Property Market Assessments

Our extensive industry experience enables us to conduct unique market analyses which provide relevant insights about different market segments. Whether it is understanding the dynamics of the affordable housing market, understanding the impact of the Gautrain on house prices, analysing mortgage lending strategies or determining where the next big growth node will be, Lightstone Property is the place to turn.

Feasibility Studies

We assist Developers and Investors to assess the feasibility of new residential and commercial property investments or nodes. Combining our comprehensive property database with retail and business information from Lightstone Consumer and Lightstone Business, we provide our clients with a detailed and unique understanding of the viability of their next investment.

Analytical and Consulting Services

We offer bespoke consulting services and access to our dedicated analysts to answer your more complicated or specialised property information needs. We have a large team of highly qualified property statisticians supported by industry experts that can assist our clients answer their most challenging questions about property.

Business Landscape, CIPC & VAT

The foundation of our dataset is the CIPC (Company and Intellectual Property Commission) database. This is the official company registration database and tracks all legal records of company registrations and directorships.

We incorporate the SARS VAT database, to enhance our modelling with regard to company size and business activity. Approximately 3 000 new companies are being registered for VAT every month (the required threshold is R1m revenue per year) and these are likely to be active.

We supplement this dataset with some derived fields, such as probability of being active; size category; industry etc. We sell this enhanced dataset or part thereof – or simply the CIPC / VAT database – to our clients.

Augmentation

Base data is augmented through analytical algorithms that segment the companies and directors into segments that are used to indicate:

• Director Influence Scores - level of influence that the director has based on directorships held in different level companies. For example, a director of a Listed Company will have more influence than the director of a single-director company not registered for VAT
• Company size is based on the sum of the Directors Scores. The greater the number of directors, and the more the relationships with other significant directors, then the higher the directors scores, and therefore the Company Score. We carry 9 relative size categories.
• Groups of businesses that are tied as a common entity through directors are flagged as related companies.
• Transformation Score indicates the level of racial transformation (based on directors) in each company.

Business Change Metrics

We also track these metrics over time to identify companies that are growing, merging, or downsizing, etc. These scores change when new directors join the board, or a related director score changes. Alerts can be set up on specific businesses, or types of businesses, to alert you to changes.

Director Change Metrics

We monitor directors that are becoming more influential in the business landscape. This is used to track key directors, established and up and coming. Alerts can be set up to bring your attention to directors who are increasing in influence, and their contact details can be purchased.

Geocoding

We have extensive experience in geocoding addresses to a lat/long coordinate and can handle large database geocoding requests. We aim to map the customer to their actual ERF, but have established methodologies to provide geocoordinates where insufficient data are available for an ERF geocode.

Data Hygiene

Lightstone Business researches and maintains a database of over ±1.7million active companies in South Africa, and can profile each by size, industry sector, location and risk. We also understand the relative influence of over ±2.2 million company directors in South Africa.

Referencing this Business Landscape enables us to match (usually in excess of 75% of) our clients own customer database. We update and standardise their existing customer records, and then we append information that they wouldn’t already know about their customers, arming them with a better understanding of their customer profile.

Customer Analysis

At the core of the Lightstone Business solution is building a deep understanding of your existing client base: this allows us to correlate our database so that it is more predictive of the nuances of your business. Through better understanding of existing client behaviour, we are better able to predict new potential customer desirability and identify the clients that should be receiving your highest priority.

Our solution is to work with you to understand your current make-up of existing customers, match them to the Lightstone Business database and return clean data. Once this has been achieved, the outcome is a clear understanding of strategy, a roadmap for your growth and an idea of what value you can expect to achieve by following the suggested route(s) forward.

Geospatial Platform

We have a GIS platform, which is available on a subscription basis and also is often used to represent the results of analytical projects.

• This enables ongoing client interrogation of results to facilitate execution of required actions identified by the projects.
• It allows for tiered access either at a management level to access your customers and leads or at a sales level allowing consultants to access leads for targeting purposes, by the geographical area that they’re responsible for.

Click here to find out more about our geospatial platform.

