No, and in most cases the contract does not require it. Standard site selection and location data agreements govern who logs in, which markets the data covers, and what you keep when the term ends. Very few forbid you from buying a second source. You can start a parallel evaluation mid-contract and have a real answer before the renewal notice window opens.
The assumption that you cannot runs deeper than the paperwork. Ask a real estate director why they have not looked at anything else and the answer is usually some version of "we are under contract until March." Ask whether the agreement actually says that and the room goes quiet. Almost nobody has read it since signing.
The renewal calendar is a deadline, not a starting gun
Auto-renewal is the default in this category. An analysis of contract data from more than 1,000 companies, published in February 2024, found that roughly 90 percent of cloud service agreements carry an automatic renewal clause, and that in most cases the vendor asks for 30 days' notice to stop one (Common Paper contract data, via Growth Unhinged, February 2024).
Thirty days is plenty of time to send a letter. It is nowhere near enough to compare two data sources across live deals, get your analysts' honest read, and take a recommendation to whoever signs. So the notice window arrives, nobody has anything better to point at, and the term rolls.
That pattern is well documented on the operations side. BetterCloud's 2025 State of SaaS research surveyed roughly 600 IT professionals and found 40 percent of organizations still track renewals manually, with 25 percent taking no action at all and allowing applications to auto-renew (BetterCloud, April 2025). At the volume a mid-sized company now carries, that is not negligence. Zylo's 2026 SaaS Management Index puts the average organization at 211 SaaS renewals a year (Zylo, 2026). Your site selection contract is one line in a queue nobody has capacity to work.
The fix is not better calendar hygiene. It is moving the evaluation off the renewal date entirely, so the notice window is when you act on a decision instead of when you start making one.
What your agreement actually restricts
Before you accept that you are locked in, open the agreement and search it. The restrictions in these contracts almost never point where people assume.
Two rows deserve more than a line.
Benchmarking restrictions are usually about publication. Some agreements bar you from publishing a comparison of the vendor against named competitors. That is a marketing protection, and it says nothing about running a private test for your own purchase decision. Read the actual sentence before you treat it as a gag order on internal analysis.
Exclusivity is the real blocker, and it is rare. A sole-source commitment is an explicit promise to buy this category only from this vendor. It shows up in reseller and channel arrangements far more than in a direct data subscription. If you cannot find that language, you almost certainly do not have it. Ask procurement to confirm in writing either way, because a five-minute answer from legal beats a year of assuming.
One more clause matters for a different reason. Check what happens to derived work at termination, meaning the scores, models, and trade area definitions your team built on top of the vendor's file. If those do not survive the contract, that is worth knowing now rather than during a migration. Our guide to evaluating location data providers covers the license questions to ask before you sign anything new.
Running more than one source is ordinary procurement practice
Outside real estate, keeping a live alternative is treated as basic risk management rather than disloyalty. Deloitte's 2025 Global Chief Procurement Officer Survey covered more than 250 procurement leaders across 40 countries. Asked which tactics work best against supplier risk, 74 percent named maintaining active alternative sources, ahead of supply chain visibility at 64 percent and supplier collaboration at 61 percent (Deloitte, August 2025). That survey is about physical supply chains. The principle travels anyway: teams that handle vendor risk well do not wait until a source fails to find out what else is out there.
Real estate teams are already running more tools than they think. JLL's 2025 Global Real Estate Technology Survey of more than 1,000 senior decision-makers across 16 markets found 81 percent of firms operating at least three existing systems that are not producing the results they expected, and 88 percent with budget allocated to upgrading legacy technology (JLL, October 2025). The money is there. What is usually missing is a comparison anyone trusts. We counted the tools a single site decision touches in how many site selection tools one store takes, and the number surprises most teams.
What to run during the parallel period
A parallel evaluation is not a longer demo. The point is to take the choice of test away from the vendor.
Use your own stores as the answer key. Give both tools a set of markets you already operate in, not a list of your stores, and ask each to characterize the trade areas and score the sites. Then compare what came back against what those stores actually do. A tool that scores your worst location highly is telling you something useful about its model, and it is a test no demo will volunteer. The back-test protocol for site scores walks through how to set that up.
