A competitive intelligence report is a recurring document that collects what your competitors are doing and states what it changes for your own decisions. For a retail real estate team it runs six sections: openings, closures, foot traffic share, trade-area overlap, the site scores that moved, and what you are doing about it this month.
Most competitive intelligence reports fail at section five. The first four pages are immaculate. Competitor logos on a map, a chart of announced closures, a share-of-visits table with three decimal places. Then the report ends, everyone nods, and the site in Tulsa gets underwritten on Thursday using exactly the assumptions it would have used if the report had never been written.
That gap is the whole problem. This is the template we use, what belongs in each section, and where the data actually comes from.
What is a competitive intelligence report?
A competitive intelligence report is a recurring document that collects and interprets competitor activity for a specific audience and a specific decision. In retail real estate, the audience is the committee that approves leases, and the decision is which sites move forward. Everything in the report either changes a site's standing or belongs in a different document.
Most competitive intelligence writing covers the merchandising side: pricing moves, assortment shifts, promotion monitoring. Those reports go to category managers. The location version goes to a real estate team, and it works on a longer clock, because a lease is a ten-year commitment and a price match is a Tuesday. Our guide to retail competitive intelligence covers the four signals underneath this report in more detail. This article is about the artifact those signals produce.
The six sections
1. Competitor openings
What it answers: who is building in our markets, and how far out.
Openings show up in building permits, lease signings, and liquor or health-department filings long before they show up in a press release. A permit filed today is a store 9 to 18 months out. The useful version of this section is not a list of announcements. It is a list of permits and signings mapped against your own pipeline, so that a competitor pulling permits in three adjacent suburbs reads as what it is: someone building a market around a site you are underwriting in the middle of it.
Keep the section short. Openings are the least decisive of the four observation signals, because by the time you can see one, the other team already made their decision.
2. Competitor closures
What it answers: which boxes are coming back to market, at which addresses.
Closures still outrun openings by a wide margin. Coresight Research counted 8,270 US store closures in 2025 against 5,270 openings, a net loss near 3,000 stores. For 2026 it projects roughly 7,900 closures and 5,500 openings, the lowest closure count in three years. Rite Aid, Joann, Party City, and Big Lots topped the list of the most-shuttered chains (CNBC, February 2026).
The failure mode in this section is reporting the corporate number. A chain announces "up to 150 closures" and the store-level addresses trickle out over months across a dozen filings. The corporate number is a headline. The addresses are the decision, and they are the only version a real estate team can act on.
That is why we publish the closure tracker, a weekly-updated public dataset of US retail departures with every row traced back to a source. Between April 9 and July 2, 2026 it logged 39 closure announcements across 32 brands and geocoded 533 individual store addresses in 48 states. Thirty-nine announcements is a newsletter. Five hundred and thirty-three addresses is a report you can join against your own trade areas.
3. Foot traffic share
What it answers: are we winning or losing this trade area against the field.
Your own visit count is a number. Your visit count next to the competitor across the street is a position. This section should carry a per-trade-area comparison rather than a portfolio total, because the portfolio total hides the only thing worth knowing: whether a soft store is a store problem or a market problem. If your visits fell 8 percent and every competitor in that trade area fell 11 percent, you gained share in a declining market and the remodel budget belongs somewhere else.
Write the section in relative terms. Visit estimates come from mobile-location panels with real error bars, and they hold up far better as a trend than as an absolute count. Our guide to retail foot traffic covers where the numbers come from, and the foot traffic provider comparison covers how methodology differs between vendors, which matters if you are benchmarking competitors on someone else's panel.
4. Trade-area overlap
What it answers: how much of this catchment we already share, and with whom.
A trade area is the geography your customers actually come from, drawn as a drive-time polygon rather than a ring around a pin. Overlap is the share of a competitor's trade area sitting inside a site you are considering. Report it in both directions in the same table. Competitive overlap tells you how much of the demand is already served by a rival. Self-overlap tells you how much you are about to take from yourself, which is the number that shows up as a surprise in same-store sales two quarters after opening. Cannibalization analysis quantifies that transfer before you sign.
Read the two together or not at all. A site with 30 percent competitor overlap and 25 percent overlap with your own store two exits away is not two moderate problems. It is one site whose realistic capture rate is well under what the demographics promise, and neither number says so alone.
5. The scores that moved
What it answers: which of our live sites changed rank since the last report.
This is the section that separates a report from a newsletter, and it is the section most teams skip. Sections one through four are observation. Section five is the only place where the observation touches a decision you are actually about to make.
The mechanic is simple to describe and unglamorous to run. Take every site currently live in your pipeline. Re-run each one against the competitive picture as of this report. List the sites whose score or rank changed, with the input that moved it. If a competitor's exit from a trade area does not move any number in your model, your model is not reading competition, and that finding belongs in the report too.
The GrowthFactor Score is built for this step. Competitor proximity and trade-area composition are inputs you can open and inspect, each with a written justification, so the section reads as "this site dropped because two competitors opened inside the catchment" rather than a number nobody can trace. Cavender's has run more than 2,000 sites through that workflow across new and existing markets, and tripled its opening pace from 9 new stores in 2024 to 27 in 2025, with every new location performing at or better than expected.
6. Recommended actions
What it answers: what we are doing differently this month, and who owns it.
One line per action. Each line names a site, a change, an owner, and a date. "Re-underwrite the Tulsa site before the July 14 committee, because two of the six competitors we scored against filed WARN notices in June" is an action. "Continue monitoring the competitive landscape" is filler, and its presence in a report is a reliable sign that section five was empty.