Kaleidoscope

Kaleidoscope is Lightstone Explore’s new geodemographic segmentation tool. We have used our many proprietary datasets (demographics, property, auto, retail, business) to categorise the population into 19 relevant segments, and used the datasets to describe each segment. At a very granular geographic level (Enumerator Area; over 100,000 in the country) we have identified the predominant type of person living in each area, along with their characteristics. This product is available within our geospatial platform LEO, or via other delivery mechanisms (eg database) depending on clients’ needs. It will help you to:

• Profile your customers & understand them better
• Understand the type of people living in the vicinity of your stores
• Identify where people of the right target type live, in order to target your marketing efforts.

Download Brochure

Town Segmentation & Characterisation

In addition to characterising people by the areas in which they live, we have also characterised towns in various ways that can help you understand the nature of opportunity in that town. Elements feeding into the characterisation include various aspects relating to the property landscape, the business landscape, the retail landscape, the cars within the town, the contribution to GDP by industry, and the demographics of the town. Some elements of change or growth are included to identify places likely to be growing or those that may be stagnating.

Customer Segmentation

We have extensive experience in building customer segmentation models for various purposes. These models are sometimes built to size the market, to guide merchandising decisions, and to contribute to decisions about store location. Our off-the-shelf product characterises the predominant population within very granular geographic regions throughout the country – over 100,000 areas. Marketers use this to understand the type of people (and their likely customers) by area.

Site-specific retail evaluations

Our team has many years of experience in evaluating sites to identify the feasibility of store placement, and evaluating the market potential and warranted scale of development for proposed shopping centre developments. Taking into account the area’s demographics, the current and future retail environment, catchment area, future development around the site, a thorough evaluation of the site, and various other factors, Lightstone Explore will evaluate the revenue potential and feasibility of each potential site (for both individual stores and shopping centre developments).

Network Analysis

We work with retailers, franchises, dealerships, banks, insurance companies, entertainment companies and others to guide on understanding optimal network placement. Our methodologies are effective for both growth and rationalisation strategies as well as a check-point on existing footprint vs the ideal, to identify revenue growth and efficiency opportunities.

Office Relocation Evaluation

When companies move offices, an unintended but serious consequence is often the loss of key employees who have an additional travel burden in the new location. Our Office Relocation Evaluation helps a company to identify the commercial node that makes most sense considering employee homes. It also enables the comparison of several options, with the choice to weight some employees whose loss would be especially impactful to the business. The evaluation gives you a detailed understanding of which option is better, the impact in terms of travel distance and cost on your total (weighted and unweighted) employee base, and the information with which to make an informed decision on new location.

Download Brochure

Mall / store surveys

Our market research team conducts intercept studies and household phone call surveys in and around shopping centres and shops to help mall owners and marketing managers understand their customer base and their preferences. These studies can also evaluate results of a campaign or other change, or track customer perceptions over time. Survey approach can also include door-to-door household surveys, which is particularly effective in areas where there are few landlines.

Brand perception evaluation & Price perception monitoring

Multi-period longitudinal market research studies are conducted to evaluate brand perception over time, within a competitive segment (own brand vs other key competitors). Separately, other studies monitor the perceptions of customers on price vs competitor outlets over time. These studies are delivered as Qlikview reports to enable data interrogation and quick result turn-arounds.

Analysis and modelling of data

Our statistical experts create approaches to help answer any number of client questions. More typically, these include:

• network optimisation
• penetration of your brand vs potential of each location
• revenue potential models
• cannibalisation models
• white spot analysis for optimal new locations
• segmentation & targeting
• strategic growth
• optimal merchandising per store

We also can include Drive Times in our analytical work to accommodate impact to customer and to facilitate understanding of catchment areas.

Bespoke solutions

We also create bespoke solutions to address any problem or identify opportunities dependent on the specifics of your business. Our statistical experts specialise in building models to support decisions, and on understanding your & other available datasets to uncover solutions or opportunities.

Geo-demographics

Underpinning much of our work is a proprietary national demographics database, which is maintained annually and based on unique geo-demographic views of StatsSA data. The dataset includes a view of the demographic profile of South Africa, including household income (at granular Enumerator Area level), number of households, number of adults, age, race, and number of economically active adults.

Malls and Stores

Our proprietary Malls and Stores database is used in many of our products and projects, and is actively maintained. It contains geo-spatially represented 1,650 Malls and around 44,000 Stores representing approximately 650 Brands in South Africa across many sectors.