The ability to work with and analyze spatial information is increasingly sought in a variety of professional fields. Geographic visualization and analysis techniques are utilized by companies and organizations to discover important trends in their data and to identify new areas of opportunity. In this course, you’ll begin to acquire these skills. This course is an introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS), with a focus on the use of GIS for applications that are important for real estate professionals. No prior knowledge of GIS is assumed for this course, although students should have some facility with basic mathematics, statistics, and spreadsheet programs. I have two major goals for this course. The first goal is to help you acquire significant technical GIS skills, and become comfortable solving problems with spatial data in a digital environment. You’ll be working primarily with ESRI’s ArcGIS suite of applications, the GIS industry standard. The second, and perhaps more important goal, is to help you become good geospatial analysts. To use GIS data correctly, you’ll need to be aware of the many unique properties of spatial data – and the potential errors that can arise if you ignore these properties. For current and aspiring real estate professionals, these mistakes could have both professional and financial repercussions, so understanding the nature of the data and the ways it can be used is insurance against future life challenges.
