Sunday, March 05, 2006

Free Real Estate Research: A Fortune 500 Retailer Approach

Bottom Line: Below I present a general strategy that leverages existing research done by Fortune 500 retailers, like Home Depot, that could help in your real estate investment decisions.

Do you feel nervous about putting down your hard earned cash for buying a house or condo? Not certain if the area is a good? If you are having a hard time with a $100k - $500k purchase, imaging what Fortune 500 retailers have to go through to make the same type of decision on new multi-million dollar stores.

Yes, retailers are pressured by shareholders to grow revenues through new store openings; however, big retailers expend a lot of time and money determining new store locations.

An interesting complimentary strategy is to look at new store openings for stores like Home Depot, Lowes, Wal-Mart, etc and verify if there are any of these new stores coming to your area. If so, then these major retailers think your geographic area has plenty of room for customer growth. If you back that up to what you're interested in, then it's also got room for housing demand.

Home Depot New Store Locations


Target newly opened stores


Walmart newly opened stores


Unfortunately, Walmart and Target are only listing stores opened in Jan, Feb and March. The Home Depot link provides scheduled future openings and is a bit more useful. Get the picture?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Would this apply to a person who wish to get in before there is a
bubble? I would think these stores would only come into an area after a good deal of development has been done. Therefore, a person speculating for ground floor opportunities, and using this measure, would definately miss the bus.

Finance Junkie said...

Looking at the lists, there are a considerable number of BFE (small) style towns on the list. Take for instance these Home Depot openings:

a) Clinton, MS
b) Denton, TX
c) Amarillo, TX

Finance Junkie said...

Relative to San Diego, Boston, Miami, etc, those towns haven't had a bubble run up. Accordingly, they aren't as desirable to live in.

It's all relative.