We’ve heard from many of our retail clients how important it is to equip teams with research and analytics tools to make the smartest possible decisions. SiteSeer is exactly such a tool that helps retailers…
- Find and choose the best locations
- Develop a data-driven expansion strategy
- Analyze customers to determine their needs, habits, travel patterns, and more
- Analyze competitors to understand your greatest competitive threats
- Maximize your sales potential
- …and much more
Model Builder: Finding possible sites to further analyze
When it comes to evaluating the potential of future stores/locations, the tools you use are critically important. After all, one bad location can tank your business (or at a minimum, hurt your overall profitability). You can build models to help you do this, but not all research tools make it easy to do so.
SiteSeer does—with Model Builder.
Model Builder is our build-it-yourself “BIY” tool for screening future sites. It helps users create Site Scorecards by choosing key performance indicators that matter most to their chain or business—things like demographics and population in the trade area, customers’ lifestyle characteristics, site characteristics, nearest competitors, and other traits.
Location Profiles: Scorecard “templates” that users can customize
Although you can build a model from scratch using Model Builder, doing so takes time and a thorough understanding of those key performance indicators for your business—and there are many KPIs to choose from in the SiteSeer system. For a small or newer retail chain or business with just a few existing locations (and not a lot of data), that’s not as easy as it sounds. For these users, SiteSeer’s Location Profiles are very useful.
Location Profiles are ready-built Site Scorecards for hundreds of chains across the U.S. The SiteSeer development team analyzed the historical development pattern of each chain to determine their KPIs. These Location Profiles give SiteSeer users a starting point when creating models of their own.
If you’re a smaller retail or other chain, you can browse the Location Profiles to find one that your chain is similar to (or aspires to be), clone it, and adjust any variables as needed. This is a huge time saver…for our tenant rep broker clients too. If you represent a retail/restaurant/other chain that’s asking you to find possible sites in a certain market, you can use Location Profiles to leverage the analysis we’ve already completed.
Adapt any KPIs in the model as you like, of course. Your business or client might want to see what tweaking the population and income variables does to the model. Thanks to real-time analysis functionality (the Prospects feature of Model Builder), you can do that and instantly see how those adjustments affect your Hot Spot.
Hot Spots: The visual output of your model on a map
What’s a Hot Spot?
After you build a Site Scorecard with all the variables that are important to your business and run your model, SiteSeer runs that site selection profile against potential locations across the region or market you choose. The visual output of that analysis is a map with a Hot Spot theme. A Hot Spot color codes the map so that the most viable (i.e., “hot”) locations stand out easily. Like this:
Want to know more about a specific site that’s shaded red (hot) on the map? Zoom in, right click, and add that site (the address that comes up) to SiteSeer. Run the Site Scorecard for that specific location, and SiteSeer produces a site report card (with an overall site grade of A through F, based on how well the location fits your success criteria). Like this:
Hot Spots allow you to drill down to specific sites and run Site Scorecards to evaluate the potential of different locations. From there, you might look for available space there (or as close as possible). Model Builder’s Prospects functionality lets you see in real time what adjusting KPIs or adding new variables does to your model and Hot Spot.
You’ll also be able to determine whether a specific site passes or fails your absolute must-have site requirements…so you don’t waste any time pursuing a site that doesn’t meet one of those requirements. Like this:
Affordable Site Analysis at Your Fingertips
Model Builder is an incredibly powerful tool in SiteSeer, and our Location Profiles on retail and other chain businesses are extremely popular for great reason!
For an affordable price, SiteSeer users can get thorough analysis on all kinds of chains—analysis they’d never be able to acquire on their own (or not without an experienced analyst and hundreds of hours of time.
Not to mention the cost of licensing data to perform this type of analysis. With SiteSeer, you can leverage our experience and expertise and build site screening models similar to the most successful chains in the country—just by subscribing to the platform.
Demo SiteSeer Today
Let us show you what our clients love about SiteSeer and the Model Builder tool. Contact us for a short demo, and bring your questions. We’ll show you how this tool can put you a big step ahead of your competitors and make data-driven site decisions that make your business successful.