Run live candidates through both. Take three or four sites currently in your pipeline and work them in each tool. Not a sample market the vendor picked. Yours, with the co-tenancy question and the awkward parcel and the landlord who will not answer.
Score the disagreements. Where both tools agree, you learn nothing. Where they diverge on a trade area boundary, a competitor set, or a forecast, that gap is the whole product of the exercise. Make somebody explain each one. Methodology differences between vendors are real and knowable, and we mapped several of them in the foot traffic provider comparison.
Ask who opened it. After a few weeks, check which tool your analysts actually reach for on a Tuesday afternoon. Usage is not everything, but a platform nobody opens is a renewal you should not sign regardless of how the demo went.
Why teams wait anyway
In our own pipeline, the deals that stall behind an incumbent contract are rarely head-to-head losses on capability or price. The buyer wanted to look, decided the timing was wrong, and the conversation ended there. It is the most common reason we do not get a fair hearing, and a contract clause is almost never the thing in the way.
What is in the way is that a vendor review has no owner. It is nobody's quarterly goal. The incumbent is functioning well enough that the pain never becomes urgent, and the person who would run the comparison already has a committee packet due Friday. That is a real constraint, and it is worth naming honestly rather than pretending the decision is being made on the merits.
The way through it is to make the first step small enough that it does not need an owner with a budget line. One market, a handful of live sites, both tools, and a short written comparison at the end. No migration, no procurement cycle. That fits inside a normal month.
Where GrowthFactor fits
Plenty of our customers came in exactly this way, with an incumbent contract still running and a single market to test. The work does not require you to move anything first.
What tends to change the conversation is scope rather than a head-to-head on any one number. GrowthFactor covers market planning for where to go next, site scoring where every variable and weight is visible and adjustable by your team, and a deal pipeline that carries the site from broker flyer through committee to opening, with the same trade area and score attached the whole way. When a site you approved underperforms, the record of what the model expected is still there.
That last part is what makes a forecast defensible in the room. If the committee cannot take the number apart, they will not sign off on it, and we wrote about what survives that scrutiny in how to defend a site selection forecast. Run us alongside what you have, see which questions get answered where, and make the renewal call in March with something on the table.
Frequently Asked Questions about Running a Second Site Selection Vendor
Can you run two site selection vendors at the same time?
Almost always, yes. Standard location data and site selection agreements govern how many people log in, which markets and business purposes the data covers, whether you can redistribute raw records, and what you keep when the term ends. None of that restricts you from buying a second source. The clause that would restrict it is an exclusivity or sole-source commitment, which is uncommon outside reseller and channel agreements. Search your agreement for that specific term rather than assuming.
Do I have to wait for my contract to renew before evaluating another vendor?
No, and waiting is what turns the decision into a rush. Roughly 90 percent of cloud service agreements carry an automatic renewal clause, and in most cases the vendor asks for 30 days' notice to stop one, according to a February 2024 analysis of contract data from more than 1,000 companies. Thirty days is enough time to give notice. It is not enough time to run a real comparison on live deals, which is why the evaluation has to start well before the window opens.
Does buying a second data source mean I am paying for the same thing twice?
Only if the two tools do the same job, and usually they do not. A foot traffic panel, a GIS environment, and a site evaluation workflow occupy different slots in the same process. Where they genuinely overlap, running both is how you find out which one your team actually opens, which is the question a renewal conversation should turn on and rarely does.
How long should a parallel evaluation run?
Long enough to cover real deals rather than a demo market. Give it a handful of live candidate sites in markets you are actively working, plus a set of stores you already operate so you have an answer key. Most teams learn what they need inside one deal cycle. What matters more than the duration is that the sites are yours and the questions are the ones your committee asks.
How does GrowthFactor compare to Placer.ai if I already have a Placer contract?
They sit in different slots, which is why plenty of teams run both. Placer.ai sells a foot traffic panel and the platform to explore it. GrowthFactor is the evaluation workflow that data feeds into: trade area, demographics, competitor context, a site score with every variable and weight visible, and the deal pipeline the site moves through afterward. Adding GrowthFactor mid-term does not require ending a Placer agreement, and the comparison you get from running both is more useful than either vendor's demo.