This Single Number Determines If National Brands Will Ignore Your Shopping Center!

  📍 If you want a national retailer in your shopping center, you need to know the answer to this question.

Hey everybody. Joseph Gozlan with the Eureka Business Group, your Retail Navigator for the Dallas Fort Worth market. And today we’re gonna talk about the number one question every national retailer is asking me when I’m showing them a space to lease.

And that is, what is your traffic? How many vehicles per day are on that street where your shopping center is facing? And it’s super, super critical for them because national retail brands are mainly focused on traffic in order to assess a location to figure out, okay. Is it the right place for me to be?

Do I get enough visibility?

Obviously that’s not the only thing, but it’s one of the main things they’re looking for. Demographics is important. Household income is important, age is important, but the number of vehicles per day that are on the street, the number of eyeballs they can get on their brand is the major factor in the decision.

If they’re gonna pick your location or they’re gonna move on to somewhere else. What is that number? At least 20,000 vehicles per day. That is the number one thing they’re looking for. Most retailers I’ve seen some retailers, especially the smaller ones that are looking at maybe 15 and up, but I’ve never seen a national brand retailer looking at space that has less than 15,000 vehicles per day.

So why should you know that? Well, for two reasons. One. Having that in your information package, making sure that your broker highlights it is very, very important. If you have an information packet for your property, and it does not say how many vehicles per day, it’s probably because it’s below the 20,000 threshold, or if you’re above the 20,000 threshold, it’s just flat out negligence.

I’m sorry, there’s no other way to say that.

The other place where it’s really important to know that number is when you’re evaluating a property to buy. If you’re looking at a property to buy, and it’s a retail center. Having a retail center located on a road that has more than 20,000 vehicles per day opens up that opportunity for national brand retailers to come to your shopping center.

So very, very important to look at. How do I find that number you ask? Well, it’s very easy. Every state has a Department of Transportation website. In Texas, it’s the texdot website. And on that website they have a traffic count map. Now there are no systems or electronic systems embedded in every road. So the way they do that is every few years they go to another street and they put some equipment on the street to do the counts.

So when you go to the TexDot map website and you look for your property or that street your property is on, it’s gonna say the number of vehicles counted, but it’ll also have in parenthesis, the last time they counted in a year.

So it’ll be 2023, 2021, 2019. So some of the smallest streets are only gonna get counted once every five years, six years. Some of them are gonna be counted every year because it’s major roads and it’s important for the Department of Transportation to figure it out. So knowing how long ago it’s been since they counted is important, but that number, it’s public information.

It’s easily accessible. There’s no excuse not to have it on your property packages when you are promoting to national, brand retailers, or even just local retailers, the more eyeballs, the more attractive your shopping center is for tenants, the more you can ask for rent. That’s it. My name is Joseph, Eureka Business Group, and give us a shout.

Send us a message if there are any other subjects you want us to make a video about and explain. We’re happy to do that. Just leave us a note in the comments below.