“I always ask: ‘what does the Placer data say? Stop estimating and get the real data.’ With Placer, we make more informed decisions and realize economic impact faster, turning what would be a six-month commitment into a project with results in a week - or less!”

~ Shannon Dick, City Commissioner at Garden City, KS

The Challenge

Developer Must estimate economic incentives needed to attract tenants to new development

Garden City, KS is a city of 28k people in Western Kansas, over 200 miles away from the nearest major metros of Amarillo, TX,  Colorado Springs, CO, and Wichita, KS. Given its location and size, Garden City faced an uphill battle when it came to convincing large, national chains - more accustomed to bigger, metropolitan markets - to open locations in their town. A new development in the city was organized as a community improvement district (CID) to assess an additional tax for infrastructure and other elements needed to develop the property, and sought to bring in a highly in-demand coffee retailer as a tenant. Looking to the City for insights, they asked: what economic incentive would be reasonable to convince the national coffee chain to open a new location?

The situation was unique: Garden City did not yet have a standalone location for the chain. As a result, they lacked a way to accurately project sales for the potential location, calculate the value of the CID tax, and understand the correct incentive to offer. Fortunately, Shannon Dick, City Commissioner and Director of Analytics for the county, was an expert Placer user.

Learn more about Market Landscape

The Solution

Placer insights on proxy concepts help the city approximate sales, calculate correct incentive

Given the lack of a standalone location for this coffee chain in town, Shannon knew he could use proxies - similar concepts to the coffee chain - as a starting point. With the Market Landscape report, Shannon looked at the top drive-thru Fast Food & QSR properties in Garden City’s trade area, then analyzed each brand’s Garden City location. Many national chains’ Garden City locations ranked in the 94th percentile and above for their category nationwide and had 192% more foot traffic than their chain’s median foot traffic nationally, suggesting strong performance expectations for the coffee retailer.

While rankings and foot traffic are a good indication of performance, the Garden City team still needed to quantify, in dollars and cents, how much sales, and thus, sales tax revenue, a new location could generate. To do this, they multiplied the 192% higher foot traffic at their locations by the median sales for the coffee chain’s locations to calculate expected sales and, thus, estimated CID tax revenue, helping the developer to understand the optimal incentive amount they should offer the coffee chain.

Learn more about Chains Metrics‍

Garden City also shared performance data around the chain’s smaller “in-store” location at the local Target, validating anecdotes about how select times saw half the Target parking lot filled with coffee-seeking visitors. In other words, while the coffee retailer would open its first standalone location for its chain in Garden City, it was not taking a leap of faith on an untested market.

The Outcome

SUCCESS: Coffee Chain Joins new development with its 1st standalone location in 200+ miles

The Garden City team shared their estimate for potential sales revenue with the developer, who used the CID tax calculations over a 22-year period to calculate an incentive, one which the tenant accepted. With the popular coffee chain as the linchpin and other tenants signed, the city is confident in the success of the new development, which is currently in construction.

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