The Data You Can't Download - Why Field Research is King

Anyone can pull a dashboard. But the intelligence that actually decides a retail real estate deal — whether a store will hit its number, whether an anchor is as strong as it looks on paper — still comes from walking the store. 

And almost nobody does it anymore.

In this episode, host Mike Law sits down with Kevin Bissell from CRE360 Partners to break down field research and store casing: the unglamorous, boots-on-the-ground work behind the most accurate sales forecasts in the business — and why the firms that skip it keep getting burned.

In this episode:

• The gap between what a dashboard shows you and what you learn standing inside the store — and why that gap separates a good forecast from a bad one.
• Why a store can rank top-10% in foot traffic and bottom-10% in actual sales — the basket-size problem that mobile-location data keeps getting wrong.
• How a single store manager can swing a location's volume 20% in either direction — and why that never shows up in the numbers.
• What Kevin is actually doing during a 10–15 minute walk through a store, and how it tells him whether it's a strong, average, or weak performer.
• Where AI and modeling stop: the tools can get a forecast most of the way there in minutes, but the last mile still takes someone who's been in the building.

About the guest
Kevin Bissell is SVP of Real Estate Research at CRE360 Partners, with decades in grocery and retail research — including leading research for one of the country's largest retail REITs and a top national grocery-research firm. He's built sales forecasts and market studies for retailers, landlords, developers, and municipalities across all 50 states, much of it grounded in the fieldwork most firms no longer do.

About the show
The Ground Truth is a podcast for retail real estate operators, executives, and decision-makers. New episodes every two weeks. Hosted by Mike Law.

Sponsored by CRE360 Partners — a retail real estate research and advisory firm helping retailers, landlords, and municipalities make better expansion and leasing decisions.

Creators and Guests

Host

Mike Law

Mike has been in the real estate & capital-raise marketing business for more than 25 years. His friendly, enthusiastic demeanor and passion for marketing have enabled him to build high-powered teams and play an irreplaceable role in the growth of several companies over his career.

Guest

Kevin Bissell

Kevin brings over 35 years of real estate research and site selection experience to the CRE 360 team. His expertise in the grocery industry began in college at Lucky Foods in Southern California. After earning a master’s degree, he joined American Stores in Buena Park, CA, as a Real Estate Research Analyst. Following the consolidation, he moved to Salt Lake City as a Senior Analyst. After American Stores was acquired by Albertsons, Kevin managed the Drug Store team in site research in Boise, ID. His REIT experience started in Houston, TX, with Weingarten Realty Investors, where he held positions as New Development Director and Director of Research during his nearly 17-year tenure. He later joined MTN Advisors, overseeing site location research for grocers and retailers. Throughout his career, Kevin has collaborated with grocers, shopping center owners, developers, and brokers to meet their research needs. At CRE 360 Partners, he leads a team of analysts to support clients in achieving growth. Kevin holds a master’s degree in Geography from California State University Long Beach and has been a member of the ICSC North American Research Group since 2017.

What is The Ground Truth?

The retail real estate business runs on data. But without judgment, field experience, and the right framework, data is just noise.

The Ground Truth is where host Mike Law sits down with retail real estate operators, researchers, and executives to cut through that noise — and equip retailers, landlords, developers, and municipalities to make better decisions about where they build, lease, and invest.

Each episode goes deep on the forces shaping retail markets right now: what grocery anchors are actually doing, how expansion strategies win or fail in the field, where trade areas are shifting, and why the most valuable intelligence still comes from walking the store, not pulling the dashboard.

If you're a retailer planning your next 20 sites, a landlord repositioning a center, a developer underwriting a deal, or a municipality trying to attract the right tenants — this is the conversation you want to listen in on.

New episodes every two to three weeks.

Mike Law: 00:05

Hello, and welcome to The Ground Truth. The Ground Truth is where we try and cut through the retail commercial real estate noise and equip you as real estate operators, executives, and managers to simply make better decisions. If you're in the retail commercial real estate business, you already know that the best decisions don't come from a dashboard. They come from real people who've actually been in the real submarket. They've walked the stores.

Mike Law: 00:30

They've driven through the trade area, and they have insights and firsthand knowledge that the data just can't tell you. My name is Mike Law, and I'll be your host for today's episode. Let's go ahead and jump right in. In our first episode, Kevin Bissell made the case for why grocery anchors still drive everything in retail real estate. One thing kept coming up was this idea that there's there's a layer of intelligence that lives just beneath the data platforms.

Mike Law: 00:56

That layer is real. It's real boots on the ground field research actually, and it sits behind every credible site selection and every credible site decision out there. Today, we're gonna discuss why field research still wins in retail real estate. I'm joined by my guest, Kevin Bissell. Kevin is senior vice president of real estate research at CRE360 Partners.

Mike Law: 01:18

Kevin, welcome back to The Ground Truth.

Kevin Bissell: 01:22

Thanks, Mike. Happy to be here.

Mike Law: 01:24

It's good to have you back, my friend. Alright. Let's go ahead and get into it. Last time you told us that grocery is the most researched retail category there is, that your sales forecasts work to be within 5% of what the store actually does. And that's incredible accuracy.

