Practical guides for investors doing their homework
There are 24,000 employer pet-care businesses in America — and 146,000 solo operators. The demand signal isn't income. It's the household that treats the dog like a child, and the census can find it.
Read more →We split all 84,000 census tracts by renter share. The majority-renter quarter of America is ten years younger and earns $39,000 less per household than the owner-dominated third — and the same storefront means opposite things in each.
Read more →New Braunfels is one of the fastest-growing places in America, so every listing there says the same thing — young, booming, affluent. We pulled all 74 census tracts. The claim is true. It's also false. It depends which mile.
Read more →Drive-thru coffee is the most commute-dependent category in small business. The site either sits on the morning flow or it doesn't — and the work-from-home shift quietly rewrote which sites do.
Read more →Every trade area gets described as "affluent" or "young" or "growing" — compared to what? We computed the actual median American neighborhood across 84,264 census tracts. Here's the yardstick.
Read more →We counted the census tracts where at least one in five workers works from home. In 2019 there were 514. Today there are 19,882. If your site model was built on pre-2020 commute patterns, it's describing a country that no longer exists.
Read more →Convenience store and gas station locations live or die on traffic and daytime presence. The stop-or-keep-driving decision happens in seconds. Here are the signals to evaluate first.
Read more →Fitness centers operate on narrower demographic windows than most retail categories. Here are the signals to evaluate first on any potential location.
Read more →Day care demand is shaped almost entirely by household composition, not income or population alone. Here are the demographic signals to evaluate first on any potential location.
Read more →Sellers and developers always have a story about why a self-storage site will fill up. The only reliable way to tell whether the story holds up is to pull the demographic data on the trade area and check the claims.
Read more →Most location reports start with a circle drawn around the address. The circle is almost always wrong — real trade areas follow road networks and neighborhood boundaries. Here's how to read one like an analyst.
Read more →Car washes are one of the most location-sensitive small business categories. The same concept can do strong volume on one site and struggle three miles away. Here are the five signals to evaluate first.
Read more →Deal packages cover financials and equipment in detail. What's almost always missing is the location, and that's the gap buyers and SBA lenders fill in late, slowing every deal down.
Read more →QSR demand is driven by who's near the location during the workday and where they're going when they leave. Here are the five signals to evaluate before signing a lease.
Read more →Sellers always have a story about why their laundromat location is a good one. The only reliable way to tell whether the story holds up is to pull the demographic data and check the claims.
Read more →Volume pricing available for teams running multiple reports