In today's competitive retail world, successful brands must carefully plan their physical expansion. Brands have traditionally relied on outdated cumbersome spreadsheets, slide decks and expensive 3rd party data sets that have only stifled innovation. SiteRise has become an industry-leading solution in this area by streamlining the process through critical data consolidation and unique collaboration tools.

Let’s walk through it your standard site planning and selection process:

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1. Market Planning + Territories

Before your team even thinks about possible site locations, they must decide on which markets they are planning to enter first. Many brands use a network of different agents/brokers across the country to get a feel for current market rates. Those brokers all work a little differently so data can be easily fragmented across different spreadsheets or property platforms if your team is looking to expand into a number of markets at once. This can set up teams for failure very early on as important data points should be stored in a single location with a uniform format so teams down the line can easily digest.

SiteRise lets you invite all your brokers into the platform (for free btw) and empowers them to upload critical market information for you. Reducing your manual data entry load and giving your team a single source of truth from the very beginning of the project.

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2. Market Analytics + Site Planning

Gone are the days of going across the street from your main competitor or simply choosing the cheapest suite in a popular shopping mall. Today’s site planning is grounded in data intelligence. Tools like Kalibrate , Placer.ai and Buxton use hundreds of different data sets like household income, foot traffic, market growth and credit card activity to build data models specific to your brand. These tools have done an excellent job of removing the guesswork for real estate teams but where does that data live?

For most brands that treasure trove of data lives only inside of the site planning platform. What if you switch platforms? Or wanted to use more than one to get additional modeling? SiteRise will house that data for you on all current and future locations. This consolidated view, coupled with the ability to analyze potential markets, pushes firms to make strategic and data-driven decisions.

3. Site Selection

Once the planning is done, you need to present your selections internally, usually to a REC or Real Estate Committee for approval. Using SiteRise's centralized view of all planned sites, makes this process much more manageable. The platform offers a detailed look at each property, including address, opening date, lease information, among others allowing you to easily showcase sites to anyone on your team.

SiteRise has helped brands like Vuori, Reformation, GoDog and Gorjana analyze, plan and ultimately select 1000s of sites. Our collaborative first approach not only speeds up the site selection process but creates a solid foundation for teams to build on as they grow their retail empires.