<<< Continued from previous page I would suggest telling your real estate broker - if you don't have one, see this article - that you wish to look at non-mall Class B real-estate ranging from $12-14.00 per square foot per year. This amount should include your base rent and any charges for common area maintenance (CAM), taxes, insurance, etc. If you are in a big East Coast or West Coast city you may have to pay more, and in a small town you may find even cheaper space, but the above figure works in Greenville, South Carolina and even in St. Louis, MO (per the proprietor of a 5-store comic shop chain) if you negotiate well enough. If you don't like anything in this price range, look a little higher but be prepared to negotiate hard. After six years in business, I'm paying just under $15 per square foot, and if I'd known all the lease-negotiation tips I'm going to share with you in the second part of this article, I'd be paying even less. When I first opened Fiction Addiction, my shopping center had two well-known restaurants that had been open for 6-10 years, a Medicine Shop drugstore, an independent kitchen shop, a Papa John's Pizza, a well-known kid's haircutting salon that brought people from the next town over, and a couple of other shops. I'd have preferred a few more retail shops but this mix worked quite well. The pizza place, drugstore, and haircutting salon were all places that customers expected a bit of a wait and so often wandered around the shopping center and into my store in the meantime. The restaurants and kid's haircutting salon were destination businesses that brought customers from all over and could be used as landmarks when giving directions. The kitchen shop's clientele were older, affluent women - a good customer base for me. When evaluating shopping centers, consider not only their location and price but also the synergies you can expect between the other businesses there. Some businesses may even have negative synergy - for example, grocery stores also sell books and their customers usually have to run right home to put the refrigerated/frozen goods away and so are unlikely to stop in your shop. When evaluating different locations, here are some other factors to take into consideration:
Keep in mind that an open space is not usually good for the existing owners, and so they may try to gloss over any negatives. If you have any questions about choosing your business location, please email me at fictionaddiction@juno.com or post your query to the BookThink Open Shop Bookstores forum, and I'll do my best to help: Once you have one or two prime candidates for your storefront location, it's time to start negotiating. Stay tuned for Part II of this article: Lease Negotiation.
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