Where the data comes from
Almost all of it is public. The cost of a competitive intelligence report is analyst time, not subscriptions.
| Source | What it gives you | Access |
|---|---|---|
| SEC EDGAR full-text search | Competitor 10-K, 10-Q, and 8-K text back to 2001, filterable by form type and date | Free |
| WARN notices | 60 days advance notice of mass layoffs and closings from employers with 100+ staff; several states run stricter thresholds and their own databases | Free, state by state |
| PACER | Federal bankruptcy dockets, including store-closing motions and auction schedules | $0.10/page, capped at $3/document, waived under $30 a quarter |
| Municipal permit portals | Openings 9 to 18 months ahead of announcement | Free, no national equivalent, city by city |
| Foot traffic panels | Visit estimates for any US location, including competitors | Paid |
| Your own point-of-sale and store data | The baseline everything else is compared against | You already have it |
The one gap worth planning around is building permits. There is no national permit database, so this section is assembled municipality by municipality, and most teams cover their top 20 markets rather than pretending to cover all of them. Say which markets you cover in the report. A silent gap reads as a zero.
How often to produce one
Match the cadence to your deal clock, not to the calendar. If your committee meets every two weeks, a monthly report is structurally one cycle late, and half its recommendations arrive after the decision they were meant to inform.
Crayon's 2026 State of Competitive Intelligence found 56 percent of competitive intelligence teams circulate findings weekly, daily, or in real time. Those teams report revenue impact at 79 percent, against 41 percent for programs running monthly or slower (Crayon, 2026). That survey is cross-industry rather than retail-specific, so read it as a pattern about cadence rather than a retail real estate benchmark. The pattern still matches how these programs die. The analysis is usually fine. It arrives after the lease is signed.
A workable split for most retail real estate teams: sections one through four monthly, section five continuously, section six at whatever interval your committee meets. Scores should not wait for a report. The report is where you explain what already changed.
What tools cover which section
No single vendor produces this report. Each one is strong on part of it.
| Tool | Strongest section | What it publicly offers |
|---|---|---|
| GrowthFactor | 5, scores that moved | Site scores with competitor proximity and trade-area composition as inspectable inputs, in the same workflow as your deal pipeline |
| Placer.ai | 3, foot traffic share | Visit estimates and market share of visits for any US venue, including competitors you do not operate |
| CoStar | 1 and 2, openings and closures | Property records, tenant rosters, lease expirations, and alerts on new space |
| Esri ArcGIS Business Analyst | 4, trade-area overlap | Drive-time and trade-area analysis over thousands of market variables |
| Kalibrate | 1, competitor openings | Field capture of first-party competitor observations tied to locations |
| Buxton (now part of Audiense) | Varies | Consultative site-selection analytics delivered as engagements |
Assume you are assembling rather than buying. Our retail analytics platform guide compares six of these side by side if you are choosing where to start.
The version that works
The clearest competitive intelligence report we have been part of was a bankruptcy, and it was two pages.
When Party City went to auction, Books-A-Million, the #2 book retailer in the US (260 stores), needed to know which of roughly 700 locations fit their criteria, and the auction did not wait. We ran the full analysis, scoring and revenue forecasts, on all 700 sites against BAM's criteria in 72 hours. They secured five prime locations, entered two new markets with zero cannibalization, and avoided overbidding on 15 sites that did not clear their bar, saving more than $3 million. The analysis came back 85 percent faster than the weeks-long process it replaced.
Sections one through four of that report were a single sentence: a competitor is liquidating 700 boxes. Section five was 700 scored sites. Section six was five bids and 15 walk-aways. The ratio is the lesson. A competitive intelligence report is judged by what changed after the meeting, and the observation pages are only there to explain why.
Frequently Asked Questions about Competitive Intelligence Reports
Here are concise answers to common questions about competitive intelligence reports from retail and real estate professionals.
What is a competitive intelligence report?
A competitive intelligence report is a recurring document that collects what competitors are doing and states what it changes for your own decisions. For a retail real estate team, that means competitor openings, closures, foot traffic share, and trade-area overlap, followed by which of your live sites changed rank as a result.
What should a competitive intelligence report include?
Six sections: competitor openings, competitor closures, foot traffic share by trade area, trade-area overlap, the site scores that moved since the last report, and recommended actions with a name and a date on each line. The first four are observation. The last two are the reason anyone reads it.
How often should you produce a competitive intelligence report?
Match the cadence to your deal clock rather than the calendar. If your committee meets every two weeks, a monthly report is always one cycle late. Crayon's 2026 survey found 56 percent of competitive intelligence teams circulate findings weekly or faster, and those teams report revenue impact at 79 percent versus 41 percent for monthly-or-slower programs.
Where does competitive intelligence data come from?
Mostly public sources. SEC EDGAR full-text search covers competitor filings back to 2001 for free. WARN notices give 60 days of advance warning on mass layoffs and closings. PACER carries bankruptcy dockets at 10 cents a page, waived under 30 dollars a quarter. Building permits come from municipal portals with no national equivalent.
How does GrowthFactor compare to Placer.ai and CoStar for competitive intelligence reporting?
Placer.ai is strongest on foot traffic and market share of visits, which answers section three of the report. CoStar is strongest on property, tenant rosters, and lease expirations, which feeds sections one and two. GrowthFactor is the layer where those observations become a site score you can open and inspect, which is section five. Many teams run more than one. Books-A-Million, the #2 book retailer in the US, used the workflow to analyze roughly 700 Party City locations in 72 hours during the bankruptcy auction and secured five sites.