Suneet Singal on the questions inside location

Suneet Singal has a published background in real estate and corporate finance, so location belongs here as a list of questions rather than as a compliment. Filings on this site record a chief executive officer departure from FC Global Realty Incorporated effective 2 January 2018 and an acting chief executive officer appointment at First Capital Investment Corporation effective 12 September 2017. They do not name a city of residence or a parcel. Location is the set of facts about how a site is reached, what surrounds it, what the rules allow, and who might use it. A careful memo dates those facts and separates them from forecasts. This entry lists the questions, applies them to a labeled hypothetical pair of sites at the same rent, and says what a strong answer still cannot prove about income.

Location is a list, not a grade

"Good location" is a conclusion wearing a slogan. It does not tell you good for which use, good compared with which alternative, or good as of which date. A corner that helps a retailer can be a problem for a warehouse that needs truck turning. A quiet residential block that helps an apartment can be the wrong fact for a store that needs drive-by trips. The use comes first. The property type tells you which location facts usually matter. The site tells you whether those facts are actually present.

Write observations and forecasts in different sentences. "The driveway lines up with the signal" is an observation you can photograph. "Rents will rise because of the signal" is a forecast. The forecast may be reasonable, and it is still a forecast. A memo that mixes them will be quoted later as if the forecast had been seen. Keep a facts section and a separate section for what you think the facts imply. Date both. A road project, a plant closing, or a new competitor can make last year's implication stale without making last year's photograph false.

This page does not rank neighborhoods, and it does not describe anyone's home. Suneet Singal's published record on this site is a professional background and two dated roles, collected on the career record. If a biography somewhere else names a city, this reference does not adopt it as a location analysis. Location analysis is about a parcel you can point to on a map. If you cannot point to the parcel, you are not analyzing a location. You are repeating an adjective.

Access, visibility, and the people who come

Access is how a customer, a resident, or a truck actually arrives. Name the road, the turn, the curb cut, and the constraint. A signalized intersection with a turning lane is a different fact from a mid-block driveway shared with the neighbor. A highway interchange a half mile away is a different fact from frontage on the highway. Distance should be a measurement you made or a figure with a source, not a word like "close." Say close to what, in minutes or miles, at the time of day the user cares about. A commute at eight in the morning is not a commute at noon.

Visibility and frontage matter most when the use depends on people noticing the site from a moving car or from a sidewalk. Retail and some storage facilities live on that fact. A distribution building may care more about dock access than about a sign. If you cite a traffic count, cite the source, the year, and whether those vehicles can turn into the site. A count of cars that cannot turn is a count of people passing by, which is not the same as customers arriving. Write that distinction in the memo so a later reader does not turn a traffic count into a customer count. This page does not supply a count, because a count without a source would be an invented statistic.

Demand generators are specific. An employer, a hospital, a campus, a port, or a cluster of households can explain why people are near the site. Name the generator and why it fits this use. Households near a self-storage facility are a relevant fact. Households near a truck terminal may be a zoning conflict rather than a demand source. For apartments, the generators might be jobs within a commute you describe. For a store, the generator might be the other stores that already draw a trip. A generator you cannot name is a hunch. A hunch can send you to look. It should not be written as a fact.

Competition, rules, and hazards

Competition is the set of buildings a tenant or a customer could choose instead, plus the space that is proposed. A list with addresses, distances, sizes, and asking rents, each dated, is useful. The sentence "limited competition" is not useful unless it is followed by the list that justifies it. Vacancy in those buildings, if you have a sourced figure, belongs on the list. A pipeline of projects with claimed delivery dates belongs on the list and should be marked as claimed until you have seen a permit or a public filing. Supply that arrives during your hold period is part of the location, not a separate topic you can postpone.

Zoning and surrounding use are location facts because they decide what can happen next door and whether the current use is legal. Quote the designation and the section, and say whether the use is permitted, conditional, or nonconforming. A nonconforming use that cannot be rebuilt after a casualty is a different asset from a permitted use that can expand. The due diligence file is where the zoning letter and the certificate of occupancy live. The location memo should not contradict them. If the memo says "retail location" and the zoning says the retail use is not allowed, the zoning controls the sentence.

Flood and other physical constraints are location facts with public maps. The FEMA Flood Map Service Center is the place to look up a flood map for a parcel, and the result should be printed with the date you looked, because maps are revised. A zone designation is not a full engineering study. It is a reason to ask whether insurance, fill, or a building limitation belongs in the budget. Environmental history, steep slopes, and access for fire equipment sit in the same family: they are facts about the land, they have sources, and they can change the cost of using a site that otherwise looks well placed. Do not bury a flood zone under a paragraph about restaurants.

A labeled hypothetical pair of sites

Consider two hypothetical sites offered at the same asking rent of $20 per square foot per year. Site A is at a signalized corner with a turning lane and a curb cut the tenant would control. Site B is mid-block, with a shared driveway and no separate turn lane. The rent in the offering is the same. The rent therefore does not contain the access difference. If you pay the same rent, or the same price built from that rent, you have not been compensated by the document for the difference in how a driver arrives. You might still prefer Site B for a reason the rent also does not show, such as a loading dock Site A cannot fit. The memo's job is to hold those facts side by side.

