The Placer platform provides multiple tools to help you determine the best business for your location by chain or business type. Use True Trade Areas, Visitor Journeys, and Void Analysis to discover unmet demand, visitors’ favorite chains, and the best-fit retailer based on a series of insights including demographics, co-tenancy, visits, and cannibalization.

You’ll be able to answer these questions after reading this article:

1. How can you gauge unmet demand in a trade area?
2. Who is the best-fit retailer for your location?
3. How can you best understand your customers’ preferences?

Get started with the following steps:

Step 1: Check the supply and demand in the trade area using the Market Outlook dataset in Audience Profile 

a. Open the Placer report for the POI^{Point (Location) of Interest.} and navigate to Demographics. Under Audience Profile, select the trade area type you would like to use (in this example, we have selected drive time).

Learn about Trade Area

b. Select the STI: Market Outlook dataset from the drop-down menu and choose to view results by either Business Type or Product Line. If the dataset is not visible in the menu, click View more Datasets to add it. You are able to view which business types have unmet demand in the area selected. In this example, see the unmet demand in the trade area for automobile dealers.

Step 2: Run a Placer Void Analysis on your location to see which chains are the best fit

a. From the Property report, navigate to Void Analysis^{A tool that generates a list of the most promising potential tenants for any property based on a variety of factors, such as demographic match, cannibalization, frequent co-tenants, and more.} in the left sidebar. This will launch a new tab in the Advanced Reports section. By adjusting the left-side filters, you can control relevant factors such as store size, tenant categories, tenant expansion rate, and more. While this list provides specific chains and their relative fit score, you can also review the list for trends - i.e. are many of the top matches restaurants or apparel retailers?

Learn about Void Analysis

b. Choose a retailer from the list, and click Match Analysis to open the detail page.

c. Here you have a full view of the match between your chosen location and this retailer in terms of demographics, cannibalization^{Cannibalization occurs when revenues at a brand’s store location drop as a result of opening an additional store nearby.} of existing stores, and frequent co-tenants.

Pro Tip: you can also run Void Analysis on empty land or a random address. Navigate to Advanced Reports in the top navigation bar, click on Void Analysis in the left sidebar, click on Add New Report, and either enter a street address or select Drop Pin on a specific location.

Step 3: Review your visitors’ favorite chains and places 

The preferences of your current customers can provide powerful insights into which businesses would thrive in any specific location.

a. In the Property reports, navigate to Visitor Journey^{The flow of commercial activity to and from any property that shows the top "Prior" and "Post" locations.} in the left sidebar. Scroll down to Favorite Chains. This allows you to see which chains your visitors have frequented the most during your report’s time period. For example, below you see that the #1 apparel retailer visited at least 3 times in the year by Madison Yards visitors is Ross Dress for Less.

Learn about Visitor Journey

b. Scroll down one more section to Favorite Places. This is similar to Favorite Chains but it’s further broken down into the individual location level. You can see that the #1 restaurant visited at least 3 times is the Chick-Fil-A around the corner, but the #2 is another Chick-Fil-A in the area. 

Pro Tip: a number of other datasets available in the Placer platform such as Mosaic Psychographics, Spatial.ai Proximity, and AGS Behavior & Attitudes can provide additional visitor preference details.