Bill Beck, the owner of Tenant Realty Advisors, has monitored the Boise area's commercial real estate market for clients since 1991. A few months ago, he had a thought: Wouldn't it be interesting to map the history of local commercial development, to show how Boise has grown from a small commercial center into a midsize one?"

He turned to Steve Jewett, of Alliance Title & Escrow Corp., and Nick Schug, a commercial title assistant with Alliance. Using the title company's database of local properties, Jewett and Schug compiled a CD with an interactive collection of local maps using satellite images gathered by Google. Open a satellite view of a neighborhood, and up pops a balloon giving a building's address, square footage and year of construction. Click on a balloon, and you'll see a detailed Alliance parcel-information page based on data from the county assessor.

The maps are part of a report Beck offers to prospective tenants. The report includes bar graphs and pie charts of construction in submarkets over 20-plus years. Meanwhile, Beck joined with Leo Geis, owner of Idaho Airships Inc., to prepare this presentation for Business Insider, using one of Geis's aerial photos.

"The last 20-plus years have seen the transformation of our real estate landscape," Beck says. "To understand what's going on, or to forecast the future, you need to have a historical perspective."

For a copy of the report on a CD, call Beck at 333-7050 or email beck@tenrealad.com.

Aerial view shows where the projects are located