The Feasibility Study Maths Stopped Working

The commissioned feasibility study is a good product. It is thorough, defensible, and when you are about to commit eight figures to a building, you should have one. The problem isn't quality. It's that its price sets a floor on curiosity.

The constraint nobody writes down

A study costs up to around £250,000 and takes six to twelve weeks. That price does something specific to a process: it means you can only afford to study cities you are already fairly confident about.

Which inverts the logic. The study is supposed to test the hypothesis. Instead, the hypothesis has to be strong enough to justify the study — so the study arrives to confirm a shortlist that was assembled by instinct, relationships, and whoever in the room had been to the city recently. The most consequential filter in the entire process, the one that decides which five cities out of forty get examined, runs on the least evidence.

Everyone in expansion knows this. It is usually filed under "commercial reality" rather than "methodological flaw."

What the numbers actually compare

For roughly the price of a single commissioned study, an annual Pipeline seat covers the whole index, unlimited, for up to eight people. That is not a marginal efficiency. It is a different category of decision-making, because it removes the reason to ration the question.

The cost you don't see on an invoice

The visible cost of the study model is the fee. The expensive part is elsewhere.

The cities you never examined. Every market that failed to clear the "worth £250k to investigate" bar was rejected on no evidence at all. Some of them were right — and, crucially, rightness depends on what you're building. Across the same 208 cities, the boutique-hotel lens returns 123 Conditional Go against the 5-star lens's 82 No Go. A market your instinct filed under "too small for us" may be too small for one format and squarely right for another. Instinct doesn't hold four category-specific cost bases in mind at once. A model does.

The comparisons you can't make. Five studies from five firms, each with its own capacity definitions and demand methodology, cannot be ranked against each other. They can only be read in sequence, which is how a shortlist becomes a matter of which report was most persuasively written.

The re-look you don't run. Markets move. Re-commissioning at full price to check whether a Hold has become a Go is rarely justifiable, so the answer quietly ages until it's wrong.

What changes when screening is cheap

The useful reframing is that these are two different jobs, and the study was only ever good at one of them.

• Screening — narrowing forty candidate markets to five, on a consistent basis, quickly. High leverage, currently done with almost no rigour.
• Diligence — everything about the specific site you are about to sign. Building surveys, lease negotiation, local execution risk. Irreplaceable.

GrowSmart is built for the first job and makes no claim on the second. Run it across the pipeline, let it kill the markets that don't survive contact with the numbers, and spend the £250k of diligence on the city that does — with the confidence that it earned its place against 207 alternatives rather than against the four other cities somebody happened to name.

This applies whichever category you build in — venues, hotels, restaurants — and it applies with particular force on the capital side. A PE fund or REIT underwriting a hospitality or F&B platform faces the same screening problem in compressed form: a deal timetable that doesn't accommodate a twelve-week study, and an IC that still expects a defensible view on demand durability across every market in the portfolio.

The independence dividend

There is one more asymmetry worth naming. A commissioned agency is frequently paid on transaction. That does not make anyone dishonest, but it does mean the incentive structure of the analysis and the incentive structure of the decision are not identical. When you own the analysis outright, there is no one in the loop who is paid more if you sign.

The takeaway

The question isn't whether feasibility studies are worth their fee for the site you're committing to. They are. It's whether the first filter in your process — the one that decides which cities ever get that scrutiny — deserves to be the only step you run on instinct because everything else was too expensive.

Book a demo and we'll run your current shortlist against the full index on the call.