In commercial real estate or shopping center development, research is essential to identifying strong, high-quality tenants. Vacancies can be costly to any shopping center owner, and yesterday’s methods of finding tenants are often inefficient and unreliable.
In today’s world, brokers working on behalf of retail and service clients are given specific parameters on the types of markets and spaces they locate. Brokers leasing shopping centers have to go find great retail tenants by assembling detailed site packages and targeting them directly.
That’s where tools like Void Analysis Pro come in.
Void Analysis is a real estate analytics tool that brokers and developers can use by itself or as part of the SiteSeer Professional platform.
What does Void Analysis do?
Put simply, Void Analysis is an analytics tool to help you as a broker or shopping center developer identify best-fit tenants.
When you run a Void Analysis on a site, you receive a detailed report with a list of businesses that are
missing (or “void”) from that trade area. Those businesses are given a score of 0 to 100—called a Match Score—which gives you an idea how well the site’s attributes match the business’s typical location profile (looking at metrics such as consumer demographics, lifestyle attributes, neighborhood type, and community size).
Another element of a Void Analysis report is the Cotenant Score. When entering an address in Void Analysis, you can also add any cotenants, and the tool will assign a score to each. That Cotenant Score indicates how often a cotenant is shared by that particular retailer or business.
With this information, you can also run a Retail Match model (in SiteSeer Pro) on any businesses in the Void Analysis report that caught your attention. This helps you analyze individual locations of those retail/other chains to identify those that are most like your site. If Void Analysis gave John’s Hardware a Match Score of 90 (indicating that the chain has often located in sites similar to yours), running Retail Match might show you that their Apple Avenue location in Boise, Idaho, scored 95, while their Daniel Drive location across town received a Match Score of 80.
The best chain businesses use data science in their site selection process
You already know that retail chains today make decisions about where to open new locations based on data rather than hunches.
Large chains have highly experienced research teams that analyze everything about their business, including:
- Their customers’ shopping habits and demographic traits (including their age, income, and lifestyle attributes)
- The demand in a market for their product or service
- The competitive landscape in a market, including complementary retailers and competing retailers
In addition, large retail chains apply their learnings to their site selection strategy. The more they know about their target customer and market, the better chance they have of choosing locations that will be successful. The real estate teams of these chains are working from a list of criteria when searching for new sites, and it’s unlikely they’ll stray far from that “must-have” list. Their site criteria might include:
- Median household income
- Employee base within a certain mile radius
- Proximity to other types of businesses
- Vehicular traffic counts
- Adequate ingress and egress
- Dedicated parking
- Site visibility and foot traffic
As a broker or developer, your job is to find new tenants. To do this well, you must think like a retailer. Void Analysis helps you do that.
Using our fictional example above, you could approach John’s Hardware with a detailed site packet that shows them how your site meets their typical site requirements—and their Apple Avenue location is especially a close match.
Void Analysis helps your site stand out
There’s no doubt that retail chains are certainly going to do their own analysis about prospective sites. But a site packet with more than just demographic data about the trade area might catch their attention. Especially if that site packet shows them detailed data about how the site is similar to both their chain and specific locations they already operate. Bonus points if you do further due diligence to learn that a certain location (e.g., Apple Ave. in Boise!) with a high Match Score is one of their top-performing locations.
From a practical perspective, Void Analysis is a time saver for you. It helps you narrow your research so you’re not wasting time chasing down the wrong tenants. It enables you to supplement your own expertise about a market. That’s a huge advantage if you’re a broker trying to stand out from your competitors.
Three ways to buy Void Analysis reports
You have three ways to run Void Analysis reports:
- One report at a time – We offer Void Analysis reports for $199.99 each and Void Analysis Pro reports (which include Match Scores for each chain listed and Cotenant Score plus other cotenant information) for $299.99 each.
- As part of a SiteSeer subscription - When you subscribe to SiteSeer, you get access to unlimited Void Analysis Pro reports as well as all of SiteSeer’s other valuable tools.
- As a standalone Void Analysis subscription - If you just want unlimited Void Analysis reports (no t the other SiteSeer tools and features) our unlimited Void Analysis On Demand subscription is a great option.
Contact us for more information about Void Analysis unlimited or the other features in SiteSeer for real estate professionals!
