Proptech company MRI Software announced that it acquired Springboard, which provides “shopper traffic counting and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered analytics.” MRI plans to add such capabilities to its MRI@Work offerings.
MRI already had a wide range of application areas: property, investment, facilities, energy, workplace, lease, and visitor management and property and lease accounting. The company also services most property types: multifamily, condo, office, industrial, construction and development, retail owners, retail tenants, and CRE occupiers. There are also managed services available.
So why acquire something that might seem tangential at first blush? Because it isn’t. According to the MRI release, “the Springboard solution provides real-time data and actionable insights, enabling retail stakeholders to optimize operations and improve outcomes for both individual retail locations and retail destinations.” The software does so by constantly measuring “visitor activity, capturing anonymized demographic and sentiment information while identifying behavior patterns – such as movement and dwell time” and then presenting the information through reports.
Providing a comprehensive set of real estate management functions is quickly becoming a given. If a company can’t do more than that, it is in a poor competitive position, because so many other software vendors could do something similar.
However, what Springboard supposedly does is an interesting bridge between two areas: the necessary CRE functions and the need for retailers and other organizations to collect traffic data to better understand their operations and marketing.
Here’s how MRI Software CEO Patrick Ghilani put it in the press release: “In light of post-pandemic shifts in the retail landscape, the adoption of in-store technology has become increasingly critical, and physical locations are playing a more prominent role in a redefined shopper and guest experience. Springboard’s intelligent, actionable data enables retail stakeholders to increase shopper traffic and engagement, improve capture and conversation rates, and, ultimately, level the analytical playing field between e-commerce and brick-and-mortar.”
Put differently, it’s not enough for software companies to simply do their job. They have to understand what their tenants use the space for and then try to advance the interests of those tenants as they can. This type of data can help understand how shopping patterns work, what popular products are, or even be adapted to see how to better manage energy in an office building or shopping mall by tracking where people congregate at different times of the day.