Helen Brown Group

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How GIS mapping can improve your real estate searching

This week I’m delighted to welcome Senior Researcher Josh Ostroski back to The Intelligent Edge. If you’re a long-time reader, you’ll know that Josh is our go-to guy on real estate research here at HBG, and this week he has a great article to share on a very clever way to find property information. Take it away, Josh! ~Helen

I had planned to write a blog post about some of the things I’ve learned in my 15 years as a Prospect Researcher since all I ever seem to write about is real estate. However, I’ve been noticing a new trend while researching properties that I think would be helpful for everyone – Assessor GIS Mapping – so I decided to go for a real estate theme for a blog post again.

Geographic Information System, or GIS mapping for short, is not necessarily a new technology, but I’ve noticed that it has popped up on most of the assessor sites now. I’ve found it so helpful that I wanted to share it so that more in the prospect development world are aware of it.

What is GIS Mapping?

GIS Mapping allows you to search for a property by address or by location and you will be able to see the property lines and, in most cases at least, who owns it and basic information about the property. Like all assessor sites, not all counties in the country share the same information and some are more robust than others.

Each site has its unique features and allows you to see different information, so be patient and play with each county (or sometimes state) sites. Even if it doesn’t give you all the information you need, you can at least have a visual of what the property looks like. Then you can use what you know and other resources to find out more specific information about the property. Often times the traditional assessor site will have more robust information on its site about the property.

Here is an example of what the map looks like. Each separate lot is outlined and you can simply click on the lot (be aware that some GIS Maps require you click on a tool in order for the assessor information to pop up), and the information will come up.

How is GIS Mapping Helpful?

I always use this feature when I’m looking at a property that has multiple lots; that way I can see what the property actually looks like. I’ve also found it helpful when someone may have multiple lots, but they are owned by different LLC’s or by family members.

Another way it is useful is when a mailing address and a property address don’t match. Sometimes that could be because the property is split between different streets or the owners bought an adjacent lot at a later date and use that mailing address.

Below is a screenshot from the San Miguel County, Colorado, GIS Mapping site. The property in question was located at 115 Francisco, Telluride, CO, which is Tom Cruise’s estate. It has been on the market for $59M.

What this shows us is that the property is owned by Client 2177 Living Trust, which if you run the property report shows an address in Los Angeles, CA, that is home to Chapman Bird Grey & Tessler, a Hollywood business management firm that Tom Cruise has been associated with. The other thing it shows is the properties adjacent to the main home that are owned by the same entity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In this example, the adjacent properties are owned by the same name, but I have often found the names can be different but have the same mailing address. One example I came across just the other day was a home in New Jersey that consisted of six separate lots; each lot owned by a different limited liability company (LLC) (ex: 123 Briar Lane Acquisiton LLC, 129 Briar Lane Acquisiton LLC).

I always use a satellite view when using the GIS Mapping tool (I actually always use satellite view in life); that way you can really see what the home and property look like. You can also sometimes tell if a home was recently renovated or differs from what the assessment records indicate, which could be due to a delay in new information being uploaded.

Another example of how this has been very useful was a request from a gift officer after a meeting with a prospect. The prospect had mentioned in passing that he was selling some land he had accumulated over the years to a developer. It turned out he owned dozens of separate lots, all under different LLC’s and many with different mailing addresses. By using the GIS Map, I was able to click on all the lots in the area and determine if they were his or not.

He was indeed selling them off and to a developer that was building a new golf course community. We were also able to tell which lots he had recently sold and for how much. With traditional resources, it would have taken me much much longer to do and I don’t think it would have been as accurate.

How to Find GIS Mapping Tools

NETROnline.com is a great resource for individual assessor sites, including listing GIS Mapping links. The assessor sites are under the Public Records Online tab.

You can also do a search for “[County Name] Assessor GIS Map” and you will probably have luck. I’ve rarely found a county that does not have this capability. There are some outliers: Massachusetts, for example, does not do it by county, but the entire state has one map you can search.

