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Retail site selection
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United Kingdom
Retail site selection backed by measured UK footfall
Shortlist, compare and decide on new UK sites using footfall, catchment and competitor data for every candidate, including units you haven't opened yet.
Get a free analysis of your locations
Up to 5 locations. No cost, no commitment.
We handle your details in line with UK GDPR.
Retail site selection is the decision about where your next store goes, and Huq gives you measured evidence for every step of it. Check footfall and catchment at each candidate unit, compare shortlisted sites with your best-performing stores, and see which competitors sit nearby. JD Sports, a UK retailer, achieved 18% lower new-store location risk with Huq, and Puccinos used it to support a key decision on potential new sites.
How Huq supports retail site selection
The overview tours the whole platform. For site selection, watch two moments. The first is an address being checked on the Explore map, which works the same for an empty unit as for a trading store. The second is sites being grouped into a Project. That grouping is how a long list becomes a shortlist the property committee can compare on the same footfall and catchment figures.
- Checking footfall at a vacant unit on the Explore map
- Holding a shortlist of candidate sites in a Project
- Comparing candidates with your existing stores
Trusted by 300+ organisations · Data across 35 markets
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What is retail site selection?
Retail site selection is the process of choosing where to open a new store. It usually runs in stages: find towns and centres with room for the brand, shortlist available units, compare them, then take the best one to a property or investment committee.
In the UK the shortlist often mixes formats: a high street unit, a shopping centre space and a retail park box can all be on the table for the same town. Each draws a different crowd. The questions are the same, though. How many people pass and how many visit? Where do they come from? Which brands are already trading nearby, and how does the site compare with stores that already work?
Huq answers those questions with measured data for any address, so a decision rests on evidence about the actual unit rather than on agents' particulars or a radius drawn on a map.
What's in your retail site selection analysis
01
Footfall at every candidate
Weekly footfall, average daily footfall and visiting versus passing traffic for each unit on the shortlist.
02
Catchment and travel time
Visitor postcodes and drive-time bands show who each candidate site would really serve.
03
Benchmark against your best stores
Compare candidates with existing stores whose trading you already know, to set a clear bar.
04
Neighbouring brands and competitors
See brand locations, industries and retail centre types around each site before you sign.
What a retail site selection analysis shows
Three views carry most site decisions from long list to signed lease.
01
Candidate sites on the Explore map
Draw an area around each available unit, then check footfall, passing traffic and nearby brand locations for each one.
02
Shortlist in a Project
Group candidates in a Project and track their status, so the whole team works from one list with the same figures.
03
Side-by-side comparison export
Export footfall, catchment and dwell time for every candidate to CSV or Excel for the investment committee pack.
Retail site selection data for any UK location
Huq covers any address in the UK: high streets, shopping centres, retail parks, competitors' stores and sites you haven't opened yet. No counters, sensors or cameras needed.
Huq manually validates more than 1,000 locations in each of its 35 markets twice a year, and data refreshes weekly.
How it works
Step 1
Tell us your locations
Add up to five addresses in the form. Your own stores, candidate sites or competitors.
Step 2
We run the analysis
Our team maps each location from observed visitor data.
Step 3
We walk you through it
A short call to take you through what the data shows and what it means for you.
Why UK retailers use Huq for retail site selection
- Huq publishes its accuracy by country: an 18.7% median error in Great Britain against landlord-reported footfall.
- JD Sports, a UK retailer, got 25% more precise catchment analysis and 18% lower new-store location risk.
- Ripon BID saw footfall up 164% year on year.
- Trusted by 300+ organisations across 35 markets, including the global insights, research and location intelligence teams at Nike, Adidas, JD Sports and Samsung.
huq's platform gave us valuable data to support a key decision on potential new sites.
Dan Brogden
National Sales Manager, Puccinos
Who it's for
01
Retail chains of any size
From five-store retailers planning their next site to global brands: choose locations, track store performance and benchmark against competitors.
02
Retail property owners
Show centre performance, support leasing and get the tenant mix right, for landlords, asset managers and brokers.
03
Investors and private equity
Check how retail brands and assets actually perform before you buy, and monitor them after.
Everything Huq measures, in one platform
- Footfall: by week, month and year, with totals, average daily footfall, trends, period-on-period change, and visiting vs passing traffic.
- Residents and visitors.
- Catchment and travel time: catchment by postcodes, plus drive-time and travel-time analysis.
- Demographics and profiling: age, gender and purchasing power.
- Behaviour: visit frequency, dwell time, time of day and dayparts, cross-visitation between up to 10 location pairs, and international visitation for tourism.
- Footfall density and transportation mode.
- Places, brands and industries: points of interest, brand locations and brand analysis, industry performance, shopping centre and retail centre types.
- Geo-spend: spend by volume and category at any UK location, via Experian.
- Tools: the Explore map (draw any area or use layers for travel time, catchment, shopping centres, retail centres, brand locations, industries and postcodes), White Space Analysis, and Projects for monitoring many locations and reporting to stakeholders.
- Delivery: the platform, CSV or Excel exports, monthly PDF location reports, and data feeds as Parquet and CSV files into Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage buckets.
- Cadence: data refreshes weekly.
Frequently asked questions
How do retailers choose a store location?
Most follow a staged process: identify towns or centres with room for the brand, shortlist available units, compare them on footfall, catchment and nearby competition, then benchmark them against existing stores. Huq provides measured data for each stage, for any UK address.
What factors matter most in retail site selection?
Footfall and how much of it actually visits rather than passes, the catchment the site draws from, the brands and competitors nearby, and how the site compares with stores that already trade well. Rent and lease terms matter too, but they are only worth negotiating once the location stacks up.
Can Huq analyse a unit that is currently empty?
Yes. Huq works on any address, so you can see footfall, passing traffic and catchment around a vacant unit or a site that hasn't been built yet. You can do the same for a competitor's store to see how busy it is and where its visitors come from.
How up to date is the data?
Huq data refreshes weekly. You can see recent trends at a candidate site rather than relying on a count taken months ago, and keep checking while lease negotiations run on.
Which UK locations does Huq cover?
Every UK address: high streets, shopping centres, retail parks and standalone sites. Huq reports an 18.7% median error in Great Britain against landlord-reported footfall, and manually validates more than 1,000 locations in each of its 35 markets twice a year, so the figures for a candidate unit are checked against real counts.
What does the free analysis include?
Send us your current stores or the candidate sites on your shortlist using the form. Huq will run a free analysis of footfall and catchment for those locations so you can see how the data compares with what you already know about them.
Questions? Talk to us
Book a demoAbout Huq
Huq is a location intelligence company. We turn anonymised mobile location data into footfall, catchment and visitor insight for any place, so retailers, property owners and local authorities can make decisions on evidence.
See how your locations really perform
Up to 5 locations. No cost, no commitment.