Andrew Dick:  Hello and welcome to the Healthcare Real Estate podcast. I’m Andrew Dick, an attorney with Hall Render, the largest healthcare-focused law firm in the country. Please remember the views expressed in this podcast are those of the participants only and do not constitute legal advice.

Today we’ll be talking about how hospitals and healthcare systems can use data analytics for site selection purposes. Buxton is a data company that helps a broad range of industry groups from retailers to healthcare providers make smart decisions when selecting the right location to do business. Today, we will be talking with Bill Stinneford, senior vice president with Buxton, about how healthcare providers can benefit from the use of customer data when developing an ambulatory network. Bill, thanks for joining me today.

Bill Stinneford: Thanks for having me.

Andrew Dick: Bill, before we talk about Buxton’s healthcare expertise, let’s talk about your background. You’re a Texas native with an interesting background in business and journalism. Tell us about your career experience before you joined Buxton.

Bill Stinneford: Yeah, well I studied business and English at college, and I got out of Texas A&M, and I was a financial analyst for a year, and I wasn’t really ready to grow up, and I’d always been a big sports fan and so I actually went back to graduate school to study journalism, and with the focus of really getting into sports, and ended up working with ESPN for about four years. So really, I got to be on the radio in Dallas Fort Worth and hosted pre- and post-game Mavericks shows. The Dallas Mavericks shows are still on the station, and were able to cover Super Bowls and spring training and training camps and just a fantastic education to study sports and study journalism, and did that for a long time. Hosted the afternoon show here in Dallas Fort Worth, and it was a blast, but you know, eventually, I didn’t want to … I guess I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life, as fun as it was in the moment, and was ready to get back into quote-unquote “business.” So that led me to make a change.

Andrew Dick: So how did you make the transition from your broadcasting career to Buxton?

Bill Stinneford: Well, it was interesting. When I was going through graduate school, I was putting away through graduate school and so I had an internship at the ABC radio station here in town, and that internship was a great experience, but that was a free internship. I had to make a little money, obviously. Going to school, doing the free internship doing morning drives. So through friends, I had heard of this company called Buxton, which I didn’t know about at the time. I got an internship in the marketing department that paid me a little bit while I went to school, and I fell in love with this company. About that time that I was at ESPN, Moneyball had come out, by Michael Lewis and that became a sort of the rage and obviously they made a movie about it.

I remember reading that when it first came out, cover to cover, and I just loved that story. I think it’s important for data analytics today because I think that story gets bastardized at times about what it really was. I think sometimes people said, you know, that that was about the story about baseball and the Oakland As and being a very successful organization with one of the lowest payrolls in major league baseball, and doing it consistently over a long period of time. But with that story, what some people said was, “Oh, they just had a bunch of stats guys made decisions and you didn’t need scouts or baseball expertise.”

It was really, what the story was saying, was you do need expertise. You do need great scouts and gut, but you also need science and data as part of your decision-making process. When you can marry those two together, you can make much better decisions. Decisions that will produce the best return on investment for ballplayers. You’re investing millions of dollars into a ballplayer that you sign as a free agent or you draft, you want to go off more than just eyeballs.

So I loved that story, and in a way, that’s what Buxton was really doing for businesses, and what we do for businesses. It was really providing the science and the data to compliment the already strong decision-making processes of a company, to help them make better real estate decisions and better customer decisions. That always stuck with me, that fascinated me. That was fascinating to me while I was an intern for them, and then got into ESPN and did that, threw myself into that for four years. But again, I studied business in college and I was always wanting to kind of think about getting back into that world.

Buxton had always stayed in touch with me, and it came to the point in my career with broadcasting where you either need to kind of move markets, or really throw yourself into the next stage and I really didn’t want to move, and I didn’t want to do those types of things and I found a great home in Buxton. That was 14 years ago now, over 14 years ago. I have not looked back, and it’s been a tremendous professional decision, and to see how we’ve grown and advanced and helped companies with those investment decisions over time. So that’s kind of how I transitioned into Buxton.

Andrew Dick: So Bill, tell us a little bit about what you started off doing at Buxton and then what you’re doing today.