Let me know what you think of GIS mapping tools, and what other interesting tools you use to find real estate information.

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Growing your corporate fundraising through better data tracking

Last week’s article about improving our use of interest codes to more effectively identify, engage, and steward donors got me wondering about doing the same sort of thing for companies that support our nonprofits. I asked Amanda Jarman, (aka the “Fundraising Nerd”) to share her perspective on the topic this week. Companies are made up of people, of course, and Amanda uses the term “biographic data” to help us consider tracking the many interconnections between companies, the people within companies our nonprofits are connected to, and our nonprofits themselves.  Thanks, Amanda!  ~Helen

Paying attention to the “biographic” data you track about companies can help you step up your corporate fundraising game. This is data that lives in the biographic section of your database, along with names, addresses, communication preferences, and the like – but instead of being related to an individual, it’s related to a company.

There’s a variety of information you might track about companies, including:

  • Contact people
  • Other important employees (such as alumni or volunteers, for example)
  • Matching gift information
  • Size/annual revenue range
  • Sector and/or SIC code
  • Subsidiaries
  • Funding priorities – company (philanthropy and sponsorship)
  • Funding priorities – company foundation

Just like with any data management process, your data coding needs start with your business needs. Depending on the type of corporate giving you are pursuing and the complexity of your fundraising program, you may need to only track some of this information, or you may want to collect all of it.

Here are some other types of data you may want to consider collecting as well:

Corporate Sponsorship Programs

Sponsorship is one of the most common types of corporate giving. If you have an active corporate sponsorship program, you’ll definitely want to keep track of the names and contact information of your primary contact(s) for sponsorship requests and stewardship.

Matching Gift Programs

Many companies match their employees’ giving to your organization. If you have an active matching gift program, you may choose to store information about a company’s matching conditions. This helps to project matching gift revenue and also helps you inform your donors about their employer’s matching program. You may choose to track an employer’s match rate (1:1, 1:2, etc.), match dollar limit, and any funding limitations related to your organization (e.g. some corporations do not fund athletics programs). In addition to tracking information about the employer’s matching program, be sure to link constituents like alumni, volunteers, members, and friends to employer records.

Corporate Major Giving Program

If your organization raises major gifts from corporate donors, consider tracking annual revenue range to help you prioritize among corporate prospects. You may also track likelihood to give and funding priorities (i.e. which of your programs the corporation prefers to give to).

This is similar to the kind of information you might track about individual major gift prospects to prioritize and focus your asks on the best philanthropic match between your organization and your prospective donors.

Corporate Partnership Program

Some organizations partner with companies beyond giving, e.g. hosting employees as volunteers, co-hosting other types of events, and/or developing programmatic partnerships like sponsored research. If your organization has a strong corporate partnership program, then linking individual constituents to their employer’s record is essential. This way, you can see the companies – and people – with which you already have a firm connection. These companies are great fits for employee volunteer or giving days.

Complex Organization with Multiple Funding Priorities

If your organization is complex and/or has multiple funding priorities, you may need to track information to help you align corporate donors with your program areas. Consider tracking business sector, either using your own categories or SIC  or NAICS code, which are used to categorize businesses by industry.

This is particularly important in the prospecting stage. As you begin to develop relationships with corporate funders, you will start to uncover the company’s funding interests which may or may not be related to your organization’s overall sector, but to one or more of your programs or research strengths.

Corporations with Multiple Locations

Many corporations have multiple locations, multiple philanthropic interests, and even multiple corporate foundations and giving programs. For example, one corporation may have several subsidiaries and branch locations, with matching gift programs, sponsored research, and corporate foundations or giving programs related to each one. To get a full picture of the corporation’s giving and relationship with your organization, it is helpful to link subsidiary and branch records to a corporate headquarters record.

Getting started

To get started with tracking corporate biographical data, first determine which of these data points will support and enhance your fundraising priorities. Next, assess your database: how can this data be stored? Do you need to customize your system?

