Company profile
Cadillac Fairview is one of the largest owners, operators and developers of best-in-class office, retail and mixed-use properties in North America. The real estate portfolio also includes investments in retail, mixed-use and industrial real estate in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. The Canadian portfolio includes over 37 million square feet of leasable space at 68 properties in Canada, including landmark developments, such as Toronto-Dominion Centre, CF Toronto Eaton Centre, CF Pacific Centre, CF Chinook Centre, Tour Deloitte and CF Carrefour Laval.
Division: Technical Publications
Industry: Real-Estate
Year: 2018
Student Team
Daniel Indig
Project Role: Business Strategy
Education Background: BCom., Finance & Statistics for Management, McGill University
Anvita Shukla
Project Role: Data Engineering Solution Architect
Education Background: BTech., Computer Science & Engineering, JSSATE Noida
Ruite Xu
Project Role: Data Analyst/Modeler
Education Background: BSc., Mathematics and Statistics, University of Toronto
Ziyan Wang
Project Role: User / Stakeholder Adoption
Education Background: BA in Economics, McGill University
Project description
In this project, students collaborated with the Strategic Planning and Insights team of one of the largest commercial real estate companies in Canada. They provided recommendations to enhance the company's KPI dashboarding and visualizations through an interactive solution.
Pain Points
- Siloed access to KPI insights across Cadillac Fairview's corporate divisions
- Manual report generation process
- Need for deeper and more timely analytic insights
Data Inputs
- Customer research (Stats Canada)
- Environics data (psychographic/demographic factors)
- Twitter API data/connectors
Analytic Methodologies
- C- Means Fuzzy Clustering
- Silhouette Index scoring
- Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)
Technical Solutions Developed
- Smart Dashboard development using: Plotly, R Shiny, ggplot2, HTML, CSS, JavaScript
- Text Analytics matching system
Student Commentary
Daniel Indig
It's great to get theory in our classes. But ultimately, especially in the life of an analytic consultant, there's no better way to learn than to work with clients and to get your hands dirty in the data. For many students, this is going to be a very new type of educational experience. All I would say is that it would be great to challenge yourself as much as possible, embrace being uncomfortable and just push yourself to learn as much as you can in this incredible environment.
One of the major challenges we were faced with in the capstone project was keeping a clear line of communication with the client. Especially at the beginning when it's not as clear what the outcome is going to be, it's important to have a clear feedback loop between our team and the client. It was really helpful for us to book regular sessions where we could show our work to Cardillac Fariview executives and actually build off of their valuable feedback.
The most rewarding part of implementing the solution was being able to present our findings and recommendations to the executives of the company.
