The corner is perfect. Good visibility, strong traffic, the right neighbors, a landlord who wants you. Everybody who walks it says the same thing. And you can still lose money there for nine years, because the address is only one of the questions a lease answers, and it’s the one operators spend the most time on.
The lease is the least reversible decision you’ll make. Staff, pricing, hours, product mix, all of that can change in a week. Square footage on a nine-year term can’t. One in four new establishments doesn’t reach its first birthday. Some of those were bad concepts. A lot of them were good concepts in the wrong box.
Two sites on the same street can differ by 30% or more in passing traffic because of a corner, a crossing, or a bus stop. So measure the address, not the neighbourhood.
MyTraffic
Six Checks, In This Order
The order matters. Cheap checks first, so you disqualify weak sites before you pay a lawyer or a surveyor. Any one of these can rule a site out.
Footfall at the door. Twelve months of it, not one. A street that lives off a summer market or a single office tower has a traffic profile that collapses for part of the year. Your rent doesn’t.
The real trade area. Where your customers actually come from is almost never a neat radius. It follows roads and transit and habit, and it stops dead at a river, a highway, or a rival cluster. Draw drive-time polygons, not circles. The primary trade area typically supplies 50 to 80% of revenue.
Demographics against your customer. Write your customer profile down before you look at the data, or you’ll talk yourself into whatever the site happens to show. Set pass-or-fail numbers: household income above a threshold at a minimum share of the trade area, residents within a ten-minute walk, enough daytime workers to carry a Tuesday.
The competitive set. Direct competitors inside the primary trade area, counted, not felt.
Accessibility. Visibility, ingress and egress, parking, transit.
The lease clauses themselves. Which is where good sites go bad.
Where Good Sites Go Bad
An office lease negotiates the box: square footage, rent, term. A retail lease negotiates the ecosystem: who else is in the center, how traffic reaches your door, whether you can grow nearby, and what share of your sales the landlord takes on top of rent. Those provisions can’t be unwound at renewal, so they deserve disproportionate attention now.
Done well, percentage rent aligns you and the landlord. Done poorly, with a low breakpoint and a broad definition of sales, it makes the lease far more expensive than the base rent suggests. Get the property, finance, operations, and legal reads before the lease process starts, in a deal memo, not a phone call.
The Question That Decides the Deal
If you already operate nearby, there’s a check the six above don’t cover. A new location posts real revenue. If a chunk of it walked over from your store three miles away, the brand didn’t grow. It redistributed.
Score all of it against your best existing stores. If you can’t explain why your top performers work in these terms, you can’t tell whether the new site will.
Four things worth un-learning:
- A great address is a great site. Measure the door, not the neighborhood.
- The rent is the rent. Percentage rent, CAM, exclusives, and co-tenancy are the real occupancy cost.
- Strong footfall means strong sales. Traffic that converts matters. Volume without fit is a trap.
- A busy summer street is a good site. Test twelve months, not the peak.