Neighborhoods Restaurants

People ask me "What exactly do you do?" quite often. I usually give some rambling answer to the affect of  "I am in real estate and restaurants." I am sure people think I am unemployed and like to eat out a lot. I thought I would give a quick readers digest version of what we do in a specific instance. I have been given marching orders to start learning additional markets. This is a quick glance of what we are looking for in a new market, in this case, Raleigh.

You might think that Raleigh is a decent size city and that you could put a restaurant in plenty of places all over the city. You could do this, but you would not be in business long. You need to figure out who your customer is, where does he/she live, where do they work, how do they get from point A to B, where do they shop, where do they eat. We do this through demographic research. If my concept looks for higher demographic (wealthy) patrons, I usually look for a restaurant site with an average household income over $80,000 per year. Not only do we need upper middle class patrons, we need a lot of them. I want over 100,000 people that fit my criteria within 5 miles of my site. The higher these numbers, the happier I am with my potential site. Now lets talk location. Anchor retail is good (think Harris Teeter, Publix, Target etc.).

Out parcels are ideal (the locations closest to the main street). In the above illustration, I would want to be in figure J3 or J4. High traffic counts are good (30,000+ cars passing your site a day). Corner locations are good, don't put my restaurant mid block or in line with a bunch of other retail stores. Oh, and by the way, everyone wants these sites...

Most times, we will go into a restaurant that is currently operating. We will quietly figure out which ones are struggling and, like a vulture circling a staggering wildebeest, we will wait for the right time to swoop.

I take no joy in this. I know how much money and sweat it takes to start a restaurant. Often I feel like the grim reaper walking the kitchen lines and dining rooms of the soon to be defunct. These restaurants all look the same to me. They feel like death's waiting room as soon as I walk in. I don't need a for lease sign out front to tell me when a restaurant is on life support. I will go into the sure fire signs in another post (early bird special).

So, after all of the analysis, there are only a few places in Raleigh that I can possibly open a store. North Raleigh, Downtown/Glenwood South, and Cary. Within those areas, there might be only a few specific sites that satisfy all of the micro criteria. So, how in the hell am I ever supposed to find a site??? Stay tuned to find out...