Breaking Down the Site Selection Process

Location, location, location. As the adage warns, finding the right site can make or break the success of your project or business. But with many factors to evaluate—from traffic patterns to construction costs, risk assessment, and future growth potential—it’s easy to wonder whether you’re overlooking a critical detail.

The site selection process involves much more than finding an available property. A poor decision can lead to unexpected expenses, operational challenges, permitting delays, and revenue loss.

In this guide, we’ll break down the site selection process into manageable steps. You’ll learn what to consider at each stage, how to compare potential sites, and which key insights can help you make a confident, informed decision.

What Is the Site Selection Process?

The site selection process is a series of steps that organizations use to choose real estate investments that help meet their goals.

For example, a retail brand looking to add a new storefront location goes through the site selection process to find the best place to put that new store.

Similarly, a transportation agency might go through a site selection process in order to determine good locations for public EV chargers.

Over time, the site selection process has evolved to accommodate faster project timelines, heightened stakes, complex financial considerations, and the need for defensible, data-driven recommendations. Below, we explore what the process looks like today and how organizations are incorporating location intelligence into their decision-making process.

Breaking Down the Site Selection Process

The site selection process can be broken down into five basic phases:

1. Project Initiation
2. Defining Site Criteria and Success Metrics
3. Site Search and Screening
4. Site Evaluation
5. Decision, Negotiation, and Final Location Decision

We’ll cover each of these phases in more detail below, paying extra attention to how site selection teams use location intelligence data to evaluate potential sites during phase four.

Phase 1: Project Initiation

The site selection process begins when a decision-maker within an organization recognizes the need or opportunity for a new location. Typically, this is kicked off by a company’s executive leadership, corporate planning team, or real estate development team.

In the case of public agencies, a site selection project may be part of a larger initiative, often led by senior professionals within that organization. For example, an EV charger site selection project may be initiated by a Director of Decarbonization or similar title in order to support climate action goals in a particular city, county, or state.

Both public and private organizations may sometimes enlist the help of site selection consultants, who specialize in helping decision-makers identify and evaluate potential sites.

Phase 2: Define Criteria and Success Metrics

Before beginning to identify potential sites, it’s important to first establish goals for the site selection process and establish site criteria that are key to meeting those goals.

For example, the drive to add a new site to an organization’s existing real estate portfolio can arise from a variety of goals, including:

• Reaching a new customer base
• Expanding to new markets
• Getting ahead of competitors
• Increasing overall sales and revenue
• Improving customer/constituent experience and convenience
• Ensuring equitable access for customers/constituents
• Meeting rising customer/constituent demand
• Achieving safety or sustainability goals
• Improving supply chain efficiencyand reducing transportaiton costs
• And more

In many cases, more than one of these goals may apply, so site selection teams often need to distinguish must-haves from nice-to-have project requirements. Agreeing on a set of must-have criteria is especially important to help zero in on a manageable list of potential sites. Otherwise, too many sites may qualify, which can quickly bog down the screening and evaluation phases. A “site elimination” mindset is key at the beginning of many site selection projects.

Finally, be sure to translate each goal into measurable success metrics that you’ll use to evaluate the performance of a new site. For example, metrics like store visits, total sales, repeat customers, new customers, EV charger usage, delivery times, vehicle emissions, and many more may be relevant to help measure a site’s success, depending on your specific goals.

Phase 3: Market Selection and Site Search

With criteria established, site selection teams next identify potential markets that align with goals for the new site(s). To identify promising markets for new facilities, market activity data, including vehicle volumes, foot traffic counts, origin-destination patterns, and traveler demographics can provide helpful cues, revealing which cities, towns, or neighborhoods align with your target customer base without cannibalizing your existing markets.

For certain retailers, such as fuel and convenience retailers, vehicle activity by fuel type (gas vs. diesel vs. electric) may also help identify the most advantageous markets for real estate investment.

Once markets have been selected, project teams then begin to create a “longlist” of potential locations for consideration. This leads directly into phase 4, which includes preliminary screening and full site evaluation.

Phase 4: Site Screening and Site Evaluation

To identify locations for the longlist, site selection project teams gather data on available properties in market(s) of interest, often with the help of a commercial real estate broker, and screen these against a preliminary list of core criteria. This screening process eliminates potential locations that may not meet zoning requirements, utility needs, and other must-haves established during phase 2.

The properties that make it through the basic screening process are then given a more in-depth site evaluation.

