CHAPTER 3
Site Selection
Mike Zelnik and Jim Garrett
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Finding the right location for your urgent care center is paramount to its success. The selection process should include the following steps:
Define a general market area.
Inventory the competition.
Locate strong retail markets with good traffic flow.
Profile the local population.
Identify the ideal property.
Compare potential sites.
To make the process easier, study the section “General Real Estate Terminology” that appears toward the end of this chapter.
Because mapping is an effective tool that aids in site evaluation, your site search should start by defining a general market area, the region that can support your first location and provide suitable opportunities for future expansion. One search method is to select a county or city and use its boundaries to define the general market area. Information used in your analysis is readily available on the basis of county, city, and ZIP code.
As an illustration of this method, consider Franklin County in central Ohio. A review of the area determines that the total population is 1,148,954 and that there are 32 existing urgent care centers (Figure 1). By dividing the population by the number of existing centers (our competition), we can calculate the population per urgent care center: roughly 32,905 people. The national median population per urgent care center is 25,144 people. Therefore, if we base our analysis on the national median population per urgent care center, this general market area has the potential to add approximately 13.7 new locations.
Figure 1. View of the population for Franklin County, Ohio. (Satellite image © 2013 Google.)
From a national perspective, there is 1 urgent care center for every 25,144 people. In our example market in Franklin County, there is 1 center for every 32,905 people. If you were using the national statistics as a benchmark, you could set up additional locations in this market and still be above the national median.
On the other hand, if we define our general market using the outer belt as the boundary, the population is 690,795 with 19 urgent care centers, for a population per urgent care center of 36,356. Compared with the national median population per center, this general market area could support 8.4 new urgent care centers (Figure 2).
Figure 2. View of the general trade area for Franklin County, Ohio. (Satellite image © 2013 Google.)
Within this general trade area, the goal would be to find an underserved target market. The target market illustrated in Figure 3 has a population of 101,760 and 3 urgent care centers, with a population per center of 33,920. This suggests that the proposed target market has the potential of supporting a new urgent care location while maintaining a population of 25,440, which meets the national median requirement.
Figure 3. View of a target trade area in Franklin County, Ohio. (Satellite image © 2013 Google.)
The comparison that we just worked through was based on national statistics for existing urgent care centers. It is generally beneficial to compare your proposed locations at the state or county level so that you can examine the numbers on an apples-to-apples basis. Note that the number of urgent care locations and the populations per urgent care center are constantly changing, so when you are researching in preparation for starting your own centers, you should not rely on the numbers used in the examples in this chapter.