Finally, determine how you will collect this information and keep it updated. You may choose to purchase SIC/NAICS code and/or matching gift program data from a vendor. You can also decide to survey your constituents about their employment, and/or purchase employer information about your constituents. Some information-gathering may have to be done the old-fashioned way, with a researcher, intern, or student hand-entering the information.

No matter which way you decide to do, enhancing your company “biographic” information is a great way to strengthen your organization’s capacity for fundraising success.

For more donor data management tips and tools, Amanda Jarman can be found at www.fundraisingnerd.com.

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Are We in a New Golden Era of CSR?

“Albert Above All” (c) 2018 Julie Kahn

This week my colleague Angie Stapleton kicks off February with a focus on companies and corporate giving. How does your nonprofit position itself with corporate donors? Do you have a written annual strategy with staff dedicated to company fundraising, or are companies a constituency you have yet to focus on? In this article, Angie sets the stage for us to think about companies and their impact on philanthropy – and our nonprofits – today. ~Helen

The national conversation on ultra-high net worth individuals (UHNWIs) and their role in philanthropy is beginning to shift. As we’ve discussed on this blog, a wave of critiques on traditional philanthropy – including Anand Giridharadas’s Winner Take All or Rob Reich’s Just Giving – have begun to impact public debate about effective philanthropy and the greater good.

While most of these discussions have centered on UHNWIs and individual giving, it has also cast renewed interest on the role corporations play in our society and their giving – also known as their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). [Read more…]

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A few of our favorite things

Over the past week I’ve added more new links than I can count to our HBG Prospect Research Links pages. At the moment there are 5 regional pages, covering (mainly free) resources for the Americas, Europe and the United Kingdom, the Middle East, Asia Pacific, and the Baltics (which is a little slim, but we decided to make it public anyway. If you have any resources you’d like to share, don’t be shy).

We’ve also built a page for due diligence and data protection/GDPR resources. Also in the works is a resource page for off-shore sources of information. [Read more…]

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Back-of-the-napkin privately-held company value calculator

Coming up with the value of a privately-held company is one of the hardest balancing acts that prospect researchers do. No matter how hard we try, we will get it wrong around 100 per cent of the time. The only consolation is that it’s very likely that not even the owner of the privately-held company has any idea what their own company is really worth. The value is simply what someone else is willing to pay on any given day.

The Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council reports that the vast majority of companies in the United States – 99.7% of employers – are privately-held small businesses, and firms with less than 20 workers made up 89.4 percent of businesses in America.

That’s a lot of businesses that aren’t publicly-held, but when I talk with researchers about things that are hard to do, there are few who don’t express doubt in their ability to read and interpret SEC forms. Understanding them is important, but it’s not what a researcher is going to spend 99.7 percent of their time doing, and – to my mind – valuing privately-held companies is harder by about the same percentage.

Of special note is the fact that, according to a U.S. Small Business Administration report, women own 36% of all businesses and 20% of employer businesses. That figure continues to grow as entrepreneurial women, eager to sidestep short-runged corporate ladders, continue the trend of building opportunities for themselves. As these successful women become a larger part of our frontline fundraisers’ portfolios, understanding how to value their companies (and understand their philanthropic priorities) becomes increasingly important for us, too.

So, how do we value privately-held companies?

Normally when we want to value a privately-held company, we do one of a few things:

  1. We get lucky and find that an intrepid business reporter has valued it for us.
  1. We get lucky and learn that the owner has revealed the information themselves, either on their company website, or in a published interview, or in conversation with a fundraiser.
  1. We get lucky and see that Dun & Bradstreet has estimated a value for the company in its Business Information Report. (NB: this is a red herring. D&B estimates are to be trusted as much as an unsupervised Labrador with a coffee table full of appetizers.)

