Location strategies to give you the competitive advantage — independent, expert and confidential advice on national and international location decisions.
Four quick questions and we'll frame the location brief — then send it to our Locations team on WhatsApp, in confidence.
Fraser Bond's specialist Locations team provides advice and due diligence to companies on all aspects of their national and international location strategies — based on robust strategic assessment methodologies and proven experience of global locations.
Our team has assessed over 1,000 locations — countries, regions and cities — globally, using the latest international location intelligence across each of the key strategic and operational factors required for successful decision-making.
Our advice is independent, expert and confidential. Location decisions are commercially sensitive long before they are announced — and we work accordingly.
From longlist to shortlist to site, our clients are supported through all phases of their major business location decisions — including the property transaction at the end of it.
We have undertaken location strategy assignments for clients from all major sectors, locating business units of every type.
Where the leadership, the talent pool and the tax position meet.
Explore →Proximity to universities, skills and research clusters.
Explore →Labour availability, cost and attrition modelled properly.
Explore →Consolidating functions without losing capability.
Explore →Network modelling, drive times and logistics cost.
Explore →Power, planning, workforce and supply chain in one assessment.
Explore →Location decisions go wrong when they are made in the wrong sequence — usually because an attractive building appeared before anyone had defined what the location had to do.
One: where are the people? For most occupiers labour is the constraint, not rent. A location that is twenty per cent cheaper and reachable by a materially smaller pool of the skills you recruit for is not cheaper. This is answerable with travel-time catchments over the roles you actually hire, rather than with a view about which district is fashionable.
Two: what does getting there cost your customers and suppliers? For retail and consumer-facing uses, catchment and footfall. For industrial and logistics, drive time to the delivery area and access to the strategic road network. For offices, the honest question is how many of your staff and visitors gain or lose more than fifteen minutes.
Three: what does the space cost there, across the distribution? Not the prime rent. The lower quartile, median and upper quartile of live quoting rents, with the number of instructions behind each figure. The spread is what tells you whether a quoted rent is defensible or merely asked.
Four: is there enough of it? The question most often skipped. A location with the right labour and the right rent and only two buildings that fit your requirement is a location where you have no negotiating position at all.
Rent evidence tells you what space costs. Supply depth tells you whether you can hold out for it.
We measure, for a defined submarket and size band, how many live instructions actually meet a requirement. Three answers change your strategy completely. Twenty-plus credible options means you can run a competitive process and the terms will reflect it. Five to ten means a tight process with two genuine fallbacks. Fewer than three means you are effectively negotiating with one landlord who knows it, and your leverage has to come from somewhere other than competition — usually from your timetable, which is why starting early matters more in thin markets than anywhere else.
We publish this depth analysis for London submarkets, which is also how we test whether our own rent figures rest on enough evidence to be worth quoting.
| Layer | What it answers |
|---|---|
| Labour catchment | Who can reach each candidate location within a set travel time, by public transport and by car, weighted to the roles you recruit. Compared against your current site so the change is visible rather than abstract. |
| Staff impact | Your actual staff postcodes against each option. This regularly reorders a shortlist, because an average commute conceals the team that gets twenty-five minutes worse. |
| Transport and accessibility | Rail, underground and bus connectivity, interchange quality, and for industrial uses access to the strategic road network and realistic HGV movement. |
| Cost, as a distribution | Quoting rent quartiles by submarket and size band, plus the rateable value position, service charge norms and what a fit-out costs there. |
| Supply depth | Live instructions meeting the requirement, and what has come to market and let in the last period. This is the leverage question. |
| Planning and constraint | Planning use, any constraint on intensification or change of use, and whether what you intend to do needs consent you have not budgeted for. |
| Growth headroom | Whether the location can accommodate the business you expect to be in three to five years, or whether you are buying a second move. |
Our live evidence base is deepest in London and the South East, because that is where we hold the most instructions. In locations where our sample is small, a quartile is a number with very little behind it, and presenting it as a market view would be misleading.
So in those locations we say what the sample is, use published and third-party sources alongside it, and mark which figures are ours and which are not. You can then decide how much weight any single number should carry. A confident figure from a thin sample is worse than an honest range, because it survives into a board paper where nobody can see where it came from.
The method, including the sample sizes, is set out in full so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Yes, and it comes before it. A search answers "what is available". A location appraisal answers "where should we be looking, and how much negotiating room will we have when we get there". Done in that order, the search is shorter and the terms are better, because you arrive with alternatives.
Three to six weeks for a defined set of candidate locations, depending on how many and how much of your own data exists. Staff postcode analysis is quick once we have the list; supply depth and cost distributions take longer where our live sample needs supplementing.
Staff home postcodes at district level is the single most valuable input, and district level is enough — we do not need full postcodes or names. Then the roles you recruit for, your three-year headcount view, and any location that is strategically fixed.
No. We will not produce an appraisal for a market where we have no live evidence and no direct experience, because the result would look like analysis without being any. We would rather say that than sell you a report assembled from published summaries.
Sometimes, and when the labour and access answers are genuinely equivalent it should. More often cost ranks third behind labour and accessibility, because rent is a line you can renegotiate at review and a recruitment problem is not.
Fill in your details and one of our team will contact you to find out what you are looking for — completely free.