Bill Stinneford: Yeah, so I started out in our retail vertical, and Buxton is a consumer analytics company helping build predictive solutions that help people make great investment decisions, be there for new locations or relocations, market optimizations, targeted marketing, helping understand how their consumers behave beyond just demographics. So there’s a couple of different verticals that we have, but our historical vertical where we started was retail. So I started in our retail vertical in sort of a business development role, calling on majority retailers and restaurants throughout, when I first started, the southwestern portion of the United States, and helping in that. Quickly rose in our retail vertical, and then oversaw that and then also over the years took over our growing healthcare vertical and so now sort of oversee all client development, both making sure that our existing client relationships are strong and fruitful as well as helping coordinate our marketing message and our sales efforts to continue to bring new clients into Buxton.

Andrew Dick: That’s a great summary and Bill, how did Buxton get into the healthcare space? Because the audience listening to this podcast, they’re real estate investors, they’re hospital and healthcare executives looking to make smart decisions when they open up a new clinic location or a new hospital, and they’ll say, “Gosh, we’ve heard of Buxton, but primarily in the retail space.” But in reality, Buxton has done quite a bit of work in the healthcare space. Tell us about Buxton’s healthcare expertise and how Buxton moved from the retail vertical into the healthcare vertical.

Bill Stinneford: Yeah, so we still have a very strong retail vertical, but yeah. We’ve been around 25 years as a company, and we started in retail but yeah, over the years we’ve grown into a restaurant, we’ve grown into city government, private equity, and as you mentioned, healthcare. Basically, any type of business, if you have a customer or a patient or a consumer, and you want to find people that look just like that and grow your business with real estate or marketing or get more out of your existing investments, we can certainly help with that.

Our core verticals are those that I just mentioned but you know, we work with Marriott and we work with Fidelity Investments and insurance companies. So yeah, basically we can apply these types of approaches to all those different types of businesses, but specifically with healthcare, which is our fastest-growing vertical and pretty soon will end up being our largest overall vertical. It’s pretty close already. It is exciting to see, and it started probably 12, 13 years ago now. One of our retail clients actually sat on the board of Florida Hospital and they were looking to roll out their Centra Care line, their urgent care line. They were like, “Hey, this is kind of like retail, this type of healthcare business, and I think that you guys can help us with that.”

At the time, we said, “Well you know, we don’t know anything about healthcare, but we’ll try.” And it worked, and in fact, they’re still a client to this day. It’s been a really successful obviously rollout, Centra Care, over the years. They still use it for that. But we’ve branched into other different service lines for them and we realized, hey, there’s something here with where healthcare is going.

Then over the last sort of five, six years as there’s been a huge growth in ambulatory facilities or outpatient facilities, that’s really been the biggest boon to our healthcare business because the things that make an outpatient or an ambulatory location successful are somewhat different and in many cases very different than what makes an inpatient healthcare facility successful. In many cases, in an inpatient standpoint, it is still a bit of: if you build it, they will come. But in outpatient, there are so many choices and there’s so much competition that the difference between success or failure of an outpatient facility maybe a quarter of a mile apart from where you pick, right? So the things that make successful ambulatory location strategies work today are still a combination of some traditional healthcare metrics. You know, certain outpatient and inpatient utilization data, insurance data, competition provider data. Those types of things.

But just as much, if not more, it is an understanding of the consumer and not just based on demographics, but how they live their lives, how they spend their money, how they behave as consumers. Their attitudes toward different things, and also retail metrics. Things like co-tenancy or area draw, visibility. Sometimes people don’t realize that a lot of times your most successful marketing vehicle in a healthcare situation or a retail situation is your facility itself. You know? And how visible are you, and are you located near things that people are driving by all the time on their way to work, on their way home, when they run errands on the weekends. That impression frequency can build up and allow people to understand you’re there. Certainly for things like urgent care that’s vital, but what we’re seeing is even in things like orthopedics and sports medicine, things that were predominantly referral-based, while there’s still a huge component of that more and more you’re seeing healthcare companies go straight to the consumer to advertise their specialty services and location strategy is extremely important in that being successful.

That was just as much to do with understanding consumers and retail metrics as it does healthcare metrics, so when you can combine all those and bring them together, which we’ve done, because now we know a lot about healthcare, it allows our clients to have … or just companies in general that employ these strategies, to have a significant leg up on the ever-growing competition.

