One of the many benefits of joining a franchise organization is that you can leverage its expertise to choose the best possible site for your business. However, while a franchise can give you the basic site selection criteria, every community and location is different. As such, talking to the right people can help you find not just a good location today, but a prime location that should remain one for years to come.

The Basics

There are a few basic indicators that can guide site selection. Most are demographic, but not all:

• Zoning. In communities that have zoning codes, a site’s permitted use is the most basic criteria. After all, without a very good reason for a zoning adjustment, you won’t be able to, for instance, build a quick lube shop right in the middle of a neighborhood on a parcel zoned for residential uses.
• Radius Population. Many franchise organizations use population within a given radius to determine if a site can support a location. For instance, an area that has 10,000 people in a 3 mile radius offers 10 times as many potential customers as one with 1,000 people.
• Age and Household Size. The average or median age and household size in an area can give you a sense of who lives there, which can help you determine if that area is fertile ground for your business.
• Income Levels. An area’s income level also gives you a sense of the type of consumers in it. Higher isn’t always better, either. Depending on your business’s offerings and its pricing strategy, you might prefer a middle- or even lower-class neighborhood.
• Traffic Counts. Traffic breeds traffic and, as such, a site with more cars going by every day is likely to generate more business than one with less. For many businesses, this is the most important site selection criterion of all (other than zoning).

Site Selection for Prime Locations

The problem with these basic site selection criteria is that they don’t always go deep enough. For instance, if an area has an average age of 33 and household size of 3.1, is it because it is filled with young families or because it has a few retirees on its east side and many young singles living with multiple roommates on the west side? With this in mind, one of the most important real-world site selection criteria is to select sites by physically visiting them.

Having someone to talk to is also a fundamental part of the selection process for prime sites. A local connection can explain the community, how people actually move about it, and what changes are occurring. Local site selection help can also open doors with government agencies to help identify opportunities for economic incentives or for easier permitting.

If your process is national, having a relationship with someone that can coordinate the process is also important. Your tenant representative can find local experts to help him. He can also help identify which communities are likely to have the prime sites that you need for a successful franchise business.

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