The Value of Fielded Evaluations in the Site Selection Process

Ed Borden, Pitney Bowes Business Insight

Do you ever miss a football game, but read the stats after the game and say “wow, that was a pretty close game – final score 23 -21”. However, if you had actually seen the game in person you would have realized that one team dominated the game for three quarters, but only by a series of miss steps, did the second team have the ability to win the game at the last minute. We see this happen every weekend in the fall – the stats and numbers alone do not provide you with the full flavor and scope of the game… who was better or was the victory deserved. This is similar to the site selection process.

Far too often, businesses are so focus on the numbers, demographics/psychographics characteristics, traffic counts, distance to the nearest competitor, etc. that they do not value the intangible, qualitative aspects of a potential site that can only be garnered from an impartial fielded site evaluation. Even if you are visiting a proposed deployment site for a day, you can gain true insight for answering the questions:

• How good is the ease of access and traffic patterns around the proposed site?
• Do the surrounding neighborhoods appear to be trending up or trending down (are the homes well maintained or are there foreclosures)?
• Are there demographic barriers to the site? – “don’t be caught on the wrong side of the tracks”
• Do the surrounding shopping centers appear to be stable or are they losing retailers (especially national nameplates)?

Because of this intangible, difficult to generate in-house data, we believe that an impartial fielded evaluation of the site should always be conducted. This fielded evaluation can be done by either an outside organization or by an in-house research team. Too often field evaluations are left strictly to the real estate teams, who may not be completely impartial, as they typically have a vested (and compensated) interest in the new deployment (whether successful or not). Our organization has done fielded evaluations for many, many clients and has effectively seen most of the US and Canada, consequentially we have market knowledge that others do not and we can better judge one site versus another more objectively.

Whether you are opening a retail outlet, restaurant, bank or health center, in these challenging economic times, when it is so crucial that new units open to plan, there is real value in paying the relatively low cost of airfare, lodging and time for an impartial professional, either internal or external, to see the site and provide the “flavor” of that site to the forecast, and not to just rely on the in-office generated numbers.