‍The Challenge

Marketing a 2 acre parcel in a small town with many dark boxes

Randall Parish, an independent broker with NAI SunVista in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is used to unique deals as a landlord-focused broker in an office and retail market (NM) that is not as large as other states and metros. Randall covers much of the state, and is used to doing smaller deals in tertiary markets for his clients.

He highlights a recent deal, which became the basis for this case: “Tucumcari, NM is at best a tertiary market, with a population of about 5,000 people. It was at one point a more vibrant community when route 66 was the main route... From a retail perspective, if you drive through town you see many antiquated or dark boxes, with few signs. I was connected to a businessman who used to live in Tucumcari and had since retired out of state, who had a 2 acre piece of land. He asked me to market that piece of land for him.”

“I drove out to Tucumcari and thought, ‘this is going to be a tough sell.’ It’s at a good intersection of State Route 54 and I-40, but it was going to be a heavy lift, and the owner understood that. He told me ‘this isn’t going to be easy, but I think there’s some value there.’ I got to work.”

Interesting neighbors: fuel, convenience stores, and a hotel owned by one of them

Not yet a Placer customer able to pull foot traffic data at the time, Randall drove to Tucumcari to research nearby stores and how busy they looked, noting a Love’s Travel Stop and a Flying J located next to his parcel. He was impressed by what he saw.

“While I was out there I talked to quite a few of the locals, visited a few businesses, and just kind of poked around. Well, right next to this land there are two major convenience stores and fuel chains, a Love’s Travel Center and a Flying J.  I was sitting in my car looking, and at one of them the door was swinging nonstop. And it’s a large facility, large enough that there’s a dog park (which I’ve never seen at a Love’s) and an EV charging station.”

Randall went into the center and asked how many visits they had per day, but didn’t get anything. He then looked at a newer Fairfield Inn across the street, and learned that Love’s had built that hotel through their hospitality arm.

The wheels started turning in his mind.

“If Love’s…put up a hotel, then that tipped my hat that something is going on here. But I kept thinking: how can I uncover that… and how can I use that in my marketing?”

He kept digging, and while he didn’t get exact numbers, he learned qualitatively that this Love’s was a very strongly performing store. Little did he know, Placer could confirm what he heard anecdotally: this station was always busy.

Learn more about Hourly Visits

An offer under contract, then hesitation

Before long, Randall had a call from an investor from out of state that was driving through the state, had stopped in Tucumcari, and happened to see his sign. The investor was considering a couple different retail concepts to put on the land. Randall explained what he learned and saw about the intersection, and things looked good. The investors went under contract for the lot.

And then they called back a few weeks later with uncertainty.

Randall wasn’t entirely surprised: “They made another trip through New Mexico and spent more time in Tucumcari. They called me and said ‘we understand this is a great intersection,’ but they were unsure about the potential viability of a deal in such a small city, and I understood that 100%.”

‍The Solution‍

Randall Gets Placer.ai and instantly quantifies how popular this Love’s is

At about this point, Randall and team happened to sign up for Placer, and one of the first things he did was look at foot traffic for the Love’s and Flying J stores near that property. His goal? Find a way to put into numbers how good the opportunity was at the location.

In Randall’s words, the results were “mind-blowing.” He  explained: “I pulled the Love’s locations for the state, and I couldn’t believe what I saw. The Tucumcari location was #1 with over 1.65 MILLION visitors in 2019 (pre-COVID), which is mind blowing. That was 40% more than the #2 store. Placer showed that this store saw almost 2x the entire population of Albuquerque (900k) in a single year! And that’s just one store. That helped me paint a far better picture to the buyer.”

Learn more about Ranking Index

The Outcome

Unsurprisingly, the buyer continued in the deal and closed shortly after Randall shared what he learned from Placer. They are now working on developing the site.

Placer brings cost effective insights to close small and big deals alike

Placer gave Randall what he needed to close the deal in Tucumcari: insights that are efficient and cost effective, allowing him to close the deal without undue amounts of time and effort, which could hurt the economics of a deal like that. At about $250k for the deal, Randall’s success with Placer means he can tackle smaller deals like this more opportunistically.

The exciting part? What Randall and his team learned when using Placer to support this deal, and how they’re using it now to win even bigger deals. As of publication, Randall’s team is far in the process of courting a well-known national retailer to open their first location in the state in over a decade, using Placer features like customer demographics, trade area, and cannibalization modeling to prove the use case.

We look forward to hearing the progress of this deal, and to hearing of Randall and team closing many more deals with the help of Placer in the future!

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