The Grades in TopRetailTenants.com are based on the BrandScore system. What is BrandScore?
BrandScore is a retail location screening and scoring system that combines local demographics, consumer psychographics including brand preferences, commercial activity, retail synergies and many more data points to produce a single numeric measure representing the quality of any store location in the US for any of the thousands of brands in our proprietary retailer database.
A book on the scoring system, "How Retailers Find Their Place, Introducing BrandScore" written by the inventor of BrandScore, Dr. Richard Fenker, is available at TheRetailPlanet.com™.
How is BrandScore used in the TopRetailTenants.com system?
When you examine a location using TopRetailTanants.com our system is actually scoring that location for all major retail chains and restaurant chains in the United State simultaneously using BrandScore. Our online database with over 20 trillion scores makes this possible. TopRetailTenants.com uses the scores for its grading system The results are then used by leasing representatives, property owners, developers, investors, municipalities and economic development professionals to determine the best tenants to recruit into a specific retail location..
What range of grades will I see for retail locations?
The grades on TopRetailTenants.com have the same meaning as in most high school and college classes.
D/F = Weak locations. Generally you would avoid these! Most have one or more serious problems.
C = Average to Low Average locations. Many retail concepts are located in C locations because of the rent or other factors.
B = Good locations. In our grading system less than 2% of all retail locations receive an A grade. Less than 5% receive a grade of B or better. Good B locations are often the best available locations in a competitive market.
A = Top locations where all of the location factors necessary for a good store exist.
Note that scores are brand specific, NOT generic. Each retail chain has been modeled individually to create the scores or grades for that chain. A good McDonald's location may not work for Wendy's!
I can't find a certain brand in your system. Can you help me?
The brands included in the TopRetailTenants.com database are most regional and national retail chains. If we're missing a major retail brand of interest, please let us know and we will see if it can be added. Our retailer database contains over 3,000 brands.
If the brand you want to analyze is a local brand and not in our database but is similar to a national or regional brand in our database, you can use that major brand as a substitute.
In the coming months, we will be introducing a unique feature which we call “Brand Cloning.” Using your knowledge of a particular local brand, you can use the power of the BrandScore application for any retail concept. You will be able to build a "clone" and combine one, two or three brands from our database of existing national and regional brands to create a new brand in the BrandScore system that you can then analyze just like a major brand!
TopRetailTenants.com is highly useful but some might call it a "black box" approach. Can we actually delve into the underlying data assumptions in the results?
Absolutely! Our goal is to make the system as transparent as possible but without overwhelming our customers with algorithms, 50-page reports, raw demographics, charts and variable weighting. To make this possible we have done several things. First, our founder and the inventor behind our grading system, Dr. Richard Fenker has written a book called “How Retailers Find Their Place, Introducing BrandScore.” We highly recommend reading this book as it provides clarity and transparency into what drives our grades. Second, we are a customer driven organization. If after reading the book, studying the components and working with the system you still have questions send us an e-mail. We are more than happy to answer your questions!
Does TopRetailTenants.com work for any store location in the US? What about rural areas of the country?
Yes and Yes. We’ve organized the United States into 830,000 Retail Districts that cover the major cities, suburban areas, and smaller town & villages where the vast majority of retail activity occurs. Each defined district is a 1x1-kilometer square. Purely rural areas like farmland and forests typically lie outside of our defined districts. But the system works anywhere there is retail activity.
How do you define “Brand”?
We use the terms "brand" and "retail chain" interchangeably. For purposes of TopRetailTenants.com, the term “brand” refers to the name of a retail or restaurant chain such as McDonalds, The Gap, Target, or A&P. Our database tracks the active locations and for over 1,000 brands, representing more than 1 million current store locations.
Where did the idea of scores or grades for retail locations come from?
Retail chain stores and restaurants have long used their own internal tools and research to define ideal sites for new locations. TheRetailPlanet.com™ has taken that concept and generalized it across the majority of branded retail activity in the US to create a scoring system that rates every location in the country and its potential for retail outlets.
How do you know which retail brand will do well in a certain location?
BrandScore is a “recipe” for each retailer based on factors surrounding where existing stores are placed. This recipe includes things such as demographics, where consumers who prefer that brand live, where the retailer locates their store in relation to other types of retailers, the volume of daytime traffic, the number of office workers, etc, etc. In short, BrandScore is a measure of the quality of the selected location for that retailer based on how well the location fits the retailer's existing “recipe.” While this information does not come directly from the retailers, the pattern of their current store placements tells us, in part, what their recipe is.
Can I find Top Retail Tenants for areas outside the US?
Today the TopRetailTenants.com application works across the entire US but not yet in other countries. However we are working with a major international partner to bring this system to other countries in 2013.
Does TopRetailTenants.com work for vacant retail land such as outparcels in front of a shopping center?
Absolutely! In fact, this is exactly how the system is used by many of our customers on a regular basis.
Are the retailers paying any sort of fee to be a part of TopRetailTenants.com?
No. All of the data comes from publicly available resources, our proprietary databases and our data partners.
Given today's ever changing retail environment, how current is the underlying data and how often are you updating it?
TheRetailPlanet.com™ has an ever growing set of “live” retail brands that are updated continuously (usually weekly). Additionally, we are updating brands, depending on their level of activity, monthly, quarterly or semi-annually. Less active brands (those that are not opening, relocating or closing stores) are updated less frequently.
