Comparing locations

Location Intelligence compares places in four ways: a ranking of the districts in a city, a side-by-side view of up to four districts, a scan for districts your branches do not reach, and the shortlist of sites you saved.

Rank the districts in a city

Open Find next. The Expansion ranking at the bottom of the screen lists the districts around the centre of the map, ordered by fit score for your business type. The five best-ranked districts also appear on the map as numbered markers. Click a district to open its site assessment.

Each district is scored on six criteria: Demand, Purchasing power, Demographics, Competition, Land price, and Room to grow. For Competition and Land price, lower values score higher. Each criterion is scaled across the districts in the list, so a fit score tells you how a district compares with the others in the same ranking.

The ranking has three views:

Ranked: one row per district, with its criteria values and a bar showing what each criterion added to its fit score.
Table: the same data in columns. Click a column heading to sort by it.
Distribution: a chart of each district's demand against its fit score.

To narrow the list, use Search areas, the City filter when the list covers more than one city, and the area type buttons:

New areas: districts with none of your branches nearby.
Room for another: districts you already serve where demand is higher than your nearby branches can capture.
Well served: districts you already serve with little demand left over.

Airports, military areas, and ports are left out of the ranking. A button above the list shows them when you need them.

Change how districts are ranked

In Find next, click Scoring criteria.
Pick a preset: Balanced, Footfall led, Premium spend, or Cost sensitive.
To fine-tune, move the slider next to any criterion. The ranking updates as you move it, and the preset changes to Custom weighting.

Each criterion shows the share of the fit score it carries. Reset to default weights returns to the Balanced preset. Your weights are saved in this browser for this workspace.

The weights affect the ranking only. The score in a site assessment comes from its own model and does not change with them.

Compare districts side by side

In the Expansion ranking, tick the box next to two to four districts. You can tick them in the Ranked or Table view.
Click Compare sites in the bar that appears at the bottom of the screen.

The Compare sites window shows one column per district, with its fit score at the top and one row per criterion. In each row, the best value has a check mark. Rows marked lower is better favour the smallest value. The last rows give each district's Area type and a View on map button, which closes the window and opens that district's site assessment.

Up to four districts can be selected at a time. To start over, click the close button in the bar at the bottom of the screen.

Find districts your branches do not reach

In Find next, under Where to open next, click Find opportunities. You need at least one branch added.

The scan covers the city around the centre of the map and looks at districts outside your branches' reach at the current travel time. It keeps the strongest on demand, demographics, purchasing power, and competition, runs the drive-time model on each, and orders them by the new demand a branch there would bring in. Where a mapped plot with a suitable land use is nearby, the result is placed on that plot.

The results appear on the map as numbered Expansion opportunity markers. Districts in the ranking that the scan confirmed carry a check mark with the share of their demand that already overlaps your branches. After you move the map or change the travel time, click Scan again.

Your shortlist

In a site assessment, click Save this site. The site is added to Shortlist with the score it had when you saved it. Saved sites are named by their coordinates. To rename one, click the pencil button next to it.

Click a saved site to open its assessment. The assessment runs again with current data, so its figures can differ from the saved score. Saved sites also feed Best site to add at the top of Find next.

Other ways to compare

In Network, click Branch peak hours to open the Explore window. It has two tabs:

Your branches: each branch's busiest hours and the branches it overlaps with. Use Show to list All branches or Cannibalizing only, and Sort to order them by Peak busyness, Most overlap, or Name.
Where to grow: districts ranked against a brief. Under What you're looking for, set a Max price, an Income target, and whether you want your branch to Cluster near competitors or Avoid them. The three Best fits appear first, followed by Browse all areas.