Andrew Dick: So Bill, if a healthcare provider came to you and said, “We’re thinking of rolling out an ambulatory care network or outpatient clinic network,” depending on what you call it, what could Buxton provide to that healthcare provider in terms of finding the right location? What type of metrics would you look at, what type of services would you offer?

Bill Stinneford: Yeah, well what we would do, I mean every case is a little bit different. We would want to build a customized solution for each one of those specific clients and what they’re trying to achieve, but you would build a forecasting solution, that is a combination of understanding the ideal patient/consumer profile for that particular service, and also the payer mix that you would like to optimize: is it all-payer, is it, commercial payer? You know, what are you trying to go achieve? Then what are the competitive variables? What are the positive correlating factors that need to be there? Then the traditional utilization data and provider data, and understand what makes successful locations successful and what makes ones that don’t succeed in an outpatient environment for that particular service unsuccessful? And build that solution that then allows the client to be able to forecast any intersection across their service areas or the whole country if they wanted, you know?

They can use the models to say: find me all the locations that will do greater than X in performance and will cannibalize my existing locations by more than a specific percentage that they set. So you help understand how many locations you can support in a market, where those locations should be optimally, how to evaluate your existing portfolio for that if you offer that service line. Which ones are not doing well but they’re underperforming their potential, which ones are not doing well but frankly they’re doing as well as they could be doing and they’re in the wrong spots, or that trade area has changed over time so they need to be consolidated or relocated and then they can use the solution to do that.

So those are a lot of the output that we provide, and we actually provide that into a very easy to use but powerful mapping and analytics platform that they can access on their phones or their tablets or their laptops, wherever they have an internet connection and visualize all the things that we’re talking about: where is their competition, where are their patients coming from, where are their potential patients coming from? Where are those recommended points? If there’s availability that pops up that you want to investigate, you can click a button and get a forecast on that potential site in about two minutes. Store files, run just regular utilization reports, insurance reports, demographic, behavioral reports. All those different types of things at their fingertips, but most imply from a real estate strategy standpoint, understand where their home runs will be and how to avoid expensiveness as well.

Andrew Dick: So Bill, we talked about a new outpatient clinical strategy. What about a health system that has an existing network that wants to analyze how that existing network is performing? Is that something that Buxton could help with?

Bill Stinneford: Yeah, you know, absolutely. I think one of the things that when you build those forecasting solutions and you’re studying their data, what makes them… For instance, you do this a lot with primary care, where they have many, many locations within a market if you’re a system. It’s identifying what’s the DNA of your best locations in suburban markets in your service areas? What are the things that are always present in those trade areas that are sort of present in the okay locations trade areas, that are hardly ever-present in the poor performing trade areas? You know, what are those factors?

Then that model that is built can again forecast future performance like we just talked about. But you can also take it and score the existing locations and compare actual performance to forecast performance. This becomes very valuable for our health system clients because it helps break down what I sort of like to call is the log jam of opinion that can develop.

So for instance, if leadership of the system comes in to evaluate the primary care facilities and their performance and they look at the low performing locations, the question that the CEO asks, she may say, “Why do we have these low performing locations?” Typically, what you’ll have is people pointing fingers at each other in the boardroom, you know? The people that picked the sites will blame the operators and the physicians within the site. The physicians and the operators of the site will blame whoever picked the site. Then eventually, everybody will get around to blaming marketing. They can all agree on that; it’s marketing’s fault.

But you know, in reality, sometimes is it the location that was a miss. Should have never been selected. Or, just as frequently, it was a great location for 20 years for primary care but that trade area has changed over time significantly and that’s not necessarily the most optimal spot for those services today. But the analytics, in an unbiased way, is informing to say, you know what? No matter what you do, no matter how many physicians you put in, no matter how often you change out the front office, no matter how much money you dump in from a marketing standpoint or a huge remodel, you’re wasting dollars. The analytics are showing that for that particular service line if you want it to produce at a certain level, the trade area potential is no longer there. So let’s use the models to understand how to best consolidate that site and where should that be transferred to, or, where should you best locate that site?