When none of those pans out, we start doing the hard work of estimating a privately-held company…

  1. We look for a comparable company or “comp,” which means that we try to find a publicly-held company that is in the same line of business with the same number of employees in the same geographical area with roughly the same sales. We then look at the publicly-held company’s market value, and…there you go. (Except there you don’t go, because finding apples-to-apples comps are as common as finding a lost Picasso print in someone’s attic. It happens, but not often.)
  1. We go through a highly scientific process to estimate value using betas, estimating revenue, expenses, etc. to come up with a value. To assist you in this venture if you dare, here is a 170-slide masterclass from NYU professor Aswath Damodaran walking you through four valuation examples. (It’s useful to know this, and I do highly recommend further education on how businesses work, and balance sheets, and P & L statements because you should know this, but we’re prospect researchers, not Goldman Sachs executives working out an IPO and we’re usually on a deadline.)

SO:

  1. Here’s my small business, private company, back-of-the-napkin estimating tactic to use if you don’t know the company’s sales. (If you do know its sales, stop now and go to the end of this article).

This technique won’t work for every company (the sole-practitioner attorney or the self-investing money manager, for example). But I think it’s a quick conservative baseline to use for companies with ~5-25 employees because we’re going to focus on how much a small company with employees has to generate annually in order to simply pay their bills. If they’re running a demonstrably successful company, then you can be sure they’ve got at least that much (and probably more besides). How much more you  want to add into the calculation based on your – and your frontline fundraiser’s knowledge – is then up to you.

First, you calculate Payroll

How many employees are there? Check the company’s website, or D&B (caveat: see above), or LinkedIn, or the company’s Facebook page.

What’s the average salary for people in that profession? Check salary websites or job descriptions on search & recruitment sites for ranges.

Now, take the employee number times the average salary = S

Multiply S times .3 to calculate benefits = B (benefits cost ± an additional third of an employee’s salary)

If this is a profession that frequently rewards employees with extras like bonuses or commission, multiply that average amount per employee to calculate Extras = E.

Add S + B + E = Payroll

Second, look at annual Costs

Ignoring things that a business owner would only have to buy once (like computers, desks and chairs, etc.) what does it cost to do what this profession does annually?

  • Insurance?
  • Rent/Mortgage payment/Upkeep?
  • Travel/Fuel?
  • Software fees? (Lexis? Bloomberg? Salesforce?)
  • Phone/internet?

Add these together to estimate Cost = C of doing business.

Add Payroll + Cost to calculate Total Expenses

This figure is what the owner has to come up with every year simply to stay afloat, so you know the company’s sales are at least its Total Expenses. (And so, to circle back to my comment earlier, if you know the sales figure, you can simply use that as a baseline to spitball the value of the company.)

Voilà, a back of the napkin company value.

Caveat caveat blah blah caveat

This isn’t perfect, I know that. But there are a lot of things we’re never going to know, like a privately-held company’s sales, its debts, and if the owner is offshoring profits.

But if we have a pile of profiles to work on and need to come up with a baseline estimation, I offer this rough estimate as a good place to start.

I’d love to hear if you have other off-the-cuff valuations that you use!

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Trouble in Paradise

Over a year ago, an anonymous “John Doe” sent an encrypted message to a newspaper in Germany called Süddeutsche Zeitung. The conversation unfolded like this:

That 2014 cache of data, the equivalent to about 38,000 average-sized books, make up what became known as the Panama Papers.

It’s a trove of documents obtained from the files of a Panamanian law firm called Mossack Fonseca, which helped create shell companies and other complex financial instruments in order to assist companies and individuals to evade paying tax in their home countries.

Journalists from nearly 100 news outlets around the world in a collaboration called the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) worked together nonstop for months under tight security and complete secrecy. [Read more…]

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Broadening your alert horizon

By Lizard Fine Art (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

There’s such a great sense of accomplishment that comes with finishing a prospect research profile. You can dot the i’s, cross the t’s, hit ‘save’ and move onto the next assignment.

But if you think about it, that moment is really the starting line. What happens after that?

