Corporate Site Selection Firm Acquires Two Economic Development Software Platforms

Corporate site selection consultancy Global Location Strategies (GLS) announced that it acquired two different software platforms for the economic development industry. It In addition to tech solutions, GLS offers a full suite of traditional site selection services for companies, and training and guidance for economic development organizations.

The first is from LocationOne — the cloud-based product LOIS, which “is a global platform for finding and marketing available sites and buildings,” according to the company press release. “The platform offers economic developers the opportunity to promote available properties to site selectors and corporate location decision makers by establishing a property viewer on an organization’s proprietary website. LOIS also boasts a public marketplace with more than 50,000 listings and leverages geographic information system (GIS) layers to view information on workforce, infrastructure, business, and industry data and more. According to LocationOne’s website, “LOIS includes individual state, county, metro, locality (community), and site and building records. The system is designed to be as flexible as possible to meet the needs of the user; therefore, records can be elected to be ‘hidden’ or filtered from view on your web site. LOIS easily adapts to your changing needs.”

The second firm is Lasso, a “property data collection platform that streamlines RFI responses for corporate location decision makers,” the company states. “Co-developed by GLS in 2021 with Midwest utility provider Evergy, Lasso provides economic development organizations a space for stakeholder collaboration and offers total data recall, a feature that allows registered participants to pull saved sites and building data into an RFI for consideration. LOIS automatically and seamlessly integrates this recall process for LOIS subscribers, GLS wrote.

“Lasso gives real estate developers and brokers, economic development organizations, engineers, architects and others the aggregated data they need to make smart, informed site location decisions,” said the Lasso website.

This is an expansion of the 2021 GLS announcement of its product Site Shepherd, “a comprehensive location analytics platform that the GLS consultancy team uses to screen, score, financially assess, and deliver location recommendations to its clients.”

The complementary products help establish a technology basis for the company, although harmonizing and integrating separate programs may become a necessary step for the corporate brand and user satisfaction.

Technology is one aspect for the company, but not its entirety. “In addition to tech solutions, GLS offers a full suite of traditional site selection services for companies, and training and guidance for economic development organizations,” the company said.