Choosing the ideal location for your business is only possible with the right business intelligence. This sort of intelligence has been available for some time, provided a business is willing to hire staff or consultants, or license proprietary data for the research. Walmart Stores, Toyota, McDonald's, and other big businesses can attribute success to their ability to scour the country and pinpoint the locations that are best suited to their business needs. This sort of research effort does not come cheap, however. Starbucks spends an enormous amount of time and resources to research the demographics of neighborhoods, traffic patterns, and the presence of other coffee shops (including other Starbucks) before making a new location decision.

This is an unfair playing field for businesses: the large corporations are the only ones that can shell out big bucks for the premier demographic, business and other data vendors, and thus they are the only ones that can afford the kind of business intelligence that will lead to location decisions that maximize their potential for success. In addition to the question of monetary resources, a fast-growing small business with already-overworked employees may not feel it has enough time to devote to the process of site selection or the expertise to figure it out.

The playing field is leveling, however, with the new availability of free research tools for business intelligence. The availability of government data is a high priority of the current presidential administration, as is evident with the hiring of the first chief information officer and the creation of Data.gov, a comprehensive clearing house for public data of all kinds, much of which is still languishing in tattered files in rusty file cabinets. This effort should make substantial improvements to the ease and level of access to government data.  

And on the private sector side, search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and specialized search engines are also terrific resources for researching information about businesses, community and government data. Social networking Web sites are also gaining in importance as tools for businesses seeking contacts and information.

While this wealth of online information can be valuable for business research, sorting through it all takes an extensive amount of time and it isn't customized to the unique needs of corporate real estate professionals and site selection advisors. One tool, www.ZoomProspector.com, is a one-stop site selection resource that gives a business precisely the information necessary to find the perfect location anywhere in the United States. Users find communities that match their needs, as well as commercial real estate that meets their detailed specifications and strategic goals. www.ZoomProspector.com provides detailed statistical profiles and demographic “heat maps” for every community in the United States, and it also allows users to search for communities that match specific location requirements, including population size, education levels, transportation access, average commute times, venture capital investment and patent issuance. Users can also filter their searches for locations that are within incentive areas.

This community, property and mapping data on the Internet is extremely valuable to corporate site selection consultants. “As site selectors, having the ability to do a real-time site search allows our team to quickly match the data on the ground to the internal parameters set by the client,” says Jason Hickey of Washington, D.C.-based Hickey & Associates, LLC. “Local map layers that highlight transportation networks, pad ready sites, economic development zones, as well as other geocoding features, depict a site in a way that isn't just in black and white text.”

www.ZoomProspector.com has helped Jamin Arn, the founder of an office supplies and furniture retailer in Janesville, Wis., called OfficePro, determine where to open a third location for his business. A quick search based on his business's requirements returned some expected results, along with other places he had not thought to look, such as Normal, Ill., a small town two hours outside of Chicago. The town has a similar population size, job growth and income per capita to Janesville, which leads Arn to believe that his business might also be successful in Normal. www.ZoomProspector.com includes a feature to search for a location that is similar to a place that you know, allowing a business that has been successful in one place to easily search for other locations that have similar characteristics of a hospitable business environment. As his company looks to expand to new locations, “ZoomProspector is the perfect company for this,” Arn says. “We go online, we type in the parameters for our company and the information comes back. It's perfect.” Arn especially enjoyed being able to conduct his research without pressure from people trying to push their locations. “If I call a guy who wants to sell, he's going to give me every reason why this is a great place,” Arn says.

Once a business has found a desirable community, the user can easily search for suitable commercial properties within that community. Utilizing a network of property Web sites powered by local GIS data, the user can then deeply analyze any property to discover, within a specified distance or drive-time from the property, information on the surrounding labor force, consumer expenditures, and businesses. The user can also overlay local GIS layers on the maps displayed, allowing a business owner to determine what zoning and incentive areas exist within the vicinity of a selected property. Alternately, after referencing zoning and incentive information, the user can draw a polygon on the map and then choose to search for properties only within that shape.

“Finding the right location for a business is difficult for even us professionals, given the thousands of potential locations out there and the ever-changing world of labor demographics, available sites and buildings, tax laws and incentives,” says James Renzas, site selection expert and principal of the RSH Group. “Having a tool like www.ZoomProspector.com is essential for companies that would like to get a handle on what alternative locations might hold for their company as well as those of us who do this for a living, as a convenient source of high-quality site selection information.”

The widespread availability of business intelligence provided through free Web site tools could not be coming at a better time. With capital increasingly hard to come by, business owners must be conscientious in any investment related decision-making. While entrepreneurs in the heady days of the late 1990s could play relatively loose, one false move in today's bleak economic climate can easily spell a business's demise. Of all the decisions that a business must make, a location decision is not only one of the most important, but given the investment necessary it is also one of the hardest to undo. Luckily, the tools now exist to find the right community and the right property without devoting any funds or even much time. It's about time that business owners receive some kind of a break, because they can't all expect a bailout.  

Greg Elenbaas is currently studying urban studies at the University of California at Berkeley. He can be reached by e-mailing gelenbaas@berkeley.edu.