Every market number in a study inherits its credibility from one early decision — how the trade area was drawn.
Market feasibility fails at the boundary more often than at the arithmetic. Draw the trade area too wide and demand inflates effortlessly; too narrow and a viable project looks starved. The defensible method derives the boundary from the asset’s economics — drive times for convenience-driven uses, destination radii for experience-driven ones, shipping economics for industrial — and then evidences it: customer-origin data from comparables, gravity-model logic, the competitive map itself. Only after the boundary is honest do the Census Bureau demographics and BLS employment data mean anything.
Demand quantification then proceeds from population and spending to the category: households times participation rate times frequency times spend, with every coefficient sourced. The step most studies skip is leakage and inflow — demand currently leaving the trade area for lack of supply, and demand entering from outside it — which is frequently where the project’s actual opportunity lives. Wert-Berater models leakage explicitly; a recent Texas RV engagement turned on exactly that tab.
The competitive analysis that matters counts what will exist at the project’s stabilization, not what exists today: permitted projects, announced pipelines, and the categories where supply responds fast to visible success. For local-supply businesses — storage, car washes, fuel — a saturation analysis comparing supply per capita against benchmark markets answers the question committees actually ask: is there room for this one?
The market section’s conclusion is a capture rate — the share of quantified demand the project must win to hit its pro forma — and the entire section exists to make that single number look conservative.
President, Wert-Berater, Inc. — independent feasibility study consultants since 1998. More than 4,000 feasibility studies completed across all 50 states and internationally, evaluating $40.2 billion in project value for SBA, USDA, EB-5, conventional, and institutional financing decisions. Fiduciary duty runs to the lender and agency in every engagement.
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