More often than not, population requirements are one of the first items to check off of your list when identifying new locations. You know that to operate your business, you'll require X number of people to be present within a trade area. But figuring out how many locations you can do in that market, and what size trade area to use are less easily answered.

For this reason, our new Market Planner feature is a game-changer for retailers and brokers alike. Now instead of employing a guess and check method to determine the size of a trade area capturing a specific population around a candidate site, you can get market planner to do the work for you. 

The feature is housed in our Target Market Panel and can immediately be applied to any of your candidate layers. You can read more about candidate layers here.  

In order to use Market Planner, you first need to create a set of candidate sites. You can either upload your own candidate layer, or you can right-click on the map to create a new candidate (see below). 

A new dialogue box will pop-up asking you what layer you would like to save this candidate to. You can either select one of your existing candidate layer or create a new one.

Once you have entered all of the candidate points you would like to draw trade areas for, you are ready to turn on the market planner feature. 

Simply navigate over to the Target Market Panel and follow these steps: 

2. Enter a total population target for the trade area you would like to map around each candidate site and hit "Activate".

3. [OPTIONAL] Turn the heatmap "On," using the variable "Population Density. Our recommendation is to use the Blue/ Red or White/Black Target Market color scheme, which can be adjusted using the target market legend. This will allow you to visualize where your candidate sites are located relative to the pockets of population in the area.

Below is a sample visualization of what you will see on the map. 

The blue rings represents the outline of each trade area. 

You can click on any of the trade area shapes to bring up the same context menu you will see for other trade area types (rings, walktimes, drivetimes etc.).

You could also add them to a layer of candidate trade areas and run a comparison report so that you are able to compare apples to apples in terms of the population around each of several potential sites.  
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