A lot of new business owners look at finding space for rentals as a time-consuming, difficult process. Finding retail space for rent, you see, is a hit or miss affair. Although you can find commercial space for rental in many cities, If you don’t get there at the right time with the right offer, it can be prohibitively expensive. Renting space is one of the biggest sources of commercial overhead, and if you are starting a new business, you really can’t afford to not have the perfect one. Starting your own business is expensive enough without the price of spaces for rental in an over-inflated market.
Nonetheless, when I started my first business, I looked at finding space for rental as a challenge. Every time I would go down the street, I would look in different rental spaces. I was in a busy town, and one with mixed financial fates. Although there were always new businesses opening, there were also always old businesses closing.
There was one block in particular that caught my interest. Almost every single month, it seemed, there was a space for rental opening up. There were always ambitious new restaurants that would start up, but they would close within half a year at the outside. The spaces for rent seemed to be well located, but whatever the reason, none of the businesses could succeed. Although some people would have dismissed this as a fluke, I wanted to pay close attention and figure out why the space for rental was always unsuccessful.
Initially, it looked like an ideally located space for rental. It was a well trafficked street in a pretty affluent, chic neighborhood. Nevertheless, none of the restaurants there did very well. After looking a little further, I figured out why. The space for rental was a block or two away from the main drag. Although there were still stores there, There were few other restaurants aside from that block one.
Basically, starting a restaurant in that space for rental was folly. There were so many well-established, delicious restaurants a block in either direction that no one would wander by there. I realized that the space for rental would be an excellent place for the specialty store that I wanted to open. The rent was very low because businesses kept failing there, so I went to the space as soon as I could. Needless to say, I was quite successful.
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