Well, an opportunity for us to have a conversation with the front line fundraiser assigned to that prospective donor, to begin with.

  • Did the profile answer all of your questions?
  • Is there any further work to be done?
  • What questions remain unanswered in the work that the fundraiser can discover on their next visit?

And most importantly, this signals the beginning – or deepening – of the relationship between your organization and the donor. The gift. Stewardship. Continuing engagement. [Read more…]

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International prospect research resources – United Kingdom

From a North American perspective, international prospect research just doesn’t get any better than the United Kingdom.

First of all, there’s no language barrier.

Second, the way information is gathered and distributed by commercial and governmental entities is relatively similar to ours, so navigating around information sources feels …familiar. Logical.

And third, many of the resources that provide information here in the US (like LexisNexis, Factiva, D&B, and Moody’s) also offer products and services in the UK, so there’s crossover. Some of the information we can already get through what we’ve already, well, got. [Read more…]

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Valuing Real Estate in the US West

Last week at the (sold out!) NEDRA conference, this week’s guest author Heather Willis spoke with her HBG colleague, Kelly Labrecque, on finding real estate values in the US west and east. “Country Mouse/City Mouse” was a big hit, and I asked Heather to share tidbits from her portion of the presentation with us today. (If you’d like to see the slides from their presentation, let us know!) And now, here’s Heather:

It’s that time of year again in the West; the snow is melting, tulips are flowering, calves are being born, and the birds are singing. It also means the year- end real estate market analyses, the new agriculture statistics reports, and the top ten landowners, have been published. Exciting right!?

Ok, you might not have the desire or the time to read through all of these reports when researching a prospect who owns a farm or ranch, so I will point out a few changes from last year and try to give you some insights into an extremely diverse and difficult group of prospects to research. [Read more…]

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Doing Your Due Diligence

By Silke Remmery (Newspaper) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

If you’re a major donor to a nonprofit organization in the UK or Europe, chances are good that someone has done background research on you to make sure you’re not an arms dealer or drug kingpin.

This is called due diligence research and it’s essential to protecting the reputation of the nonprofit. What the organization is doing is ensuring that there are no legal reasons why the gift may be contested or clawed back later. Or worse.

A nonprofit’s reputation is obviously important – if an organization becomes allied with …a despot, say, it risks years of damage and decreased support of every kind. They become that scarlet-lettered nonprofit that everyone remembers for being the de facto money-launderer for the drug ring. Not too many volunteer and trustee types (or donors)(or talented employees) want to be affiliated with that kind of organization.

Most organizations in the UK and Europe have a policy to do due diligence research at a relatively modest level (at least by major donor giving progam standards). The amount under consideration can be as low as £1,000 or €1,000.

Of course, we do due diligence research on this side of the Atlantic, too, but we are more likely to back into it. By that I mean that we’re not usually specifically looking for negative information to see if we want to be allied with a donor from the get-go. Many times the person or company or foundation has already been a donor at a certain level for many years, but now is interested in making a very large or transformational gift of some sort.

Sometimes the news just falls in our lap in the course of our usual prospect research. Like the time I discovered…well, never mind. Suffice it to say it was a yikes-bullet-dodged moment and the organization I worked for decided to let that relationship gently fade away into the night.

But let’s say you do need to do reputational research on a prospective donor. Where are the best places for you to go?

Some organizations decide to hire an outside firm that specializes in due diligence research. It can be expensive, but of course the avoidance of reputational damage is frequently worth the money.

Others ask their prospect research department (or HBG) to take a first crack at it to see if any immediate red flags appear. They can then decide how to move forward if worrisome details start to emerge, by either running the request up the flag to a due diligence firm or by deciding not to ask for the donation to begin with.

If you want to tackle the due diligence research yourself, here is a list of a few of our team’s favorite sources:

You’ll find tons more resources on our HBG Research Links page. What are some of your favorite sources for due diligence research?

The Helen Brown Group LLC
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Helen Brown Group