The climate was right for Vancouver-based QuadReal Property Group to take advantage of the mountain of data it was sitting on with its global real estate portfolio valued at CA$73.8 billion.

However, the manager of the British Columbia Investment Management Corp.'s real estate program needed some help mining all that data. So QuadReal brought in Adastra, a global information technology firm that uses data to try to help boost a company's bottom line. Their introduction came via Microsoft, which certifies certain companies to work with its clients like QuadReal. That essentially made Adastra, with offices in Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver, a subcontractor.

"We've been doing the hands-on execution and implementation so QuadReal can become more data-driven in their operations and decision-making," said Dilraj Sehdev, executive director of Adastra US, in an interview. “We have sensor data to understand traffic patterns, weather forecasts, and populations' resource utilization. The current global environment of extreme weather events will undoubtedly factor more heavily into the locational analysis of future commercial development opportunities."

Neal Gilmore, senior vice president of data and analytics at QuadReal, said the company has grown from CA$24 billion in real estate assets since being spun out more than six years ago, and those assets were developed using software as a service, or SaaS, and other systems.

"As we mature, we need an environment to take that data, bring it together and do important things for the business," said Gilmore, who, along with Adastra's Sehdev, talked with CoStar News about how the companies work together.

Adastra, which has been expanding into the United States and opened offices in Miami, Los Angeles and New York City, has 20 customers in real estate across North America.

"The brutal truth is most of the real estate industry is still building the foundation," said Sehdev.

For companies like QuadReal, the future might include employing artificial intelligence to make decisions, said Sehdev with Adastra, which has been in the industry for 23 years and has 20 customers in real estate across North America.

"These things tell you what happened, but the next question is, 'why did it happen and what will happen next?" and then question what the company should do next, said Gilmore. "The base level is 'tell me about my business' and you grow from there."

QuadReal declined to say how it uses its data. Still, Gilmore said the real estate company has done the so-called what's happened part of its data and now is trying to get to where it can predict what will happen in its portfolio.

In the case of the pandemic, there were different migration patterns, but the question is whether machine learning can point to early patterns, Gilmore said.

"Now we have a platform in which we can make that type of analysis, and the applications are infinite," said Gilmore.