Global Location Strategies (GLS), one of the world’s leading corporate site selection firms, announced today the acquisition of two cloud-based software platforms serving the economic development industry: LocationOne (LOIS) and Lasso.
LOIS is a global platform for finding and marketing available sites and buildings. The platform offers economic developers the opportunity to promote available properties to site selectors and corporate location decision-makers by establishing a property viewer on an organization’s proprietary website. LOIS also boasts a public marketplace with more than 50,000 listings and leverages geographic information system (GIS) layers to view information on workforce, infrastructure, business, and industry data and more.
Lasso is the first-of-its-kind property data collection platform that streamlines RFI responses for corporate location decision-makers. Co-developed by GLS in 2021 with Midwest utility provider Evergy, Lasso provides economic development organizations a space for stakeholder collaboration and offers total data recall, a feature that allows registered participants to pull saved sites and building data into an RFI for consideration. LOIS automatically and seamlessly integrates this recall process for LOIS subscribers.
GLS purchased Evergy’s shares of the Lasso and LOIS applications to assume full ownership. Collectively, the acquisitions further substantiate GLS’s dominance of SaaS solutions for corporate and economic development location services. In 2021, GLS launched Site Shepherd, a comprehensive location analytics platform that the GLS consultancy team uses to screen, score, financially assess, and deliver location recommendations to its clients.
GLS President and Founding Principal Didi Caldwell said, “GLS combines world-class site selection experts, industry-leading technology, and data-driven analytics to enable clients to make long-term, sustainable location decisions. LOIS and Lasso are pivotal tools that dramatically elevate and scale our work.”
After introducing technology solutions to its portfolio of services, GLS has experienced rapid growth. In the last three years alone, GLS has grown from seven employees to 16. Since 2020, in its core business of site selection services, GLS has announced 11 projects producing 4,059 jobs and representing $16.8 billion in capital investment.