6 best site selection tools for commercial real estate brokers

For a broker, the right site selection tool is often the one whose a client will open, read and pass along to the people who sign the lease

MOST SITE SELECTION software is sold to the brand. Franchise development teams, retail real estate departments and restaurant chains are the buyers these vendors describe, and the plans are packaged for a company choosing where its own next store should go.

A few products are built, at least in part, for the other side of the table. A tenant-rep broker assembling a shortlist, or a leasing agent pitching a center to prospective tenants, needs evidence a client will accept, delivered in a form that client will open.

What Goes Into a Client-Ready Location Package

A location package is the set of evidence a broker puts in front of a client to support a site. It usually has five parts:

• Visits: how many people come to the site or its neighbors today, and when.
• Demographics: who lives and works around it, by age, income and household.
• Psychographic fit: lifestyle and spending segments that describe what those people like, which lets a broker compare them with a tenant’s customers.
• Trade area: the zone a store draws most of its customers from, often drawn as a drive-time area that follows the road network.
• A shareable output: the report, infographic or map the client reads.

A tenant-rep broker leans on the demographic and psychographic parts to argue fit, while a listing broker needs visits to show that a center draws shoppers. No single tool below supplies all five, so a broker who puts these packages together regularly may need two.

1. Placer.ai

Visit data is Placer.ai‘s part of the package, and its commercial real estate solution is written for brokers and landlords rather than only for brands. The page tells brokers to show a property’s key metrics in their pitches. It also points them to Placer’s site selection report, which combines demographic, psychographic and foot-traffic analysis, to help clients find locations for expansion.

For a listing broker, Void Analysis is the more direct tool. A void analysis looks for the tenant categories missing from a center or trade area, and Placer’s version ranks candidate tenants by demographic fit and co-tenancy (the mix of neighboring stores that draw shoppers to one another). That gives a landlord’s broker a data-backed list of who to call.

Placer.ai is sold only as a subscription, with no one-time reports and no published price. That suits a brokerage with a steady flow of retail deals better than one that needs visit data a few times a year.

2. Esri ArcGIS Business Analyst

Esri’s ArcGIS Business Analyst supplies the demographics and, often, the finished document. Its site reports and infographics (one-page visual summaries of an area’s data) export to PDF, image or dynamic HTML. The product comes as desktop software, a web app and a mobile app, so the same numbers are available on a phone during a site tour.

It is, however, analyst software. Several site workflows, such as suitability scoring and void analysis, are reserved for tiers above Web App Standard, and esri.com shows no price. A brokerage with GIS support in-house will get the most from it.

 

3. Spatial.ai

Spatial.ai covers psychographic fit: who a trade area’s residents are beyond age and income. Its PersonaLive segmentation places every US household into one of 17 high-level groups and 80 behavioral segments. For a broker, those segment names become the argument: a tenant whose best customers fall into a few segments can be shown a site where those segments are common. Segments can be read by DMA, ZIP code or census block group, and the tool can draw heat maps of a brand’s top ones.

Spatial.ai publishes a testimonial from Colliers’ national director of retail services, who describes answering client questions on the fly during discovery calls.

Even so, Spatial.ai’s homepage pitches it to retail marketers, and no drive-time or forecasting tools are listed. (The entry plan, The Analyst, is $425 a month on annual billing, and a buyer who isn’t satisfied can opt out after 90 days.)

4. Maptitude

Maptitude, from Caliper, covers trade areas and census data at a price a small brokerage can see before talking to anyone. It can be bought online or by phone without a sales process, and Caliper keeps a solution page for real estate. The desktop edition draws drive-time rings and radius maps, and each license comes with one free Country Package of maps and demographic data. A broker’s list of sites can be imported from an Excel file. For a small team that wants census counts around a handful of sites, that is a short route from a spreadsheet to a finished map.

The desktop edition runs only on Windows, and it asks more of its user than a browser tool does. (A one-year desktop subscription for one user is $795.)

5. SiteSeer

SiteSeer contributes trade-area demographics in report form, and it is the only product here with a plan its maker says is designed for tenant-rep brokers. That plan, Analyst, is also aimed at retailers with fewer locations. The Explorer plan is pitched to shopping-center owners and leasing agents, which covers the landlord side of the same deal. Reports come out as PDF or Excel files, and Void Analysis reports can be bought one at a time.

The subscription plans themselves are quote-only, and uploading a broker’s own site list is not confirmed on SiteSeer’s pages. Customers quoted on its site include Mattress Firm, i9 Sports and Fresh Thyme Farmers Market.

6. Maptive

The shareable map is where Maptive fits.

Working from the broker’s own spreadsheet of sites, it shares a finished map with a client as a link that opens without a login, either password-protected or public. Shared views can hide chosen columns and tools, so the client never sees the broker’s internal notes.

The map can also be embedded in a web page or saved as a PNG, PDF or JPG image. Around each site, a distance ring in miles or kilometers captures nearby sites or customers, and they export with each one’s straight-line or driving distance.

Maptive does not supply property data. It has no listings, comps or lease records, so every site on the map is one the broker brought.

Which Output Will a Client Actually Read

Not every client reads a full report, so the format matters as much as the data. Three formats cover most broker work:

• A PDF report, for a client who wants numbers to file. Esri’s site reports and SiteSeer’s PDF reports both fit.
• An infographic, for a client who will read one page. That is the job of Esri’s infographics.
• A live map link, for a client who wants to look around on their own. A password-protected link from Maptive is one way to send it.

Visit data from Placer.ai and segments from Spatial.ai usually end up inside one of these formats. A tenant’s real estate committee may want the PDF on file, while the founder may only ever click the link. For a broker, the right tool is often the one whose output a particular client will open, read and pass along to the people who sign the lease.