Market Insite Group Guides Retailers

Kathy Huber

Why Is This Lady Smiling? ... Because she's helping the retail industry make better decisions. This is Kathy Huber, CEO of the Market Insite Group, based in Sausalito, CA (just north of San Francisco). Last week I visited her office, and she demonstrated how owners, like Crown America and Macerich, and tenants like Apple, The Body Shop and Talbots, use her web-based service.

Retail real estate directly aligns the interests of owners and tenants through the use of percentage leases. So there's a natural convergence of interest for both the owner and the tenant to be successful. The Market Insite Group provides a tool to predict the volume of sales for a retailer in a specific market. This is critically important because a bad store location can haunt both a retailer and a shopping center owner for years.

Huber uses a proprietary database of 200,000 locations of the top 700 retailers in the US, combined with a huge volume of demographic and lifestyle data. Based on a series of complex formulas, she evaluates the sales performance of a retailer's existing locations and matches these to sites with similar characteristics to develop a predictive score. This is a far cry from the old days when Huber in a previous career sat in a parking lot counting customers entering Gymboree stores!

The aim of the Market Insight Group is to develop an industry recognized performance metric, similar to the way that Fair, Isaac scores consumer credit risk. It's a big vision. But one recent client stated that the locations recommended by the Market Insight Group exceeded those locations opened previously by 36%. That's a pretty good start.

--Peter Pike