But that’s very different than another location that you may have that’s doing the same actual volume, which is below par, but when we look at that with the model the forecasts are saying it should be doing 40% better because this site looks like 10 other sites you have in these types of markets that they have the same type of potential patients in the same volumes, they have the same level of competition, the same area draw factors, the same utilization and insurance metrics. All these things are the same as all these other locations that all do 40% better but this one’s not: why?

Sometimes that can be that it does need to be remodeled or it needs to be moved just a little bit down the street to a more visible area because that piece of the street is no longer where people are drawn. Or it could be that you need to add physicians. A lot of times we see that. The wait times in those facilities end up being longer and it’s tougher to get an appointment because you don’t have the proper staff, or the front office isn’t … You know, the front office help is not as nice as they need to be. Or maybe we do need to do more marketing. But you know that that trade area should be performing better than it is.

That opens up a lot of possibilities because now what you’re doing is not only finding the best places to invest in new locations to the degree that you’re opening up locations for primary care or urgent care or specialty, but you’re also improving the performance of the existing portfolio of investments by knowing which ones to not invest in any more, and then which ones have potential and you should invest in. The overall return on investment on all of your real estate becomes that much better. There’s just a lot of waste in healthcare today because people are making decisions based on opinion, and people that make decisions based on data for the actual healthcare of their business, sometimes they’re not making the best decisions based on data for where they invest dollars.

Andrew Dick: That was a great summary, and it seems to me, Bill, that there are a lot of different companies that claim to offer site selection. A number of our healthcare clients get pitched all the time, but Buxton seems to have maybe the more comprehensive platform for this service. What do you think makes Buxton unique when compared to its competitors?

Bill Stinneford: Well you know, it’s interesting. I think we take a very different approach than the traditional players, I guess, in healthcare, with regard to these types of decisions. I think that that comes from our consumer analytics and retail site selection background. There’s a lot of good companies, but I think one of the things that I tend to see that people are still relying on or offering as a way to select sites is more macro-level traditional healthcare data. So certainly outpatient and inpatient utilization data, but at a county level or a city level. The output may say you have a need for three additional orthopedic surgeons within this market. Okay, great. Where? That’s a big county. That’s a big geography. Again, as we talked about in an outpatient environment, the difference between a successful location or an expensive miss might be only a half a mile down the road, one spot versus another.

So if you’re talking about macro level, county-level data that shows demand for a particular service, great. Where are you going to service that? Because especially as you have so much more competition, both system competition as well as, you know, private companies that are focusing on a specialty or two, many of them, backed by private equity that can choose where they operate, choose the type of payer, the type of patient that they want to go after. They’re employing a lot of these quote-unquote “consumer research strategies” and if you make it much more convenient, if somebody is in need of a service and you make it much more convenient, if your primary care doctor is telling you to go 40 minutes across town but there’s a specialist that you drive by all the time and you’re seeing their billboards and their advertisements on TV and those types of things, well, can I just check them out? And so it’s really important to understand where to be at an intersection level, at a micro-level.

That’s where we grew up and where we still excel today with retail and restaurant, and weaving in a lot of that traditional healthcare data and weaving in over a decade now of really strong ambulatory site selection healthcare experience with our consumer analytic experience and our retail experience really allows us to produce a unique solution that again can help our healthcare clients have a tool that the people that they’re competing against might not have to help them be successful in a very evolving healthcare environment.

Andrew Dick: Bill, let’s switch gears at this point and talk about ICSC or the International Council of Shopping Centers. They host an annual event called Recon. This year was significant from my perspective because there was quite a bit of effort and showcasing health and wellness programs and how retailers can collaborate with healthcare providers. Why do you think there was such a strong push this year to talk about health and wellness at ICSC Recon?

Bill Stinneford: Well, there’s a number of different reasons and I’ll try to knock out a few of them. I mean, first off, I was really excited that ICSC did that because it is such a strong push from a “retail center” standpoint, quote-unquote, obviously, it’s no secret that there are certain retail concepts that are struggling. Some are going out of business. There are vacancies in a lot of these centers. Now, I don’t think that retail is dying. I think that retail is evolving just like healthcare is evolving, but one of the things that you’ll see thriving right now are things like fitness facilities, gyms, restaurants. Things that are focused on a healthy type of environment. Urgent care, different healthcare specialties. So from an ICSC, an International Council of Shopping Centers perspective, to focus on a sector that can help fill vacancies and help create great foot traffic and those types of things, obviously that’s a no brainer.

