Retail Site Selection 101 seminar held at River City Extreme

The Wright County Economic Development Partnership held a Retail Site Selection Presentation at their monthly noon luncheon event on September 11th at River City Lanes Extreme Bowling in Monticello .

Peter Dugan of CB Richard Ellis was the presenter. Both KKE Architects and LarsonAllen were sponsors for this event.

Peter Dugan started with an explanation of sophisticated data analysis that can be done for a retailer for any given location. The goal of any retail development should be optimal deployment of the shopping district. A mistake in the layout will hurt all of the retailers in the site. Merely being concerned about “cherry picking”, or getting the choicest spot can create a number of failures for neighboring retailers, which ultimately would hurt your site. First of all, a developer should begin with an understanding of the fundamentals such as knowledge of the geography, the mobility of the people, access to the site, and the demographics (both density and profiles). An analysis of the target population should include a macro analysis: where are the customers, who are they, and what do they want? A macro analysis that can be purchased is called a “market potential index”. Also, a micro analysis should be done to study what makes the site preferable, and to identify the psychological and physical barriers. Dugan recommends using a Polygon to describe a target population area, because a simple radius doesn't take into account the psychological and physical barriers.

Knowing the local community profile can be more important sometimes than the available demographic data. For instance, the data doesn't take into account the transient population. An example given was the community of Duluth , which has a large college population, which does not show up in the data. If you were developing a site for a pizzeria, you may want to be in that market, but the data wouldn't help you identify that target population. For reasons like that it is important that a developer does what Dugan calls, “ground truthing the demos”; or driving and walking the area and talking to the people in the area. This will give the developer a visual sense of what the site would mean as well as discover any unknown information.

The Partnership exists to enhance the business climate of Wright County and help create more jobs in Wright County . The strategies the Partnership uses to achieve its mission include being an information resource and finding technical assistance; aiding business development through Business Retention & Expansion visits, providing financing resources, and providing business information and training through seminars and workshops. Also, the Partnership markets Wright County to business site locators, and maintains an excellent website, which includes a listing of commercial and industrial property available in Wright County (see www.wrightpartnership.org ). The Partnership also assists with Workforce Development and has gathered economic statistical information, which is available on its website.