Site selection brief template: the sections a committee expects

A site selection brief is the document a real estate committee reads when it decides whether to approve a location. It runs a page or two and carries the whole case for a deal in a form a busy approver can scan. The brief summarizes the underlying analysis and arranges it so each claim sits next to the evidence behind it. The sections below are the ones a defensible brief includes, with notes on what belongs in each.

Put the conclusion in the first line. A reviewer should learn whether you are recommending approval, a pass, or a second look before reading anything else, along with the site, the format you would build, and the single number that drives the call. Everything after that line exists to support or qualify it. When the recommendation comes last, committees read defensively, hunting for the verdict instead of weighing the evidence.

Every figure in the brief depends on how you drew the trade area, so state it plainly. Say whether the boundary is a drive time, a walk time, or a radius, give the threshold you used, such as a ten-minute drive or a half-mile walk, and explain why that method suits the format. A grocery store and a coffee kiosk do not serve the same shape of ground, and a radius that ignores rivers and highways will overstate who can actually reach the door. Naming the method lets a reviewer judge the numbers instead of guessing at them.

Report the people inside that boundary: population, household count, income, and daytime population where the concept depends on workers rather than residents. Then translate the raw counts into demand for what you sell, whether that is households above an income line, kids under ten, or some blend your model already trusts. Keep every figure scoped to the trade area rather than the city or county, because a county-wide average can hide a pocket that is too small or too thin to support the store.

List the direct competitors inside the trade area, how far each sits from the site, and how much of the demand they likely absorb. Then cover co-tenancy, the neighbors that help rather than compete: the anchor that drives the trips, the complementary tenant whose customers also buy from you. A site can clear every demographic bar and still struggle because three rivals already split the demand, and a weaker site can punch above its numbers because it sits beside the right anchor.

For any operator with nearby stores, the brief has to separate new demand from demand you would simply move across the parking lot. Show the overlap between this trade area and your closest existing units, and estimate how much of the projected sales would transfer from those stores rather than come from new customers. A site can look strong on its own and still be a poor deal once you net out the sales it pulls from a unit you already own.

Give the committee the total score and the components that built it, each with its weight and its contribution. A reviewer should be able to see that the site scored well on access and household income, poorly on competition, and then argue with any one of those inputs. A single number with no breakdown invites the question every committee eventually asks, which is where the number came from, and a brief that cannot answer it loses the room.

Attach a source and a date to each number: the demographics provider and its vintage, the date of the competitor data, the origin of any traffic or spend estimate. This is the part teams skip under deadline, and it is the first thing a careful approver probes. A population figure from a three-year-old extract may still be usable, but a committee deserves to know its age before it leans on it. Figures without provenance get discounted, and rightly so.

Close with what could undermine the recommendation and how sure you are. Note the data gaps, the lease or access questions, the assumptions that would change the answer if they broke. Then state a confidence level, because an approver weighs a high-confidence pass differently from a marginal one. A brief that admits its weak points reads as more credible, and it gives the committee a fair basis for the decision it has to make.

Assembled by hand, a brief like this takes hours per site, and the sourcing is the first thing to slip when a deal is moving. Software closes that gap by building the trade area from the road network, pulling demographics and competition inside it, modeling cannibalization against your own locations, and scoring the site on weights you control. Geod packages the result as a PDF site brief with the score components, the sources, and the data vintages already filled in, so the document a committee reviews is generated from the analysis rather than retyped from it.