Web site monitors environmental, quality of life issues
By Patrick Healy, PBN Staff Writer

Providence's UDM Land Sciences, a private company with 10 employees, will soon unveil a Web technology called Land Truth, which it hopes to integrate into the Web sites of area real estate companies, and the awareness of the entire real estate community.

The technology will allow a user to publish environmental information using digital media, by capitalizing on the expanding public interest in environmental and quality of life issues of the real estate market.

After completing three years and $1.4 million of market research with a group of approximately 25 Rhode Island real estate brokers, appraisers, civil engineers, surveyors, and environmental professionals the company determined what criteria it thought was the most important in its technology.

The technology will map out specifics of areas including airports, city and town halls, fire stations and even fire hydrants. It will also enable users to view police stations, railroad stations, libraries, hospitals, schools, open space parks, open space wildlife management areas, historic districts, major utility lines, environmental hazards, superfund sites, toxic storage sites, underground storage tanks, air pollution point sources, landfills and junkyards, well groundwater quality, flood zones, soil suitability for development, wetlands, and public transportation.

Richard Pace, president of UDM Land Sciences, developed Land Truth with UDM Executive Vice President Peter Gengler.

Pace said the technology brings to the table an environmental aspect not previously dealt with on real estate Web sites. "I would say it's the environmental orientation that makes it unique," he said. "Most other sites deal with valuation and the demographic information, whereas we offer the abilities to look at flood plains issues and wetlands issues."

The first real estate agency to utilize Land Truth is the Sharon Steele Group of Providence, which will feature the technology on its Web site as early as this fall.

Michael Sever, creative and strategic principal of Providence's Aardvark Design, who designed and built the Sharon Steele Web site, knew he wanted to use Land Truth before he even began working with Steele, but that Steele had been familiar with Pace's work already. "Before we began working with Sharon we were talking with Rick (Pace) and taking his technology and making it an Internet technology, which was up until that point a CD-ROM Technology."

Sever said Land Truth is a good fit with the mission of the Sharon Steele Group, "How Sharon presents and how Sharon sells is not about homes specifically, it's about communities and lifestyles," he said. "We wanted to create a site which allows people to learn a little bit about the communitieswhat we're trying to do is give a user a look into that community in one stop without having to use multiple links."

John McCue, director of computer systems at UDM Land Sciences has been putting together a prototype site for Land Truth since last December. "Before that we had built up a sizable amount of code and desktop applications for width," he said, "and some of that code was directly applicable to the Web."

Combining 58 different databases from 16 different sources Land Truth information was converted into one application.

Pace said UDM will make efforts to sign up other real estate agents in other regions in the state, but will not use the technology with agencies whose areas overlap the areas covered by agencies they already have as clients. "We're geographically exclusive," he said.

If Land Truth proves successful, Pace said, he would like to bring the technology to the Boston metropolitan area and Portland, Maine.

Published 08/13/2001

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