Report: market and area analysis
The market and area analysis will become part of Placepoint Fusion. The report itself is not finished, but everything it builds on is available today: building stock, ownership form, transactions, demographics and travel time for an area you draw yourself. This page shows where in Placepoint each point is answered.
The report is coming, the underlying data is here
The report gathers building stock, ownership form, transactions, demographics and travel time for an area in one document, whether the area is a matrikkelenhet, an administrative boundary or a polygon you have drawn yourself. Until it is ready, you do the round yourself, in three ways: Analyze and the map layers, layer by layer and panel by panel, the table behind each layer downloaded with Export, or by letting Placepoint AI put the document together from the same sources. It is the same data in all three cases; the difference is who writes the document.
Building stock, ownership form, registered transactions, population and travel time on foot, by bicycle, by public transport and by car are register data, and they appear in the console for any area from the first line you draw. Two things are not included, however long you look. Rent levels and vacancy in the surrounding buildings are in no public source, that is the landlord's and the agent's own knowledge of the market. And a project the developer is certain of, but which has not yet reached a public planning proposal, is not in any map layer either, however far the planning has actually come. The page says that too, track by track.
See also: Analysing value and potential on placepoint.no.
A drawn area or an administrative boundary
Before any of the figures mean anything, you have to decide which surface they apply to, and that is not the same question as where you click on the map.
Basic statistical unit, municipality and district are the surfaces the statistics actually come in. Statistisk sentralbyrå (SSB) publishes population, income and wealth at basic statistical unit level and never finer, Kartverket records transactions on the property they apply to, and both boundaries stay fixed from year to year, with a few exceptions when the unit boundaries themselves are adjusted. That makes an administrative boundary the right choice when you want to compare against a known figure (a municipal average, a district figure a client already knows) or follow a development over time, because the basis for the figure does not change under you from one measurement to the next.
A catchment area is something quite different, and that is precisely why it does not exist in any table at SSB. Travel distance maps out what a person actually reaches within a time budget, along the road network and the timetables, not as a circle and not along a basic statistical unit boundary. A ten-minute walking catchment can cover half of one basic statistical unit and none of its neighbour, and a driving catchment can cross three municipal boundaries without caring that the boundaries exist. It is the right choice when the question is who actually gets to a particular place, a shop, a gym or a plot you are considering developing, because that is the question a customer or a tenant asks, not where the municipal boundary runs.
The report can answer both, but not with the same figures. The population, the income and the building stock become different values depending on which surface you choose, because each surface sums a different set of underlying units. Set an administrative boundary when you want to compare with something known, and a drawn catchment when you want to describe what a place actually serves. Mixing the two in the same sentence without saying which one applies is the most common mistake in an area assessment.
Who this is for
The chain assessing its next retail location, the developer pricing a plot against what has actually been built and sold around it, the bank and the investor putting a market in context before a financing decision, and the agent putting together a comparison basis for a sales assignment. They all ask the same question first: what is this area, really, before they move on to one specific property.
The data is the same wherever in the country the area lies: 3.5 million matrikkelenheter, 1.1 million active companies and over 14 million registered owners and rights holders. See Placepoint in figures for the full overview.
The checklist
| Track | What you are looking for | Where in Placepoint |
|---|---|---|
| Building stock | Number of buildings, UFA, building type and year of construction | Map layer: Buildings, Analyze the area in Analysis |
| Ownership form | Who owns it, and how much is held by companies, private individuals and the public sector | The property panel, Ownership and Company Structure |
| Transactions | What has been sold, when, and at what price where the price is public | Analysis, Property prices |
| Demographics | Who lives and spends time in the area | Map layer: Demographics, Report: Demographics |
| Travel time and amenities | What can be reached within a time budget, and what lies there | Travel distance, Map layer: Business, Map layer: Education |
| Delimitation | Drawn area or administrative boundary, and whether the choice should be saved | Analysis, Projects: Areas, Tags |
The map layers are switched on from Map layer in the left-hand menu. See How to use map layers if you have not done it before.
