Alberta Site Selection Tool launched

Alberta Municipalities’ Economic Strategy Committee received an update from Alberta Jobs, Economy and Trade last week on its recently launched Alberta Site Selection Tool. The innovative online tool gives investors a new way to find opportunities in Alberta and enables municipalities and other economic development partners to promote our province's communities as destinations of choice to potential investors.

Alberta’s Site Selector Tool consolidates information on property listings with infrastructure and socio-economic data from the Alberta Regional Dashboard. The benefits of this tool are twofold:

• It gives businesses and investors access to data they need to make informed decisions about expanding or setting up shop in Alberta.
• It gives municipalities and economic developers a platform on which to raise the profile of opportunities in their communities.

The Tool includes data on:

• 89 indicators from the Alberta Regional Dashboard, including socio-economic, labour, demographic, and industry data. 
• Infrastructure details such as major highways and high-load corridors, rail line and rail terminal information, airports, transmission lines, irrigation networks, historic sites, and hospitals.
• Property listing information provided through data partner SpaceList, which aggregates listings from many commercial brokers.
• Municipal contact details (on an opt-in basis).

The Site Selector Tool offers municipal contact information, which serves as a central point for investors who want to communicate with you regarding doing business in your community. It also ensures the right information reaches the right people within your municipal government. To share your contact information, please contact Senior Economic Analyst matthew.sheremeta [at] gov.ab.ca (Matthew Sheremeta).

The tool offers many benefits to municipalities, including:

• Increased visibility into properties in communities and their connections to nearby infrastructure. 
• Ability to upload properties for free through SpaceList to be included within the Alberta Site Selector Tool. 
• Ability quickly pull together critical information on nearby infrastructure to support investment requests.