Sqwyre is an online market intelligence service helping you assess opportunities and risks for every commercial property in England and Wales.
Risk and reward are not evenly distributed. Chance plays an extremely large part in success or failure. Our objective at Sqwyre is to provide a dispassionate view, to strip away hype and anxiety, and tell you what we see, and the range of what is possible.
We do that by aggregating open data on rents, staff numbers and salaries, vacancies, and economic activity to bring you comprehensive business intelligence for individual industrial, office and retail business premises.
This helps you find the right customers, in the right numbers, and in premises that are in the right place, and of the right size, for rent you can afford.
If you're using Sqwyre, you don't have to hope your business will be successful. You'll know.
Big business can quickly become abstract and glossily plastic, but smaller, owner-run enterprises are all too human.
Their owners bleed, sweat and suffer the pains of their companies, and they celebrate and rejoice in their success. All too often, though, the circumstances of the markets in which they operate are invisible and uncertain.
Sqwyre exists to even up the availability of market intelligence between small companies and large corporations. Our data are derived from public sources, reducing the cost of providing information. However, that does not mean that aqcuiring these data are easy.
Much of our data are derived from Freedom of Information requests. When we started, most local authorities (of 348) refused to publish citing the risk of such data being used to commit crime. We proved, in a number of appeals to the Information Commissioner, that such fears were complete fallacies.
To date, ICO has issued 15 decision notices in our favour, compelling local authorities to release ratepayer and vacancy data.
95% of local authorities now publish, but – for the outliers – this prompted a type of arms-race in which they made ever-more alarming claims as to the threats they face, leading to a cycle of further information requests, refusals and appeals.
We continue to pursue these refusals via the First Tier Information Tribunal and, as we secure publication, that data will be added to our existing database.
Further information on our legal travails can be read here.
Sqwyre is the hard-won result of years of accumulating an array of public data into what is now one of the most comprehensive business intelligence databases in England and Wales.
To support our work, and to gain benefit to additional features and regional data aggregations, please buy a membership. If you find that none of our membership options offer sufficient insight then contact us for a custom consultation.