[Insert corny joke about the year flying by here] 😉 . Welcome to the December 2024 release notes! ❄️

Places Highlights

• More than a million new places in specific countries and categories 📈
• Improved Geometry for US brands in select categories 🎯
• 104 new brands across 79 countries 🎉

Places Growth

This month, SG Places has a grand total of 56,530,207, including POI with or without geometry, closed POI, and parking lots. This is a net increase of 1,266,636 places from last month. The net increase is attributed to regular updates of large scale sources, net new brands, and a concerted effort to add coverage in specific categories across the US, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil 🌎.

Coverage Gains in Key Categories

While we never claim to cover every place on earth, we pride ourselves in our ability to quickly research and build new places to meet urgent customer requirements. This month, we sprinted towards a handful of coverage gains in a handful of countries: Warehouses and distribution centers in Mexico and Brazil 📦; Office buildings in the US and Canada 🏢; and Pharmacies in Canada 🧑‍⚕️💊. Through these efforts, we picked up new POIs in tangential categories as well. Notable increases include:

• US 🇺🇸
  • naics_code = 531210 (Offices of Real Estate Agents and Brokers): +191,581 POIs 🕴🏠
  • naics_code = 551114 (Corporate, Subsidiary, and Regional Managing Offices): +34,890 POIs 🏢
• CA 🇨🇦
  • naics_code = 531210 (Offices of Real Estate Agents and Brokers): +25,626 POIs 🕴🏠
  • naics_code = 446110 (Pharmacies and Drug Stores): +2,722 POIs 🧑‍⚕️💊
• MX 🇲🇽
  • naics_code = 445110 (Supermarkets and Other Grocery (except Convenience) Stores): +70,439 POIs 🛒
  • naics_code = 493110 (General Warehousing and Storage): +12,280 POIs 📦
• BR 🇧🇷
  • naics_code = 445110 (Supermarkets and Other Grocery (except Convenience) Stores): +55,854 POIs 🛒
  • naics_code = 493110 (General Warehousing and Storage): +23,178 POIs 📦

Of course, you can always visit our Places Summary Stats to find more details on our continued growth.

Geometry Improvements

The polygons in our Geometry product are comprised of building footprints, slices of building footprints, hand drawn polygons, polygons extracted from aerial imagery, etc. For each POI, we attach a polygon that we believe to best reflect the POI's real world footprint. At scale, this can be challenging, and we continuously cycle through categories to clean up outliers (as measured by wkt_area_sq_meters) 🕵️‍♀️📏.

This month, we focused on gas station (naics_code = 447110) and hardware store (naics_code = 444110) brands in the US. In the December release, ~30k branded, US gas stations have an improved polygon_wkt, and ~3k branded, US hardware stores have an improved polygon_wkt🎉. Improving the polygon_wkt often improves other inferred geometry metadata as well. As a result, the percent of branded, US gas station POIs with polygon_class = "OWNED_POLYGON" increased from 92% ➡️ 93.7% 📈.

Brands

This month, we added a grand total of 104 brands across 79 countries including:

• Consumer Cellular (SG_BRAND_4db0456989d11907) with 3,894 POIs 📱
• Smurfit Westrock (SG_BRAND_9ef501466a3bc86b) with 664 POIs 📃
• Rocket (SG_BRAND_931f152d39895c8e) with 471 POIs 🛒⛽️
• H&S Energy (SG_BRAND_ad0e95e7a0a4356d) with 261 POIs ⛽️
• Caliber Car Wash (SG_BRAND_86924146e15633a6) with 60 POIs 🚗🚿

👀 Are we missing a brand or country? 👀 Please let us know here

Brand Openings and Closings

• We rely on POI metadata to track store openings and closings, and we are especially interested in understanding open/close dates for branded POIs. It can take more than a month to infer open/close dates, so we report brand open/close metrics on a one month delay.
• In this release, we flagged 1,831 brands with at least one store closure in October 2024 and 1,909 brands with at least one store opening in October 2024. Learn more about our open/close columns here.

Drops ⬇️

• We are ingesting many sources and due to source changes and processing changes, Placekeys do drop over time. In this release, we dropped 2,351,695 Placekeys (65,849 branded and 2,285,846 non-branded).