Building stock
The first thing a practitioner wants to know is what actually stands in the area: how many buildings, how much floor area, what type of development and how old it is. That decides whether an area is fully developed at all, or whether there is potential left in what already stands there.
Map layer: Buildings gives the building stock layer by layer: Apartment building and Commercial buildings by building type, Building age for the year of construction, and Developer activity for what is under construction right now. The catalogue gathers them in one category, so you add them one at a time instead of hunting for each individual layer.
What the map layers do not do is add up a figure for exactly the area you have drawn. That is what Analyze the area does, a separate mode in Analysis: draw the outline with Draw area or Draw screen, and choose one of five calculations: Floors (building) and UFA m² (building) for the buildings within the outline, UFA% (plot) and BYA% (plot) for utilisation against the plot area, and Demographics (area) for the population (see Who lives and works there). High UFA% against low BYA% means tall buildings and densification; high BYA% against low UFA% means low, dense development with little to build on without building upwards.
UFA from Matrikkelen is register-based and can differ from actual measured area, especially for older buildings and buildings with extensions that have never been updated in the register. A UFA% figure for a whole area inherits the same uncertainty from each individual building it sums.
Who owns it
The next question is who stands behind the buildings: is the area mainly owned by companies that develop and sell, by companies that manage for the long term, by private individuals, or by the public sector. The answer says something about how easily the area can be assembled in one hand, and who an approach should actually be directed to.
Today Placepoint answers this property by property, not as a finished area figure. Open a property and read the Owners tab in the property panel: the title holder, and for each ownership share an interest type and an ownership form. Ownership and Company Structure takes the same a step further and puts it on the map: each property is coloured by the NACE industry of the top owner, so that you see clusters of the same type of ownership, letting, development, management or borettslag, without clicking through property by property.
That layer shows the pattern, not the percentage. A share of the area owned by companies versus private individuals versus the public sector, summed for the whole drawn area, is a calculation Placepoint does not do for you today; that summing is exactly what the report adds.
Private individuals are shown as Private person in owner and transaction data unless the account has extended access through documented legitimate interest. An area distribution between companies, private individuals and the public sector is therefore always a number of rows, never named people.
What has been sold
The third track is the market: what has actually changed hands, and at what price. That is the reference any price assumption for the area must stand against.
Analysis gathers this in the market analyses: Market Activity for housing sales and listings, Commercial Transaction for commercial property, Plot Transactions for raw plots and plots with permission, all with the same filter rhythm and the same cluster display on the map. Area Score, another analysis in the same menu, lays a grid over the same view and gives each cell a score from 0 to 20, a first sorting of where in the area it is worth taking a closer look before you move on to individual sales.
The map layers Property prices, Number of transactions (property) and Latest sales (units of use) give the same basis as static layers on the map, useful when you compare several areas side by side instead of drawing one outline at a time. Report: Price statistics takes the price level and the price development further as a separate document.
Only fritt salg (open-market sale) gives a real price indication. Arv (inheritance), skifte (estate settlement) and seksjonering (sectioning) are transfers without a market price, and should be kept out of a price anchor for the area.
Who lives and works there
Who actually lives and spends time in the area is its own question, with its own document: Report: Demographics goes through all the tabs, and Demographic analysis shows the whole round at one address, from catchment area to income per basic statistical unit. This page does not repeat it, only where it sits.
Map layer: Demographics gives the figures from Statistisk sentralbyrå (SSB) per basic statistical unit: Population for the number of residents, Age distribution and Households for the composition, Income and Wealth for purchasing power. Daytime population is the layer a market and area analysis needs beyond what the Demographics report itself covers: how many actually spend time in the area during working hours, not just how many live there. A block with a low resident population and a high daytime population is an office location; the opposite pattern is a place people come home to. Main Industry per Basic Statistical Unit adds the same distribution for what kind of workplaces dominate.
If future growth should also be included, not just today's figures, Report: Social statistics covers population figures and SSB's projection to 2050 for the municipality and the basic statistical unit.
What lies within reach
The last track turns the question from what is in the area to what the area actually gives access to, and this is where a drawn catchment gives a different answer than an administrative boundary.
