Michael Davis
Michael Chen
November 4, 2025
For brick-and-mortar founders, choosing the right location is one of the most important decisions you will ever make. The right space can help you grow for the next decade. The wrong one can drain time, money, and energy before you even get off the ground.
Many brick-and-mortar business owners rely heavily on instinct and personal taste when selecting a location, but the strongest brands combine that intuition with disciplined, data-driven validation. That is why it is as much of an art as it is a science. We spoke with owners, brokers, and data experts to understand how to marry the two together in real-world location strategy.
The Art: Trusting Instincts and Knowing the Neighborhood
It’s tempting to think that the more data you have, the safer your decision will be. But numbers alone can’t tell the whole story. The art of location selection comes from what you notice and feel on the ground. Sitting in a café for an afternoon, chatting with the barista, or asking nearby owners how often customers complain about parking can reveal truths that no traffic count ever will. And don’t just stop at one visit! Multiple site visits give you and your team time to notice new details about the unit, the broader property, and the neighborhood.
As our experts point out below, many successful expansions begin with intuition. Business owners who know their neighborhoods well often see opportunities long before the spreadsheets catch up.
Robert LeBlanc, CEO of hospitality firm LeBLANC+SMITH, has built a portfolio of unique brick-and-mortar concepts across New Orleans. When it came time to expand beyond their first music venue, his team chose to open a cocktail bar in the same neighborhood. That decision gave them the advantage of familiarity: they already understood what the community wanted and what was missing.
For Robert, everything always come back to the neighborhood. “Choose to be in neighborhoods that you enjoy and that inspire you, and neighborhoods in which you can make a meaningful contribution to their community.”
Even at the largest companies, this “art” of location selection instinct still matters. Brett Robinson, founder of Brandmarch, recalled consulting with one of Amazon’s earliest executives and seeing firsthand how much weight they still put on visiting stores and speaking directly with managers and customers. “This was someone who had access to more consumer data than almost anyone, yet they still valued what could be learned from a two-minute conversation,” Brett said.
If you don't know the numbers, you're gambling. The best operators I know treat data like a compass, not a GPS. It should point you in the right direction, but you still have to navigate the terrain yourself.
The magic is, undoubtedly, in marrying the qualitative and quantitative insights. To paint a holistic picture of any given site, you have to get from behind the spreadsheet and into the neighborhood. Boots on the ground. Connect with the people.
As an operator, you need to master the art of sales forecasting in new markets. Good forecasting paired with a solid comprehension of the investment required to build out and ramp-up business at a new location is a fierce combination for business owners who are considering new locations.
The unknowns kill a business more than the knowns. Even the world’s largest coffee chain closed 600+ U.S. stores overnight during COVID. If billions in resources and advanced models couldn’t prevent that, it proves a simple truth: money cannot buy certainty. Success comes from sharper, disciplined use of data — integrating multiple layers and continuously validating forecasts against real performance.
The Science: Using Data to Reduce Blind Spots
While instinct plays a role, data is essential for reducing risk. The most experienced brokers and data experts emphasized that too many owners skip this step or do not go deep enough. Equally important is matching the numbers against the realities of opening a new location, which is more expensive than ever. Owners also need to factor in the increase in general and administrative costs that comes with building a support system to sustain multiple locations.
“If you don’t know your numbers, you’re gambling,” said restaurant real estate expert Edie Weintraub. Her non-negotiable, must-knows include:
True trade area data. Not just a radius on a map, but who is really walking, driving, or biking to reach you.
Daypart patterns. What time of day does your business serve? Lunch requires a strong daytime population. Dinner or brunch may rely more on evening residents or weekend traffic.
Competitive landscape. Nearby competition matters, but what matters more is their market position, performance, and whether the area can support multiple options.
Real occupancy costs. Rent plus CAM, taxes, insurance, and utilities — and how those stack up as a percentage of projected sales. Homegrown pro tip: Assume these costs will go up annually!
Labor and supply chain realities. These vary dramatically from state to state, and can turn a seemingly promising site into a risky one if ignored.
Edie also urges owners to validate data from multiple sources and then layer the human story on top. “Data will tell you where the traffic is, but walking the block tells you why people are there and how they behave.”
Edie’s colleague and fellow real estate professional Courtney Hewitt agrees that the magic lies in combining the qualitative with the quantitative. In addition to Edie’s top tips, she recommends looking at parking ratios, public transit access, and even social media heat maps to understand which blocks are attracting people. A mile radius might look promising on paper, but Courtney has found that geotags on Instagram or TikTok can reveal hyper-specific hotspots where customers actually gather.
For Kimberly Boardman, Vice President at Selig, data only becomes useful when it’s contextualized. She stresses that operators must pair data with rigorous sales forecasting and a clear understanding of the investment required to build out and ramp up a new location.
“Data on its own is interesting, but it doesn’t become useful until a business owner has defined their customer,” Kimberly explained. With that clarity, only then can demographic data unlock powerful insights, whether you’re a fast-food concept tracking daily vehicle counts or a high-end lunch spot studying how many office workers are within a five-minute walk.
She also urges owners to study the health of their competitive set. A strong market should feel additive, where your business becomes an “and” for the customer, not an “or.”
Taken together, Edie, Courtney, and Kimberly’s advice demonstrates the power of combining instinct and ground-level knowledge with disciplined, quantitative analysis. But data in retail real estate isn’t standing still. A new wave of tools is making it possible to go deeper, faster, and with more precision than ever. That’s where Shobit Gupta, founder of MapZot AI, comes in.
For Shobit, the unknowns kill a business more than the knowns. Data’s role is to reduce blind spots and help business owners make confident, forward-looking decisions. Mapzot uses AI to integrate demographic, traffic, and financial data, helping operators see patterns that aren’t obvious on paper.
Shobit urges owners to focus on three best practices:
Get your data in order. Many businesses struggle because their own sales, customer, and cost data live in disconnected spreadsheets or systems. When those pieces don’t talk to each other, the result is confusion instead of clarity. Organizing and integrating this information is the first step before layering on third-party tools.
Insist on methodology. When you use third-party data tools, don’t just accept the outputs at face value. Ask the provider how the data was collected, what models were used, and what assumptions were built in. Different tools can tell different stories, and without understanding the “how,” you won’t know which story to trust.
Mapzot.ai is part of a growing toolkit for site selection, built to forecast outcomes and flag potential missteps early—explaining the ‘why’ behind the data. Other platforms like Placer.ai and Kalibrate are also reshaping how operators analyze trade areas and competitive density.
Choosing a location is never simple, but balancing both sides of the equation gives founders the best chance at long-term success. If you’re on the hunt for a new location, let us know! We’re happy to put you in touch with the folks in this article and other experts across the U.S.
At Homegrown, we help entrepreneurs make these decisions on their own terms and grow in ways that align with their vision. If you found this helpful, follow us on LinkedIn or subscribe to our newsletter to stay up-to-date on our latest insights!
How To Pick Your Next Location