But I also think you’re seeing the demand on that side, but I think also you’re seeing the demand on the healthcare and the health and wellness side of understanding that healthcare cannot exist in the old traditional way. That it has to be out in the neighborhoods, and it’s not just … You know this is something that we talk about all the time with our clients, with the health system. People need to think about their health system as a brand, and some people within those systems may be thinking about that as a brand, but not enough.

I think sometimes health systems think that people in the market, just regular Joe America, understand the difference between health system A and health system B in a market, but for the most part, they really don’t. So how do you distinguish your brand and how do you make people want to stay with you in sort of a cradle to grave relationship? Not just, “Hey, come to us. We’ll treat you when you’re sick.” But, “Come to us. We’ll keep you from getting sick. We’ll keep you healthy.” That’s really I think the future of healthcare and no amount of healthcare legislation or type of healthcare legislation is going to help us as a country if we don’t start getting healthier and start making better decisions.

Part of that is education. Part of that is taking that education and those types of offerings and types of ways to stay healthy, both with food and with education and with fitness, into the communities. Into neighborhoods. And that’s a retail strategy, right? So the things that will help people be successful in healthcare, offering these types of services, not just health and wellness but healthcare, you’re going to have to be out in the neighborhoods, and to do that you’re going to have to understand a real estate strategy beyond the old, if you build it, they will come.

In our presentations, we talk about how healthcare is evolving. Clearly there are regulatory hurdles and uncertainty with regard to healthcare regulation and certainly, Buxton can’t help with any of that. But the other things that are making healthcare evolve are the evolving consumer, and how people make decisions and choices about the healthcare services that they provide. Their smartphones and where they go and look at things as they go shopping for other things, you know? That you have an evolving consumer and the type of expectation that they have, but also you have, as we talked about earlier, an extremely competitive environment. Extremely competitive.

There is so much money being spent in healthcare, and any time you have that much money being spent and some of the traditional players by taking a traditional healthcare approach are investing those dollars inefficiently and leave themselves open to competitors, you’re going to have a bunch of people jump into that market. Any time there’s a bunch of money to be had and there’s a perceived inefficiency in the market, you’re going to have a lot of players jumping into that space and so you’ve got that. Private equity is in it in a huge way. You’ve got, obviously, you’re looking at the growth of CVS and Walgreens and Walmart and you know, just what is going on with all of that. You’ve got a lot of different players in the space and what are they doing? They’re understanding consumers. They’re understanding a retail strategy. They’re going into neighborhoods and being more convenient and more visible to provide these offerings.

If you’re sitting out there on the free land that the church gave you behind an industrial park that no one can see, you can’t see in from the highway and those types of things, you’re going to get slaughtered. So that’s part of why it’s important to not only have these conversations like you and I are having but why ICSC and retail are getting involved as well.

You know, sorry to keep blabbing here but the last piece on this is in our presentations we talk about Blockbuster. Blockbuster, I think there’s one Blockbuster still in business in Bend, Oregon. Right? But if you and I were having this conversation 13, 14 years ago and I told you Blockbuster would be completely out of business in 2019, you’d have told me I was crazy. But that happened. It wasn’t that Blockbuster didn’t have a lot of really smart people and did a lot of really smart things, but A, they didn’t pay enough attention, or enough people didn’t pay enough attention or pay enough respect to how the consumer was evolving and how they wanted to make choices, and they also didn’t pay attention or give enough respect to the new competitors in the market. “They can’t do what we do,” and that type of thing.

They’re completely out of business. That’s mind-blowing when you think about how big they were and how many smart people that they had, and they did a lot of things right. But it doesn’t take that many bad decisions, or that much not paying attention or giving enough respect to your competitors to let it bite you in the rear, so to speak.

So think about today. You’ve got CVS, right? What is CVS, there are 9000 CVS locations, most of them in the United States. There are 1100 plus MinuteClinic locations. They’re starting to offer other types of services. Obviously Aetna, with the affiliation there. You know, I mean there’s all kinds of innovation that can come from that, and they’re in every neighborhood in the United States. They can be the ones. They’re not there yet, but they could absolutely be the ones that have the ongoing conversation with the people in their trade areas and develop cradle to grave type relationships with those types of people across a variety of different healthcare services and wellness.

