Our data team spent the winter months keeping warm by huddling around their computers, building a wide range of new data and mapping tools, and reimagining others.
Much of our work though remains under the hood – not building new attributes but refining existing ones. Our internal models are increasingly reliant upon a broadening range of hyper-local data sources that focus on changes at the individual parcel level. Our 2026A core demographic estimates reflect those efforts at identifying growth hotspots, both current and future.
Some highlights of this release:
New Core Data Elements
Most users are satisfied with income tables that cover all households. But some really do require income for a subset of the total – such as businesses that focus on only renter households or households who are 55+ years old. In many cases, what is really wanted is not total income, but what’s left after Uncle Sam or after the mortgage has been paid and the family fed. For those users, we now offer a number of additional combinations for which income distributions are available –
- Total income, disposable income, discretionary income
- Tenure (owner, renter)
- Household Type (family, non-family)
- Householder Age
- Household Size
- Vehicles available
Many of these can be created on a custom basis using our synthetic household model, while some of the more common income distributions are part of the standard data library (such as age of householder by tenure).
Other additional variables include the new householder age by tenure table for those whose targets cover age and home ownership.
Journey to Work and Workplace Demographics
Users who are accustomed to the census ‘travel time to work’ tables are well aware of the importance of commuting times but also of the shortcomings of that table – they don’t tell you where people go to work, just how long it takes to get there. We assembled the census bureau block level journey to work files in order to help users better understand the commuting patterns – from both ends of the commute.
From a trade area analysis perspective, this data can help to answer some key questions –
- Do the people who work here live here? Or do they arrive from other towns?
- How far do people travel to get to this workplace?
- What are the demographic characteristics of the workers?
For analysts, we have added Panorama Workplace and Dimensions Workplace in order to better understand the daytime population and how it differs from the local resident population.
Parcels, Permits, and Land Use
As many know, we are working on our Hotblocks project which will focus on current and future development hotspots. Much of the underlying effort is based on building a parcel level base where we can track new buildings, redevelopment, and developable land. With this release, some of those base elements are being made available at the census block level including:
- Parcel and building characteristics
- Building permits – quarterly and annual by type of permit
- Land use by parcels and size
- Land use cartographic files
Retail Potential and Retail Gap
Over the last few years, retail has changed considerably as some categories have all but disappeared and others have been greatly impacted by internet shopping. For this release, we have redesigned our retail series to clean up the retail categories and to add to it a number of business types that aren’t strictly retail – like movie theaters, fitness clubs, and automotive repair shops.
MRI-Simmons Update
The MRI-Simmons data has been updated to the latest survey (2025 Spring Doublebase). As always, there have been many changes to the attributes covered with about 1100 drops and 3600 additions. The added variables include substantial financial content, as well as an expanded internet shopping section, additional details on lodging on business trips, and new details on ATV and motorcycles.