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Site selection analysis
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United States
Site selection data for retail and restaurant locations
Compare candidate sites on weekly foot traffic, where visitors come from and overlap with your existing stores. Get a free site selection analysis.
Get a free analysis of your locations
Up to 5 locations. No cost, no commitment.
We handle your details in line with the CCPA and applicable US state privacy laws.
Site selection is the process of choosing where to open a store, restaurant or other commercial location. This page covers retail, restaurant and commercial real estate, not industrial or data center sites. Huq gives you the evidence: visits at any US address, drive-time catchments, residents vs visitors, nearby brands, and how much a new site would overlap with your stores. More than 1,000 locations are manually validated in each of Huq's 35 markets twice a year.
See how site selection works in the Huq platform
This overview tours the Huq platform. For site selection, watch how a shortlist comes together: drawing candidate sites on the Explore map, adding map layers such as travel time, brand locations and shopping centers, then grouping sites in a Project and exporting the results. Those are the steps you'd follow to take a site to committee.
- Catchment and drive time: where each candidate's visitors come from and how far they travel.
- POIs, brands and industries: which brands and industries already trade around a site.
- Projects and PDF reports: track every site from first look to committee and share a report on each.
Trusted by 300+ organisations · Data across 35 markets
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What is site selection?
It means weighing what a new location needs against the merits of possible sites. In retail and restaurants, it usually runs in four steps: set criteria, build a shortlist, gather evidence on each site, and take a recommendation to a real estate or investment committee.
Traditional location data leans on radius rings and census figures. They describe who lives nearby, not who actually visits. Observed visit data shows how busy a location is, residents vs visitors, where visitors come from and how far they drive, which brands sit nearby, and whether a new site would draw on the same people as your existing stores.
Huq brings that evidence into one platform, from the Explore map to Projects and reports. JD Sports, a UK retailer, used Huq catchment insights to make its catchment analysis 25% more precise and cut new-store location risk by 18%.
What's in your site selection analysis
01
Foot traffic at candidate sites
Weekly visits at each site on your shortlist, so you can compare demand and seasonality.
02
Catchment and drive time
Where each site's visitors come from and how far they travel, instead of a radius ring.
03
Overlap with your existing stores
Cross-visitation shows how many visitors a new site would share with stores you already run.
04
Nearby brands and industries
Brand locations, POIs and industry performance around each site, to judge co-tenancy and competition.
What a site selection analysis shows
Send us a shortlist of two or three candidate sites. Your free analysis compares them side by side, ready to export as a report.
01
Side-by-side foot traffic for each site
Weekly visits at each candidate site over the past year, so you can compare demand and seasonality before you sign.
02
Catchment map for each site
Where each site's visitors come from, so you can see whether the catchment matches your customers instead of relying on a radius ring.
03
Cross-visitation with your current stores
The share of visitors each candidate site shares with your existing stores, so you can spot cannibalization risk before committing.
Site selection data for locations across the US
Huq covers any address in the United States: shopping centers, main streets, downtowns, strip malls, 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 retail teams use Huq for site selection analytics
- Huq publishes its accuracy by country: a 19.5% median error across published markets, against a 30% healthy threshold.
- Huq's customers give it an NPS of 42.
- Trusted by 300+ organizations 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 national brands: choose locations, track store performance and benchmark against competitors.
02
Retail real estate owners
Show shopping center 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
- Foot traffic: by week, month and year, with totals, average daily foot traffic, trends, period-over-period change, and visiting vs passing traffic.
- Residents and visitors.
- Trade area and travel time: trade areas by ZIP code, plus drive-time and travel-time analysis.
- Demographics and profiling: age, gender and purchasing power, available in selected markets.
- Behavior: visit frequency, dwell time, time of day and dayparts, cross-visitation between up to 10 location pairs, and international visitation for tourism.
- Foot traffic density and transportation mode.
- Places, brands and industries: points of interest, brand locations and brand analysis, industry performance, shopping center and retail center types.
- Geo-spend: spend by volume and category, available in selected markets.
- Tools: the Explore map (draw any area or use layers for travel time, trade areas, shopping centers, retail centers, brand locations, industries and ZIP codes), 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
What is site selection?
Site selection is the process of choosing where to open a store, restaurant or other location. Most teams set criteria, build a shortlist, gather evidence on each site, then take a recommendation to committee. Huq fits the evidence step: weekly foot traffic, catchment and overlap with your existing stores for every site on the shortlist.
What factors matter in retail site selection?
Common factors include population, competitor locations, co-tenancy, traffic counts and lease costs. Observed visit data adds behavior: how many people visit, residents vs visitors, where they come from and how far they drive. Huq provides that for any US address, alongside nearby brand locations and industry performance.
Will a new site cannibalize my existing stores?
Cross-visitation shows how many visitors a candidate site shares with your current stores. Huq compares up to 10 location pairs at once, so you can see whether a new site adds new customers or splits the ones you already have.
How often is Huq's data updated?
Weekly. Each week adds a new data point, so you can judge a site's seasonality and see whether an area is growing or slowing before you sign a lease. Data feeds arrive as CSV or Parquet files in Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage.
What's in the free site selection analysis?
Send us two or three candidate sites. We'll compare them side by side on weekly foot traffic, where visitors come from and overlap with your existing stores, so you have evidence for your next committee. It's free, with no commitment.
Which US locations does Huq cover?
Huq measures visits to stores, restaurants, shopping centers, vacant units and other addresses across the US, one of its 35 markets. More than 1,000 locations are manually validated in each market twice a year. No sensors or cameras are needed, so you can analyze your own sites, competitors and sites you're considering.
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.