Use case · Site selection

Find the best place to open next, ranked and explained

Every new location is a large bet that is still too often decided by gut feel and slow site visits. SmartMarket turns the question into a ranked, explainable answer: break the city into micro-grids, score every one on the data that drives footfall and revenue, and surface the best sites with the reasons behind each one.

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The decision

A large bet, still made on instinct

Opening a new location is one of the most expensive decisions a retail, restaurant or service brand makes, and it is still too often settled by gut feel, costly site visits and slow manual surveys. When the read on a catchment is wrong, the store underperforms from day one.

The stakes are real: external industry research finds that around half of new restaurants in India close within their first year. The question that decides the outcome is simple to ask and hard to answer well: where should the next store go, and why?

What the workflow resolves

From a target city to a ranked shortlist

Micro-grids

Break the city into 150m grids

The target city is divided into 150m by 150m micro-grids, so each candidate area is analysed at a consistent, comparable scale rather than by neighbourhood guesswork.

Enrich

Enrich every grid

Each grid is layered with footfall, affluence, income, age, competitor presence, adjacency and infrastructure, drawing on the Lepton Data Observatory.

Score

Apply a weighted opportunity score

A weightage-based composite opportunity score combines the signals that matter for your format into a single, comparable number per grid.

Rank

Rank the best sites on a map

The top grids surface on a map dashboard, ranked and ready to shortlist, so you compare the strongest options side by side.

A drive-distance catchment in SmartMarket: the service-area polygon around a site with layers and attributes
A drive-time catchment in SmartMarket: the area a site can actually serve.

Why instinct alone misses the best site

The signals that decide a location interact. A grid can have strong footfall but weak affluence, the right demographics but heavy competition, or a quiet today and a major infrastructure project arriving tomorrow.

No team can hold all of that in their head across hundreds of micro-markets. SmartMarket scores every grid on the same data and the same weights, so the comparison is even and the best site is the one the data supports, not the one that was easiest to visit.

A city, resolved into a ranked shortlist.

Every micro-grid is scored on the same data and the same weights, then the strongest sites rise to the top with a Smart Score and the reasons behind it. The expansion decision becomes a shortlist you can defend.

How SmartMarket answers it

Verifiable data science, not guesswork

SmartMarket runs the workflow on the Lepton Data Observatory, Lepton's unified India dataset stack: demographics, affluence across the top 500 cities, footfall at 150m grids, upcoming infrastructure projects, road traffic, transit and more. Google Places Insights adds live point-of-interest quality signals such as ratings and reviews, so the competitive picture reflects the real strength of nearby outlets.

Each grid receives a Smart Score, a composite opportunity score with explainable reasons, so the answer is not a black box. Analysts can build custom expansion models on the platform, while executives can ask a question in plain language and get a ranked, presentation-ready shortlist.

150m × 150m micro-grids, so every area is scored at the same comparable scale
100+ datasets unified in the Lepton Data Observatory behind each score
300+ point-of-interest categories for footfall, adjacency and competition

What a ranked shortlist changes

  1. 01

    Decisions in minutes, not months

    The shortlist replaces rounds of manual surveys and field scouting, so the team moves from a question to a ranked answer quickly.

  2. 02

    An answer you can defend

    Every site carries a Smart Score and the reasons behind it, so the expansion committee sees why a location ranks where it does.

  3. 03

    One method across the network

    Because every grid is scored the same way, sites in different cities compare on equal terms, and the strongest opportunities stand out.

Proof

Built on live, first-party location data

A shortlist is only defensible if the data under it is current. The Google Places Insights integration inside SmartMarket carries 70+ attributes across 250M+ places and refreshes monthly, so competitor presence and point-of-interest quality behind each ranked site reflect the street as it is today. The same location-intelligence stack is applied across real estate, retail and BFSI datasets.

Company scale 1500+ active customers across retail, BFSI, FMCG and quick commerce rely on Lepton location intelligence
  • Google Places Insights
  • Real estate
  • Retail
  • BFSI
Get started

Rank the best sites in your target city.

Bring a city and a brief, and we will walk you through a ranked, explainable SmartMarket shortlist for your next location.

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