Who Gets Paid When You Sign the Lease?

Draw the money flow around a typical expansion decision and something becomes visible that nobody says out loud.

The agent introducing the site earns on completion. The broker advising on the market has a transactional relationship with landlords in it. The consultancy running the feasibility study is often positioning for the follow-on mandate. Everyone in that chain is competent, professional and acting in good faith — and almost nobody is paid the same whether you proceed or walk away.

This is not an accusation

It's worth being precise, because the cynical version of this argument is both lazy and wrong.

Transaction-linked incentives don't produce fabricated analysis. They produce something subtler and harder to detect: asymmetric thoroughness. The case for proceeding gets built with more care than the case against. Risks appear, because a professional adviser will always list them — but they appear as manageable caveats rather than as the reason to stop. Nobody lies. The centre of gravity of the document just sits slightly downhill of "yes."

You can see it most clearly in what's missing. How often does a commissioned study conclude that none of the shortlisted markets are worth entering this cycle? It is a legitimate finding. It is also one that nobody in the chain is paid to reach.

What ownership actually changes

When you own the analysis outright, three things change:

No one in the loop earns more if you proceed. The verdict has no financial stake in your decision. That doesn't make it correct — but it removes one specific, structural source of drift.

"No" is a normal output. Across our 155 venue markets, 58 return No Go — nearly twice the 30 that earn Strong Go. For 5-star hotels it's starker: 73 No Go against 26 Strong Go across 208 cities, and for fine-dining restaurants starker still, at 75 against 11. Those distributions are only possible from a source with no position in the outcome.

You can ask about markets nobody is selling you. Advice arrives shaped by who has inventory to place. A market with no agent pitching it is not a market without opportunity — it's a market with no one incentivised to bring it to your attention.

That third point is the one with real money in it. Every operator's shortlist is assembled partly from inbound: the sites agents brought, the markets where a landlord relationship already exists, the cities someone visited for a conference. None of that is illegitimate, and all of it is selection-biased in a direction nobody chose. The markets that never reach the room aren't rejected — they're never nominated, which is a filter operating silently upstream of every piece of analysis you then commission.

An index you own inverts that. The list of candidate markets comes from the data rather than from the deal flow, and inbound opportunities get scored against markets nobody is pitching. Sometimes the pitched site still wins; that's a genuinely stronger position to sign from than never having checked.

Where the incentive still sits, including ours

Consistency requires saying this plainly: we are not neutral either. We sell an annual subscription. Our commercial interest is in your renewal, which means our incentive runs toward analysis you find reliable over time rather than analysis that closes any particular transaction.

That's a better-aligned incentive for this job, not a pure one. Judge it the way you'd judge any other: look at whether the tool has ever told you something you didn't want to hear. If it hasn't, the alignment isn't working, whatever the pricing model says.

The structural version of the same point: exclusivity exists only at Enterprise, and binds only within your competitive set — one operator per set. We are explicit about that boundary rather than implying a universality we don't have.

The practical test

Three questions, applicable to any adviser including us:

1. When did this source last recommend against something you wanted to do? If never, you have a sales channel, not an analysis function.
2. Would this document look different if the recommendation were "don't"? If the "no" case would obviously be thinner, you're reading an asymmetric document.
3. Who chose the shortlist? If the markets under consideration arrived from people with inventory in them, the most consequential filter already happened somewhere you couldn't see it.

The takeaway

Keep the agents and the consultants — they are genuinely good at what they do, and site-level execution needs them. The change worth making is narrower: own the screening layer, the one that decides which markets get considered at all, and make sure it belongs to nobody who is paid when you sign.

Book a demo and we'll run the markets you're weighing — including, if the numbers say so, the ones you're being pitched.