Centralizing portfolio data and optimizing the affordable housing pipeline

“Using Ratio.City was a tremendous opportunity to build efficiencies into my unit. We have an end-to-end need across our unit for everyone to be on Ratio.City for different purposes at different times.

As an example, what Ratio.City allowed us to do is to zero in on areas of the city where we think we needed modular housing and find some of those smaller land assets, infill opportunities, or just assets that we wouldn’t have paid attention to before because they weren’t the big obvious sites.”

Ashmeed Ali, Vice President of Portfolio Strategy CreateTO

Meet CreateTO

CreateTO is the city agency responsible for managing Toronto's real estate portfolio. Since their formation in 2018, CreateTO has overcome numerous challenges in managing their portfolio of over 8,000 properties. Their current mandate includes the delivery of the City’s Housing Now Program and other housing initiatives where city lands are prioritized to deliver 10,000 affordable housing units. The Portfolio Strategy team, led by Ashmeed Ali, Vice President of Portfolio Strategy, was challenged to strategically identify under-utilized lands and then recommend opportunities to City Council to make better use of City real estate.

In order to deliver on their mandate, one of CreateTO’s most ambitious tasks was aggregating dispersed datasets into one, centralized platform to visualize all City-owned real estate assets, which was previously managed by 24 different City divisions, agencies, and corporations. There was an overwhelming amount of data and not all of it was organized in a way that was easy to understand or use. The lack of a centralized platform and consistent data formats made it difficult to analyze and restructure the portfolio effectively.

The Problem

CreateTO faced several pain points, including a legacy of decentralization of real estate management across different city agencies, divisions, and corporations. Additionally, CreateTO found themselves working off of huge, yet incomplete, data sets—making it challenging to identify asset types, occupants, and opportunities for optimization. Portfolio data from the land registry was in a variety of formats and needed to be compiled. It was difficult to identify under-utilized assets. Individual site feasibility studies were time consuming—each potential opportunity needed to be evaluated based on planning policies, zoning regulations, surrounding context, development potential, and relationship to other publicly owned assets.

Assessing challenges and eliminating the guesswork?

Ratio.City started working with CreateTO in late 2019. The Ratio.City platform centralizes real estate data and easily integrates it with other data sources to gain a complete understanding of an asset portfolio. CreateTO was able to use the Ratio.City platform to visualize their data more effectively; and by combining their own portfolio data with Ratio.City's unique datasets to understand development potential more holistically and efficiently.

CreateTO staff uses Ratio.City to support a variety of tasks, including identifying potential development sites, doing ward-based or geography-specific analysis (e.g. City-owned lands around transit stations), and identifying real estate to meet the diverse needs of City divisions, agencies, and corporations. The platform's secure data hosting and intuitive search features were adopted first. Once potential sites are identified, the development team uses the 3D massing tools to analyze different density and built-form concepts. The CreateTO team rely on Ratio.City tools as they explored opportunities to optimize land holdings, repurpose under-utilized sites, and identify transit-oriented development opportunities.

Easy Implementation

  • Centralizing the available real estate data sets and turning them into fully searchable data layers

  • Allowing CreateTO to integrate their data with other data sources to gain a complete understanding of their portfolio in context

  • Organizing training sessions and materials to optimize the platform’s usage, empowering the team to leverage their own data with our tools

  • Scheduling regular Lunch and Learn sessions to present new features

Quick ROI

  • Access to centralized real estate data, which allowed for a more efficient and effective portfolio analysis of CreateTO’s portfolio of 8,000 properties

  • An intuitive platform for visualizing data layers effectively and easy cross referencing with other data sets

  • Streamlined processes for finding land, doing ward-based analysis, and needs analysis for projects

  • Effective massing tools to analyzse different density concepts for sites

  • Increased ability to explore opportunities to repurpose under-utilized sites and identify transit-oriented development opportunities

  • Improved ability to provide feedback to city planning teams on how assets should be used

The Results

By partnering with Ratio.City, CreateTO was able to centralize their real estate data, improve data quality, and gain strategic insights to optimize their portfolio quickly and effectively. The platform's user-friendly interface and intuitive features made it easy for CreateTO's team to adopt and utilize the platform, helping them deliver on their mandate to better manage the City-wide real estate portfolio, provide affordable housing units on city-owned land, and build a vibrant city through complete communities.