Once the longlist has been whittled down to a smaller set of viable locations, site selection teams evaluate each of the potential sites with a variety of quantitative and qualitative analytics. Below are some of the common metrics teams use to ensure new sites will optimally support the established project goals and offer a competitive advantage.

How to measure vehicle and foot traffic

Both driving patterns and foot traffic can have a major impact on site success. For this reason, vehicle and foot traffic counts at potential sites are frequently used to evaluate whether those sites can drive the desired performance in terms of visits or sales.

You can explore this topic in more detail by checking out our How to Measure Foot Traffic blog. 

It’s important to know that not all traffic counts are made equal. Basic traffic counts may be able to tell you how many vehicles or pedestrians pass by a location on an average day, but a more granular look at traffic can be helpful to distinguish an okay site from a great one. For example, data with more granularity showing how activity shifts by time of day, day of week, and season helps you understand if the traffic at a potential site aligns with customer visit patterns from your best performing locations. You may also want data that can help you distinguish truck traffic from personal vehicle traffic.

Traffic data + customer profiles

Combining vehicle and foot traffic data with traveler demographics can further help you evaluate how likely that traffic is to drive site performance. Look for mobility analytics providers that can provide demographic context like household income, family size, and other relevant details that can help you choose sites with the most potential to drive new customers based on your existing customer profiles.

Competitive landscape reality check for retail stores

Competitor presence in close proximity to potential sites can also inform how successful a site may be. Be sure to check the nearby area for any competitor sites, keeping in mind that your own existing locations can also act as competition for new sites (this is often referred to as site “cannibalization”). You’re looking for a site where potential customer demand is higher than current supply.

Feasibility checks

Feasibility checks are crucial to the site selection process, and may require a deeper dive into local ordinances, tax laws, economic incentives, and other factors impacting whether you can actually build or operate at the potential site. For example, a music venue owner might need to confirm that local noise ordinances won’t interfere with late-night performances, while a bar may need to investigate the regional requirements for maintaining a liquor license.

Site visits and due diligence

Before investing in a new site, you may want to visit in person for thorough due diligence. A site visit can help reveal red flags that data alone can’t catch, as well as advantages that may not otherwise be obvious.  

When you visit a site, consider factors like access and visibility, adjacent land use and co-tenants, noise and air quality, and other factors that may impact the appeal and ease of access at the given location. 

Phase 5: Decision, Negotiation, and Final Selection

Once all the data is in, both quantitative and qualitative, it’s time to rank your shortlist of potential locations and get input from stakeholders to arrive at a final decision.

During this step, the site selection team often shares its recommendation(s) with internal stakeholders first. Typically, the team makes a case for their recommended site(s) by comparing expected revenue to expected costs (e.g., development, transportation, and labor costs) to prove out positive ROI. Internal stakeholders may include colleagues in finance, human resources, logistics and supply chain management, and other departments, though executive leadership typically provides the final approval.

This step may also include negotiation with external stakeholders such as municipal governments, property owners, or local developers to identify local incentives, cost savings, expedited permitting schedules, and other advantages certain locations may be able to offer, informing the final decision.

At the end of your process, you should give each of your potential sites a final score based on how well it meets your range of criteria, identifying the most optimal site.

Why StreetLight Helps You Run a Faster, More Defensible Site Selection Process

StreetLight is a powerful partner in the site selection process, offering location intelligence data that helps identify optimal sites based on comprehensive and granular insights.

StreetLight helps you enhance your market selection and site evaluation phases with instant access to location intelligence, streamlining site selection decision-making and saving you time and resources. Because we offer the deepest, most trusted repository of mobility data available on the market, we help site selection teams go beyond basic traffic counts to understand how movement patterns translate into site performance.

Our data is rigorously validated both internally and by third parties, so you know you’re making decisions based on trusted information. And StreetLight Data has been a leader in mobility intelligence, providing trusted, granular data to the private sector and state, regional, and local agencies for over 10 years.

Businesses and public agencies alike are already using StreetLight to choose optimal sites. For example, a nationwide breakfast chain uses StreetLight to analyze commuter activity and capitalize on morning coffee demand.

A Silicon Valley city also used StreetLight to find optimal sites for over 400 public EV chargers based on Origin-Destination patterns, personal vehicle vs. truck activity, traveler demographics, trip lengths, and peak parking times.

To learn more about StreetLight’s site selection analytics, reach out to a team member today.