That is pretty interesting but should be pretty scary to a lot of traditional players in the space. But what is CVS but a retailer who understands consumers? All of these things are sort of blending together into this world, and so I was glad to see ICSC jump on that. So sorry if I’m talking too long about that, but that’s just near and dear to my heart and I’ve just seen that evolution over the last few years.

Andrew Dick: No, I appreciate the conversation, Bill, and in fact, the one reason I wanted you to talk about ICSC is that I know that Buxton has had a presence within the organization for some time, and that’s really where some of Buxton’s roots started, in the retail space. I also enjoyed our conversation offline about CVS and Walgreens and what those organizations are doing, because they have a powerful footprint. They have a network that’s hard to compete with, and I know they’ve partnered with some of the local healthcare providers to staff their clinics, but you’re right in that CVS and Walgreens are looking to expand healthcare operations and local healthcare providers should be watching what they’re doing, and be concerned in some cases because of the network that they have.

Bill Stinneford: Yeah, you know, and … Yeah, sorry, Andrew. I was just going to say real quick on that, but there are strategies to take if you are those systems to make sure that you don’t get swallowed up by that. You know, but it is taking a neighborhood by neighborhood approach and not a one size fits all approach to your marketing or to the services that you offer. It’s really catering your offerings in each of the neighborhoods that you serve to the population of that neighborhood and their needs and their desires and the services that they may need, and how to educate that population to have better outcomes over time, and think, you know, there’s no one size fits all approach to that.

The way that you achieve those localized, local store marketing if you will, neighborhood customization of your offerings, is to use data and analytics and understand people as consumers, not just demographics in those neighborhoods and understand their behaviors and their attitudes and how often do they exercise or not exercise, how are they eating, poorly or well? How are they aging? What are the different types of things? You could have two houses that demographically are the same, but how they live their lives, how active one is versus another, you know, one could be 65 and hikes three times a week and eats well and is always very active, and the other living right across the street that’s 65 that has the same net worth is a couch potato. You know, one guy needs an orthopedic surgeon, the other guy needs a cardiologist.

If I’m just looking at them demographically, I’m not going to be able to tell the difference, so implementing consumer-level data, understanding people’s attitudes and behaviors in combination with other things, can help people forecast what will be needed and how to change outcomes not on a market level basis, but on a location by location or a trade area by trade area basis. Not every CVS trade area is the same, but they’re using data and analytics to optimize their offerings and their messaging in those local communities to be as successful as possible, and that is possible for healthcare companies outside of those big guys, but you’ve got to implement some of the things we’ve been talking about today.

Andrew Dick: Great point, and I enjoyed that part of our discussion. Bill, switching gears, I know that Buxton recently developed a strategic relationship with CoStar, which is a huge player in the real estate space. What does that strategic relationship look like, and how will it benefit your clients?

Bill Stinneford: Yeah, we’re really excited about the relationship. It is a game-changer in real estate investment. For those that don’t know, CoStar is a very large data and research and analytics company in their own right, and publicly traded and they have amazing information on real estate. What’s available in the markets for sale, for lease, of what type of real estate, what are the asking rents, what’s the asks price for land, what are things being leased for around it, what’s the tenant mix, who are the tenants in particular facilities? It’s just, I’m not even doing it justice, the vast amounts of wonderful data market comps. The vast amount of data and research that goes into their offering. So for the first time, what we’re able to do is combine our two offerings in one platform for the benefit of our clients.

If you think about some of the things we talked about earlier, the output of a healthcare system comes to us and says, “Hey, we want to really grow primary care, urgent care, orthopedics and cardiology in an outpatient setting.” We would build those forecasting models based on combining their data with our data and methodologies and then forecast: here’s how many locations you’re going to have for each of those service lines in the market and here’s where they layout. The best analytical intersections for you. You now have that inventory of top potential locations that meet all the criteria that your successful locations already have for those services. Well now with CoStar, the one thing we weren’t able to provide was: okay, that’s great. These are the best analytical intersections for me. Is there anything available that meets my ideal location both in terms of size and quality but also economics.