Travel distance draws the isochrone: the surface you reach within a time budget, per mode of travel. Two isochrones from the same point, ten minutes on foot and ten minutes by bicycle, show how much the difference actually is.
Put point-of-interest layers over the same surface, and you see what is actually within reach: Grocery Chains and Shopping centres for retail, Kindergartens, Primary Schools and Upper secondary schools for schools, and Public transport stops and Walking to the public transport stops for public transport.
Travel distance explains the speed assumptions per mode of travel and what makes an isochrone smaller than expected.
The isochrone follows the road network and the timetables, not a circle around the point. The point-of-interest layers show what exists within the surface, not how many people actually shop or walk there.
How you delimit the area
Everything above can be read on an administrative boundary or on an outline you draw yourself, and the drawing itself is the same tool whichever track you are in.
Open Analyze (the lightning icon) in the left-hand menu. Draw area (q) draws a freehand polygon point by point, Draw screen (w) uses exactly what you see in the map view, Hide drawing (e) and Clear drawing (r) control whether the outline is shown and whether it is deleted. The outline stays until you change or remove it, so you can read several of the tracks above on the same surface one after another.
An outline drawn in Analysis disappears when you leave the tool. If the same area is to be used again, in a report or a new session with Analysis, you create it instead under Projects: Areas: the polygon is saved with a name and a description, and Analysis and the reports in the active project can use it without you drawing it again. Tags solves a different need: you tag individual properties within or around the area to keep a working list of candidates, regardless of which outline you drew them from.
A saved area requires an active project. If you draw an outline in Analysis without an active project, it is there until you leave the tool, no longer.
The report itself
| Part | Content |
|---|---|
| Summary | Key figures for the area set against an administrative reference: number of buildings, ownership form, price level, population and travel time |
| Building stock and ownership form | Building overview with UFA, BYA, building type and year of construction, and ownership form split between companies, private individuals and the public sector |
| Transactions | Sales in the area for the chosen period, with price per square metre where the price is public |
| Demographics | Population, daytime population, age, income and households per basic statistical unit in the area |
| Travel time and amenities | What can be reached within 5, 10 and 15 minutes on foot, by bicycle, by car and by public transport, and which retail, school and public transport amenities lie within |
| Appendix | Source and date per item of information, with a link to the map layer or tab the figure came from |
The area in the report is the same one you have drawn or chosen in Analysis, and the comparison against an administrative boundary comes with it as a fixed reference, not as something you have to set up again.
Create the report today with Placepoint AI
Placepoint AI has access to the same registers as the map layers and analyses above, and writes the document from one prompt. Area analysis: a whole street in one prompt shows an example with the same span, a whole street gone through address by address. The prompt below covers the tracks on this page:
Create a market and area analysis for [address, place or polygon]. Show
the building stock with UFA, BYA, building type and year of construction,
ownership form split between companies, private individuals and the public
sector, registered transactions over the last two years with price per square
metre, population and daytime population per basic statistical unit, and
what can be reached within 10 minutes on foot and 15 minutes by car. Compare
with [municipality or district] as the administrative reference, and state clearly which
figures apply to the drawn area and which apply to the reference.
If you are on the map, the Agent does the short lookup without switching tools: "How many grocery shops and schools lie within a ten-minute walk from this point?" gives the answer as text with links, without you having to draw anything.
Related views
- Analysis - the market analyses, Travel distance and the tool for drawing the area yourself.
- Map layer: Demographics, Map layer: Business, Map layer: Buildings - the layers behind each track.
- Demographic analysis - catchment area and population at one address, step by step.
- Report: Demographics - the population composition in depth.
- Report: Social statistics - population figures and projection to 2050.
- Report: Price statistics - price level and price development for an area.
- Report: Tenant analysis and tenant search - the companies in the area, not just the buildings.
- Catchment areas - methodology - the definitions of catchment area, isochrone and radius.
- Projects: Areas, Tags - save and reuse the delimitation.
Data sources
- Statistisk sentralbyrå (SSB) via Geodata (demographics, income, wealth).
- Matrikkelen and building data via Geodata.
- Registered sales via Kartverket.
- Brønnøysundregistrene (ownership form, company structure).