Whether buying or leasing Tucson commercial real estate, the site you pick depends on a systematic approach to evaluating potential locations.
You don’t have to rely on a gut feeling as to whether your business will do well in a particular Tucson retail space.
You can use proven scientific tools to measure or study specific sites to intelligently estimate their future potential. Site selection is less an art than a science.
Remember, site evaluation is a process. During this process you objectively assess the quality or suitability of real estate for a specific business concept.
To evaluate a site, you must measure the relative quality of a piece of commercial real estate compared to other like-pieces of real estate, using all the objective and subjective information available.
Customer Behavior
Picture your customers when determining the effects of location. Understand the profile of your customers, such as
- how much effort they will put into finding your business
- why they would choose you over your competition
- how they connect visits to your location with other activities
- when they will stop by from home or work
- their neighborhood demographics.
Site Quality vs. Business Success
Location, location, location—it’s not as simple a formula as it seems in the Tucson commercial real estate market or elsewhere.
In many markets today, predicting sales is not the same as evaluating site quality. While site quality contributes to sales, it’s only one of many factors that contribute to a sales prediction.
Sales forecasting or sales prediction is the process of predicting the expected sales volume for a particular location. Some of the factors to consider include
- market presence
- marketing
- operations
- customer perception
- timing
- site evaluation.
Site evaluation measures the quality of the location, taking into account
- demographics
- visibility
- access
- current and future competition.
In site selection, do not confuse site evaluation and sales forecasting. It is very difficult to separate the part of sales explained by site quality from the parts depending on other factors.
Evaluating site quality and evaluating risk are separate problems. Factors creating high risk are only partially related to the factors determining site quality.
If your new location has to be immediately successful, your most important evaluations may have only a little to do with site quality and more to do with marketing and image.
Elements of Good Site Evaluation
A site of average quality can be a very high risk due to a few factors like visibility, strategic position or too much competition.
Site evaluation often includes several interested parties and each party has a somewhat different reason for liking or disliking a site. Therefore, you need to focus on objective features that determine the success of a site in order to effectively evaluate the site for business success.
These features that determine site quality are unlikely to change several years down the road. A good location will always prevail over a poor location, but good location does not guarantee good sales or quick success.
Short-term sales vary from market to market, and site to site. Short-term sales are often mistakenly the only measure in site evaluation.
Many factors contribute to site quality and many factors determine sales in any location. Short-term sales are rarely a trustworthy indicator of site quality.
Instead, develop an objective systematic process of site evaluation, including solid knowledge of your customers and a strategic plan for market development. That will make your site selection based on facts, not just what feels right.
Intelligent Site Evaluation
Spend the money necessary for a smart site evaluation process before you buy or lease Tucson commercial real estate. This one-time expense gives you an effective picture of
- customer research
- market selection
- site evaluation.
Waiting until things fall apart to spend money on site evaluation will cost a great deal more. The consequences for the integrity of your business can be devastating. Spend early to increase your earnings later.
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