For businesses: find the location before your competitor does

A location decision usually comes down to three things: how many people are within reasonable reach, who they are, and how many are already doing what you plan to do. All three can be calculated. Yet the decision is still made, surprisingly often, on a gut feeling and whichever unit happens to be vacant.

The map has a mode that does the maths for you.

Site analysis mode, briefly

Switch the region level on the map to Etablering and pick a sector. Sweden is then divided into square kilometre cells, the same grid Statistics Sweden uses for population data, and each cell is coloured by how large the market gap is right there.

The model is a gravity model. It weighs the population in and around the cell against the supply that already exists, damped by distance, and highlights the cells where the base is large and the supply is thin. Click a cell and you get the numbers behind the colour: population, age distribution, a supply index and the distance to the nearest competitor, both in metres and in actual travel time.

Around twenty sectors are currently included, among them gyms, pharmacies, health centres, preschools, grocery shops, restaurants, cafés, car workshops, dentists, hairdressers, builders merchants, opticians, bakeries and veterinary clinics.

What you can do with it in twenty minutes

• Rule out half the country. Start wide, look at where the gap is largest for your sector, and spend the rest of your effort on a handful of towns instead of on all of Sweden.
• Test a unit you are already looking at. Zoom to the address, read the cell figures and see whether the customer base is really there, or whether you are about to pay rent for great visibility in a thin catchment area.
• Check the surroundings. Switch on noise, traffic flows, public transport and planning restrictions in the same view. A location with a perfect customer base and no bus stop is not the same as a good location.
• Measure travel time properly. Use the travel planner from the unit to the places your customers or staff come from. Straight line distance lies in almost every Swedish town.
• Compare municipalities as an employer. Tax rate, income levels, population growth and commuting distances decide how easy recruiting will be.

What we are building next

The map is made for exploring. Businesses usually need something else: a single piece of evidence you can put on a table, send to a bank or attach to a board paper. That is where our effort is going now.

• The location report. Everything about one location in one document: customer base, age profile, competition and travel times, accessibility, surrounding factors such as noise and risk, and how the location compares to the alternatives. The foundation already exists in our property report and we are building on it.
• Monitoring. A location is not static. We want to be able to tell you when the customer base shifts, when a competitor opens or closes, or when the municipality plans something nearby.
• Several locations at once. If you run a chain, the question is rarely "is this one good?" but "which five of these thirty do we pursue?". That should be rankable.
• Your data on top of ours. If you have sales figures per store, customer addresses or a catchment area of your own, the analysis gets considerably sharper once it sits on top of our data.

Help us build the right thing

We would rather build this alongside someone who will actually use it than guess our way there. If you are in the middle of a location search, a relocation or an expansion decision right now, get in touch and tell us what evidence you wish you had. We answer everything, and the early conversations decide what gets built first.

Write to kontakt@mapandmove.se or use the contact page.

Photo: Holger.Ellgaard, Barkarby retail park in Järfälla, Sweden, 2010. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. The image has been cropped and downscaled.