Jérôme MASSA
Can you tell us about your company?
As an urban planning and commercial real estate consultant, I founded MVMT Conseil a little over two years ago after having led one of France’s leading commercial real estate consulting firms.
My role is to advise private‑sector operators, such as retailers and commercial real estate professionals, as well as public‑sector bodies, including local authorities and urban planning professionals.
What does your role involve?
When I work for private operators, my role involves providing them with market research and studies on the potential and feasibility of commercial projects, whilst taking their business model into account.
When I work on behalf of local authorities or developers, my role is to advise and assist them in implementing a strategy to revitalise commercial activity, or to make recommendations regarding the planning of ground-floor retail spaces.
These various projects may be located in city centres, emerging districts, or peripheral retail areas. For example, I recently completed an economic regulatory impact assessment as part of a retail property restructuring project for a shopping centre in Paris. I am also working on the transformation of a 70,000 m² outlying area in Cannes, with the aim of converting it into a mixed‑use district.
To successfully carry out these assignments, I rely on field surveys, retail market statistics, and commercial mapping… This is where Codata’s datasets come into play, as they provide all the information I need instantly through the platform.
By combining my expertise and on‑site analysis with Codata’s data, I deliver high value‑added recommendations to my clients, enabling them to envision new urban development projects, redevelopment strategies, or transformations of outlying commercial areas.
How do Codata solutions help you carry out your daily missions?
Codata is an essential tool that I use almost every day. I mainly use the commercial sites search engine.
Those requests by retail polarity give me access to key data such as:
- The number of locations located within the commercial site,
- The number of locations occupied by retailers,
- The distribution of shops by activity,
- The commercial vacancy rate,
- The turnover rate of shops.
Vacancy rates in commercial sites —particularly in city centres and shopping centres— have become essential indicators for conducting diagnostics or impact assessments in France. To access this information, I use the location search engine.
Starting from a given unit, I can quickly visualize vacant premises around it through the mapping interface. In just a few clicks, I am able to identify areas with clusters of empty locations as well as sectors that may be in difficulty.
Finally, the feature that traces isochrones at 10, 20 or 30-minute intervals from a specific point on the map saves me time when compiling certain reports.
According to you, what are the strengths of the Codata solution?
I started to work with Codata’s data when it was still printed on paper. Throughout the years, I have observed a steady expansion of the geographical areas covered and studied by Codata.
On-site data collections carried out by the teams are now almost exhaustive, covering a wide range of city centres, including small‑scale commercial sites. This level of enrichment provides exceptional depth and breadth in research. In addition, thanks to the annual surveys conducted by the data-collectors, Codata updates its datasets on a regular basis, ensuring access to recent and highly accurate information.
Another key strength of the solution lies in its data history, which enables users to analyse trends in commercial offer indicator—such as the vacancy rate—over several years.
Finally, the maps are of high quality: they are clear and easy to understand.