Contributed by Alexandra Baird Allen of Turner Drake & Partners Ltd.

"Turner Drake was founded in 1976 to provide real estate services to the business community in Atlantic Canada.  In 1998 we expanded our service area to include Ontario, to meet the demands of clients owning property there as well; we have also undertaken assignments from coast to coast.  Through our various affiliations we can offer valuation services throughout the United States and the United Kingdom. Our team approach ensures that we are uniquely equipped to provide professional assistance in the fields of valuation and appraisal; property tax; counselling (expropriation, feasibility studies, portfolio and asset analysis); Lasercad® space measurement; economic intelligence (market surveys, site selection, trade area analysis, supply and demand analysis); planning; and brokerage (sales and leasing).  Turner Drake & Partners Ltd. is a professional services firm regulated by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, and All operations of Turner Drake & Partners Ltd. are covered by a quality system registered to the ISO 9001:2015 standard.

"We provide solutions to real estate problems": that is our mission, and to fulfil it we develop long term relationships with our clients, in effect becoming their real estate arm.

Real estate is a multi-faceted challenge and rarely receives the attention it deserves; despite the fact that it is usually the most valuable of fiscal assets. Nor are the diverse skills necessary to protect and nurture the real estate investment readily available to the average property owner.  They must instead be sought from a variety of ad hoc sources: appraisers, sales and leasing agents, tax consultants or other professional advisors such as lawyers or accountants.  As a result the advice is often contradictory or too narrowly focused: as a consequence it may be of doubtful validity.  We have addressed this problem by training our own team of real estate specialists.  They have outstanding experience and qualifications.  We have carefully assembled exceptional resources, databases, computer facilities and superb contacts, to ensure that our team has a thorough knowledge of the Atlantic Canada and Ontario real estate markets at all times.  In 2006, Turner Drake brought in GIS as a tool to view and analyse data spatially…quite sensibly, given that real estate is all about “location, location, location.”   

GIS plays a key role in what we do.  One such recent project was a land suitability analysis which we undertook for a municipality in Atlantic Canada. They wanted to identify which of four potential sites would give them the best “bang for buck” for a comprehensive new community development.  In order to provide an unbiased, fact-based opinion of which site would be the best candidate, we overlaid a variety of geographic data: property boundaries and ownership; locations of municipal services – from transit and active transportation networks to water and sewer services; topographic data pertinent to each of municipal servicing and environmental features and sensitivities; and demographic information.  Using a weighted ranking system, we were able to codify the complex pros and cons of each site into a succinct ranking of the four sites.  Our Economic Intelligence team conducted the geographic analysis; our Planning team weighed in on the municipal planning considerations of each potential site; and our Valuation team provided a preliminary estimate of acquisition costs for each site, followed by a more comprehensive valuation of the two short listed sites.  At all times during the process, we maintained open lines of communication with our client, keeping them informed of issues and opportunities as they arose, and tweaking the analysis as needed to ensure it provided the most accurate, reliable, and transparent solution to their real estate problem."