Our ShopPoint™ database of Shopping Centers and Retail Centers offers the first comprehensive look at the entire retail landscape of the United States. The ShopPoint™ Center information is used in combination with our ShopPoint™ Retail Grid System and our ShopPoint™ Retailer Database to allow our users to define and evaluate retail areas of any size or shape.
USRetailCenters.com offers a number of databases for license that offer information on United States retailers, shopping centers and business centers of many types and ranging in size from the largest Regional Malls to Micro-Centers with as few as two businesses. All of these data are part of the integrated ShopPoint™ Database displayed online at the USRetailCenters.com site.
We've divided the entire retail landscape of the United States into approximately 336,000 1 kilometer x 1 kilometer grid cells or "bricks." A brick is roughly a one kilometer square area containing some level of retail activity ranging from "limited" (fewer than 10 retailers) to the "dense" (areas containing major shopping centers and/or hundreds of retailers).
Let's look at the facts about centers and retail areas. The current commercial databases listing centers and malls have between 5,000 and 50,000 entries. These data typically represent all of the larger shopping centers in the United States and many mid-sized centers. If you are looking for major retailers in the US, quite a few can be found in these centers; however, there are some "catches" here --- and they are big ones.
How important are these smaller centers and retail clusters? If you are The Gap, Sears or Nieman Marcus, perhaps not very important. However, roughly 80% of all retail activity takes place in these grid cells and micro-areas outside of the traditional centers and malls. Hundreds of major retailers such as chain restaurants, convenience stores, pharmacies, and many others are likely to be found here. Also, in today's competitive retail environment, with limited development of new centers, many traditional center-based retailers are opening stores here.
Our research on all shopping areas in the United States shows that retail activity takes place in:
All of these centers are spread throughout the 336,000 grid cells used to define the retail geography of the United States. The grid cells help to identify sections of any market where patterns of retail activity or the associated trade areas will be of interest to certain retailers, brokers or developers.
"Shopping Centers" and "Retail Centers" have the same meaning in our database for most centers --- both refer to a traditional shopping center. But there are some important differences in some cases:
To provide the most comprehensive coverage, our Large and Small ShopPoint™ Shopping Center Databases are a combination of traditional Shopping Centers and Retail Centers.
Our ShopPoint™ Retailer Data Consists of:
includes approximately 59,000 “large” shopping and retail centers that include traditional malls and shopping centers >50,000 square feet as well as power centers, big-box centers and many others. By design this data also includes many medium-sized grocery anchor or category killer anchor centers that are included because of the presence of major retailers. Most centers with 20+ retailers are included in this database.
includes approximately 105,000 “small” shopping and retail centers that include some overlap with the Large Center Database for Grocery Anchor Centers and smaller Power Centers. This database includes many retail/service/business centers where retail or service activity is a major part of the center but not strong enough to earn the label of “shopping center.” Most centers in the range from 6 to 20 stores or 10,000 to 50,000 square feet will be listed in the “small” center category.
includes approximately 551,000 micro-centers with 2-5 businesses. Approximately one-half of these are retail/service centers and the other half are mixed use business/office centers.
includes approximately 169,000 Business Centers ranging from 10 to 200 businesses. These may represent an office park, an office building or a traditional center or cluster of businesses with limited retail and a service or business emphasis. These data are currently on the site and will be available by June, 2010.
Our full retailer database contains approximately 3,100 major retail chains and over 523,000 small, local retailers. The current data for license, however, consists of only the chains where we have more than 90% of the locations in our database. New chains are added to these data monthly as we are able to complete the locations for missing retailers. If you use retailer data in your current work, you can appreciate that keeping this information up-to-date is a challenging problem.
If you need specific retailers not listed below please contact us and we will give you an estimate of when these data will be available.
Please read the following to determine if the above databases will meet your requirements:
Our shopping and retail center databases give, by far, the most comprehensive coverage of shopping and retail centers in the US with over 884,000 large, small and micro centers available. That is the Good News. The Bad News is that we have only limited attribute information available for most of these centers. Attributes include:
If you need comprehensive coverage of retail and center locations and find the above list of attributes adequate, our ShopPoint™ databases are likely to meet your needs. If you require detailed center information that includes center plans, leasing information, available space and a history of previous transactions, you will not want our data.
You will notice two other problem areas when you begin to look carefully at the centers on our site:
1. Location or Geo-Coding Problems: much available information on centers or retailers from online sources or commercial databases contains "bad" location information. Addresses are incorrect or approximate. Street names are listed incorrectly. The geo-code (or latitude/longitude) for addresses is incorrect. Addresses point to a location on the street, not the center. The center contains retailers that are scattered across several geographic areas. And so forth.
We apologize for the limitations here and are engaged in a constant process to improve these data with better addresses, better locations, better data sources ---- BUT, this is a moving target and will take time to correct and improve. As we move to a more complete retailer database and rooftop geocoding you can expect major improvements in 2010 but it will take several years to eliminate all of the noise in our data.
2. Limits on Center Retailers: While we have retailers in 95% of our centers, the number of retailers in the center ranges from roughly 50% to 100% depending on the center, the data of opening and whether or not the retailers represent major chains or independent retailers. We are working to improve these data with our updates and more detailed online search algorithms (plus partnerships with other companies having center data); however, this is a process that will also take place over time, in part because the world of major retailers is changing rapidly today and also because data on small retailers, from businesses databases, is often 1-2 years out of date. You will see a big jump in accuracy here as our live data goes online late in 2010. In the meantime we apologize for the incomplete data. "We are on it!"
3. Center Fragments: Many centers are polite enough to locate all of their retailers within a single building or other limited geography --- and are easy to view and understand as "one center." Many other centers, however; are spread into fragments or sub-centers across a broad geography; are a mix of one or more major centers surrounded by retailers and small centers; contain retailers on both sides of a major street; and are divided in other ways. We have done millions of retailer and center geo-codes attempting to integrate centers and retailers correctly but there is still lots of room for improvement. You may notice when looking at large centers that a nearby micro-center is actually part of the large center --- but a problem geo-coding the address made it appear outside the center. We apologize for these problems in the data but they cannot be fixed until the improvements in Items 1 and 2 above are fixed.
Please contact me if you have additional questions.
Dr. Lynn Cherry
817-886-2727
Lynn.Cherry@USRetailCenters.com
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