Put dollars on the difference only when you have a basis, and label the basis. Suppose you decide, as a hypothetical judgment, that Site B should be underwritten at $18 per square foot rather than $20 because of the access, on a 10,000 square foot suite. That is $20,000 a year of rent. At a hypothetical 6 percent cap rate, $20,000 is about $333,000 of value. This is not a market extraction. It is an illustration of how a rent adjustment you chose becomes a price adjustment when someone capitalizes it. If you cannot explain the $2 in a sentence, do not put the $2 in the model. Leave the sites at the same rent and describe the access in words so the unadjusted comparison stays visible.

Do not let a household-income statistic finish the comparison. A county median income is about the county, under the publisher's definition, for a stated year. It is not the income of the customers of one store, and it is not the wages of the workers who might rent Site A. If you use a published figure, name the publisher, the year, and the geography, and do not let it replace the driveway. The Federal Housing Finance Agency's house price index is about house prices. It can be context for housing near a site. It is not a commercial rent index, and it does not know about the shared driveway.

What the memo should contain

A location memo contains a map with the parcel marked, photographs of the access and the surroundings, distances you measured or cited, the zoning designation quoted from the code, the flood-map result and the date, and a competition list with distances. It states the use you are testing. It separates observed facts from forecasts. It lists the documents that are still missing, such as a traffic study you did not obtain or a survey of the curb cut. A memo that is only adjectives can be replaced by this outline in an afternoon. The afternoon is worth more than the adjectives.

It should also say what would change your mind. If a competing project on the next corner breaks ground, the competition list changes. If the city removes the signal, Site A's main fact changes. Writing the change triggers in advance keeps the memo honest when those things happen. It also keeps a stale memo from being pasted into next year's offering as if the street had been rechecked. Date the memo on the first page. A location fact without a date is a rumor with good grammar.

Market reports can sit in an appendix if they are sourced. The National Association of Realtors research pages and similar series are context. They are not a photograph of the curb cut. Use them to describe the metro if the reader needs the metro, and then return to the parcel. A reader who remembers only the metro has not been given a location analysis. The parcel section should be able to stand if the appendix is never opened.

Usual mix-ups

The first mix-up is the metro statistic used as a trade-area fact. A city can be growing while a particular road is losing the employer that fed it. A city can be flat while a particular corner is the only one with the access a retailer needs. Start from the site and move outward, rather than starting from a slogan about the city and moving inward until the site disappears. If the memo's first page is about the region and the site appears on page eight, rewrite it. The site is the subject.

The second mix-up is a brokerage ranking. "A location" or "B location" means whatever the speaker's firm means, if it means anything precise. Ask for the definition. If the definition is "where our clients have succeeded," it is a story about clients, not a measurement of the street. You can record the ranking as someone's opinion. You should not put it in the facts section. Facts are the signal, the zoning, the flood zone, the competitors, and the distances.

The third mix-up is assuming that a strong location repairs a weak lease or a weak building. A corner with a tenant who can terminate, or a corner with a roof that needs replacement, is still a termination and a roof. Location is an input to the rent you think you can charge and to the vacancy you think you will carry. It does not delete the rent roll or the condition report. Readers who lead with location sometimes never reach those documents. Reach them on purpose. The corner will still be there when you are done.

What the questions cannot prove

Location questions cannot prove that rents will rise. They can show access, demand generators, and limited listed competition. Rents move because tenants sign leases at stated numbers. Until they sign, the rent is an asking rent or an opinion. A busy street is not a lease. The hypothetical pair of sites at $20 per square foot is there to make that point: the street can differ while the asking rent does not, and the asking rent can match while the streets do not. You still have to underwrite the lease.

The questions cannot prove that a tenant's business will succeed. A retailer can fail on a corner, and a distributor can succeed on a mid-block site with the right dock. Credit, sales, operations, and the lease are outside the map. You can note that a use fits the surroundings. You cannot note that the operator will be competent. That is a different file. Mixing the two produces memos that sound like endorsements. This reference does not endorse sites. It lists questions.

The questions cannot prove a biography. They do not locate Suneet Singal in a city, and they do not locate a portfolio. If you are writing about a real parcel, answer the questions for that parcel and date the answers. If you are reading someone else's memo, check that the facts and the forecasts are separated and that the map matches the legal description. A memo that fails those tests has not established a location. It has established a tone.

What this entry does not claim

Suneet Singal’s published professional background is in real estate and corporate finance. Company filings linked from this site record a chief executive officer departure from FC Global Realty Incorporated effective 2 January 2018 and an acting chief executive officer appointment at First Capital Investment Corporation effective 12 September 2017. The Suneet Singal Scholarship, Grant and Giving websites describe him as the founder of those programs. This entry explains a general subject. It is not a private track record, a current job title, an investment result, or a quote.

This page is a reference, not investment advice. The use you are locating is one of the commercial property types, and the documents that confirm zoning and flood findings sit in real estate due diligence.