Compare places for a new location

You are choosing between two or three places, the lease is long, and the decision is expensive to reverse.

Who this is for

Written for Retail, restaurant, clinic, franchise and home-service owners. You bring the commercial question; the published record behind it comes back with the answer, and you can see where each figure came from.

What to bring

Have these to hand before you paste the prompt. Anything you leave out should be asked for rather than guessed at.

The candidate areas, by city, ZIP or county
The kind of business you are opening
Which trade area you draw from, if you know it

Try this prompt

Paste this where you connected HARBOR Port and replace the bracketed parts. It asks for sources and periods on purpose: that is what makes the answer checkable.

Compare [candidate areas] for a new [business type]. Show population and income context, how many businesses of this kind are already there, what comparable workers are paid where that data exists, and the typical climate. Lead with the strongest signal and the biggest drawback, cite the source and period beside every figure, and separate what the data says from what you think it means.

Then ask a narrower question. These are the ones people ask next.

Which of those areas has the most businesses per resident, and which has the fewest.

What would change your ranking if I weighted household income twice as heavily as population.

What the answer looks like

The shape below is the point of the workflow. If a response arrives without the periods and the source behind each number, ask for them before you use it.

A side-by-side table, one row per candidate area
Population, households and median household income, with the survey year
Employer establishments and employment for the relevant industry
Nonemployer counts, labelled as a separate population
The strongest argument for the leading area and the strongest against it

Limits to keep in view

Employer establishments and nonemployer businesses are different populations. They are never added together, and a page that shows both names each one.

Census, BEA and BLS series are published on different calendars and for different periods. Every figure carries the period and geography that were actually returned, not the one that was asked for.

Wage data is published for labour-market areas, which do not line up with counties or with a service area. When the geography does not match, the number is omitted rather than stretched.

Climate normals and historical extremes describe the past. They are not a forecast, a project-specific hazard estimate, or an insurance input.

Not answered by this data:

Your revenue, customers, bookings, pipeline or churn
Inventory, capacity, staffing rosters or payroll
Your actual utility bills, fuel spend or supplier quotes
Business credit, insurance premiums, or lending decisions
Permit, licence or certification status
A local forecast, a hazard estimate, or a legal opinion

Where the numbers come from

The answer is built from the published sources below. Each one keeps its own geography, period and definitions, and the answer states which was used.

Census American Community Survey
Census County Business Patterns
Census Nonemployer Statistics
BLS occupational wages
NOAA climate normals

The exact names, and where to read the detail

bls

bls_wages_by_occupation_geo

census

census_acs_demographics
census_cbp_market_size_by_naics_county
census_nonemployer_stats

noaa-cdo

noaa_cdo_climate_normals_for_county

Scoped to what your plan reaches, and to the sources each workflow names. Reviewing the catalogue first is the cheap way to decide whether this covers your question: source catalogue.