiatives.
A Greener Future for Urban Development
As global interest in green city development continues to grow, with international urban leaders, city planners, and developers collectively calling for investments totaling $800 billion by 2030, city planners and developers are exploring novel ways to design efficient and sustainable urban environments.
By leveraging innovative property data platforms to identify opportunities, guide investment decisions, optimize design plans, and streamline management operations, stakeholders across all aspects of modern urban planning are shaping the next generation of sustainable cities.