News

December 21, 2020 | IN Media Release and News | BY Holly Brennan | 3 min read

A partnership between AVID Property Group (AVID) and RPS Group (RPS) has marked a significant industry first in putting new masterplanned communities officially on the map. New and improved street mapping services is boosting safety, convenience and liveability at communities in just a matter of weeks.

Mapping services such as Google have traditionally lacked the resources required to upload residential address data, taking up to five years to put new communities on the map.

As Australian ecommerce faces a $4 billion boom as a result of the pandemic, there is a clear and immediate need for the industry to implement new mapping technology and services. RPS identified the roadblock in the delivery of connected communities, offering a service that bypasses the typical five-year process and delivers digitally mapped communities in up to three weeks – a service that was quickly adopted by AVID for its Harmony community on the Sunshine Coast.

RPS Service Line Leader Urban Design Peter Egerton, who has worked on the Harmony by AVID Property Group project since 2007, said he was excited to see the community become the earliest adopter of the new service.

“No one really considered the impacts of COVID-19 until it hit us, and that’s what triggered us to look into the currency of online mapping,” Mr Egerton said.

“It’s not just about finding an address on a map; our field capturing process has enabled us to capture street view of roads, footpaths, parks and playgrounds, with the additional ability to walk through café, sales office and the display village.

“Door-to-door postal deliveries and virtual tours are a necessity now, in addition to the need for improved emergency service access to street address information.

“AVID completely understood how important online street maps are for building a safe and connected community; the first question they asked was how soon could we start!”

AVID General Manager Queensland Bruce Harper said the convenience of digital mapping was a luxury that was often taken for granted.

“Having visitors easily find your house and getting deliveries to your doorstep is a simply luxury new developments often miss out on,” Mr Harper said.

“Our ever-growing community is thrilled that we’ve been able to bypass the typical three to five year wait times of street updates.

“Fostering a connected community has always been a priority for us, and engaging RPS is just another way which we’ve been able to do this through urban planning.”

RPS spent a day in the field to capture data which then took a week to upload and an additional week and a half to for Google to vet the data and upload to their system – totalling a maximum of three weeks.

RPS has completed the first round of 1,200 blocks, home to around 3,500 residents and includes the Harmony Café and we will continue to roll this service out as each stage of the development is completed.

For more information on the growing Harmony community, visit www.harmonyliving.com.au.