Now, they can actually turn on the Buxton recommended potential traders. You can turn on then CoStar and say, “Okay. What’s available that meets my economic criteria, my size criteria, my use criteria, that fall within those recommended trade areas?” So actually see all of that in one platform, see who to contact there or who to put your people in contact with to get these very precious sites in the most ideal trade areas as quickly as possible without having to wait on brokers or other things that may take a while, or only see some of the sites that may be available. This gives you access to all of the sites with all of the information that you have to get to sites … Again, we’re talking about a very competitive market. To get to those sites in the best-recommended trade areas analytically faster than your competition, it is really a game-changer in our world.

Andrew Dick: So Bill, when we were talking offline it sounds like your clients could also use this, the CoStar feature as well, to the extent that they were looking at a leasing arrangement with a referral source and the Stark law or the anti-kickback law may apply. You could quickly pull comps from that area and make an educated decision based on what is fair market value in that area. Is that right?

Bill Stinneford: That’s exactly right. I mean, CoStar does a tremendous job pulling that data in every market across the United States at regular intervals so that it’s clearly available on the platform. So you have to utilize data to prove that you are asking fair market value for real estate. You can easily pull that report in a few seconds and so it’s just tremendously valuable, yes, for Stark law compliance and anti-kickback.

Andrew Dick: Right. Bill, as we wrap up, I want to ask you just a couple of questions. Over the next five years, how do you think the Buxton business model will change?

Bill Stinneford: It’s interesting. Over 25 years, our business model, what we do has not really changed, which is combining our clients’ data with our data and methodologies and technologies to produce answers, right? We love data. We’ll always love data. We spend millions of dollars a year on data to help answer a lot of these questions, but data in and of itself is worthless. There’s a lot of people that are data-rich and insight poor, to use the cliché. But what we really bring to the table and have always brought to the table is the ability to find the patterns in the chaos. To know what to do with all of that data combined, and experience to create answers. These are the things that you need to be successful and here are all the places that you do not that have it. Here are all the places that you are that don’t have it anymore. Right? Whatever that ends up being.

Now, where we’ve changed and evolved and grown is how our clients interact with those answers. So we talked about our technology platform that enables our clients to push buttons easily and get the answers that they need to make these decisions, so I think you’ll continue to see our technology evolve. You’re seeing all kinds of things with artificial intelligence and machine learning. Those are buzzwords out there, and we certainly implement those things into our solutions, but you always have to question with that, when you hear those sexy buzzwords, you still need a lot of sample set. A lot of data points, to be able to come up with valuable insights in that. But we’re experimenting with that. Data visualization, mobile data to be able to follow people’s traffic patterns and shopping behaviors. There are all kinds of interesting technologies and new data sources that we’ll continue to investigate and implement and develop ourselves to continue to make our answers better and the way in which our clients interact with them better.

But, you know, the fundamental question of what Buxton does, helping people understand who their consumers are and where’s everybody else that looks just like them that aren’t utilizing them right now, and where are the best places to invest their dollars for real estate, that’s always going to be who we are. In healthcare, that will only continue to grow. I think you’re continuing to see the advancement and the acceptance of these types of strategies and the need to understand people, patients as consumers. The need to think about things not purely as retail but more like retail than they have in the past. So I think you’ll continue to see us invest heavily in our healthcare vertical, in data technology and people to continue to produce the best solutions for our clients to help them navigate a very competitive and evolving time.

Andrew Dick: Great. Bill, where can our audience learn more about you and Buxton’s healthcare practice?

Bill Stinneford: Yeah, you know, the best place, we have a lot of great content, is to go to our website. That’s just buxtonco.com. You can contact me directly as well. It’s Bill Stinneford and my email is bstinneford@buxtonco.com. Or you go to our leadership page and you’ll see our leadership and our email addresses on the website as well, but there’s a healthcare section on there. Lots of great content and videos, and for people at any stage to learn more about the things that we’re talking about today and why they’re so important.

Andrew Dick: Bill, thanks for joining the podcast. I really enjoyed our discussion. Thanks to our audience for listening as well, on your Apple or Android device. Please subscribe to the podcast and leave feedback for us. If you have any ideas for future topics or guests, please reach out to me. My email address is adick@hallrender.com. We also publish a newsletter called the Healthcare Real Estate Advisor. To be added to the list, please reach out to me at the same email address. Thank you!