Mike Law: 01:42

But that actually doesn't come from a subscription or a software license. So Kevin, what is field research and why does it still matter in an era where everyone thinks all the data is already out there?

Kevin Bissell: 01:56

Yeah, so it's so important for grocers to be highly accurate on the sales forecast because they operate on such thin margins. They can't afford to open a bad store. So they heavily rely on field research. Just about every grocery company uses fieldwork to conduct the research and then build models that produce sales forecasts. So you have to get the data right and by being on the field and actually seeing the site, walking the site, driving the site, the trade area, you get to understand the market and how it travels.

Kevin Bissell: 02:28

Getting right down into where you're going in and doing the intelligence on the competition, the competitor stores within the trade area, the ones that'll be impacting your store when you open or you'll be impacting them when you open is very important. So we deploy to the field, we'll drive the site, get to understand the site, how it travels, if there's any ingress, egress problems to it, if there's any barriers, both perceived and physical. So a physical barrier could be a river, a train track, you know, just no access from a road. A perceived barrier could just be a change in demographics that a certain group won't shop in another area. So we're taking all that in.

Kevin Bissell: 03:10

When we go into a competitor store or even sister stores, again, we're evaluating each grocery location due to ingress, egress, the condition of the center, is the landlord taking care of that center or not, the condition of the parking lot, different co tenants within the center, does it match the grocer or does it not match the grocer, can be an indicator of how successful the center is. We then go into the store. We're looking at all different aspects of the store operation. So the cleanliness of the store, condition of the store. We look at things like ceiling tiles and floor tiles or the flooring in the store.

Kevin Bissell: 03:51

We look at refrigeration to see how it's running, if it's leaking or not. We're looking especially at the amount of fresh foods. So fresh foods are items that are perishable, that will not last on the store for a long time. And if you see a low level of stock in the perishables, you know that the store is probably a slow store. If you see it stacked up, the produce stack very high on the wet rack.

Kevin Bissell: 04:19

If you go to the meat department and you see they have a lot of meat in the meat case and it's not covered up, that's a busy store. That means they're moving the product and they don't have to worry about it going bad. So after we walk the store and get all these conditions, we'll talk to key members of the store and try and get a sales number out of them. And once we do all that, we exit the store, we'll make our notes, we take all that information back and it's what we use to build our model that produces a sales forecast.

Mike Law: 04:50

So that's a fantastic setup. One of the things that I remember us talking about on the last episode was you had said that a good store manager can swing a location's volume by 20%. But I'm curious, how do you assess the kind of operational quality when you're talking with a manager? Why would that change the math and the analysis that you're doing?

Kevin Bissell: 05:14

Yeah, that's a tough one, especially when you're doing field work and you're only in the store, maybe once or twice, On a good day you get into it three times. It's just knowing how a store operates. I had personal experience with this when I was at Lucky Stores in Southern California putting myself through college. We had a manager who was just He wasn't a bad manager, but he wasn't a great one. He was replaced by a gentleman who was one of the best managers I've ever seen.

Kevin Bissell: 05:44

Certain times you get in the store and managers have to be in the office, they have paperwork to do, But this gentleman would be down in the front of the store bagging groceries, talking to the customers. He was hands on everywhere. He'd be back helping the meat department. He'd be back throwing milk in the milk box just to keep the store running. It's not just the store manager, but it's even department managers.

Kevin Bissell: 06:07

You can have a bad department manager who misses ordering the right amount of product to come in for a special and they run out of that. So a good management team in the store can definitely improve sales 25% or more, or it can hurt sales. So it's hard to pinpoint when you're encasing a store doing the field work. It's more of something you just notice. Hey, I've been in the store for forty five minutes.

Kevin Bissell: 06:35

I haven't seen any manager upfront. And this is the time of day he should be up there. There's busier parts of the day. Mornings are typically busy around lunchtime and especially after or just before dinner or after dinner, that's your peak times in the grocery store. And that's where you should see some sort of management up in the front of the store.

Kevin Bissell: 06:52

And when you don't see that, it kind of raises alarm bells.

Mike Law: 06:57

So you mentioned department managers, which departments stand out to you as the ones that are, you know, kind of have the telltale signs that this store is doing well?

Kevin Bissell: 07:10

Meat department, produce, deli and bakery are the key departments. Any one of those can add sales to the store if done right. But again, if the product's not out there, I would have to say meat department is the main driver of that. Produce is usually pretty good. They get standard orders.

Kevin Bissell: 07:27

They know what they're doing, but the meat department, can see when they don't have enough hamburger out or ribs that are on sale, they run out of ribs or something like that, it's noticeable. And people complain. Matter of fact, I have a very good friend currently here in Houston who's an assistant manager at a store out here and he was just telling us a story about how he over ordered on the ribs. And the manager was a little mad at him, he was saying it's better to over order than under order. So it does play a key role.

Kevin Bissell: 08:00

Know, the good management throughout the store will make the store more successful. A weak manager is gonna knock sales off somewhere.

Mike Law: 08:07

Absolutely. So this is where I think it kind of gets interesting for the people out there that are making decisions right now because there's all kinds of tools out there and companies selling estimated store volumes based on cell phone traffic with Placer. And a lot of decision makers are treating that data like gospel. In your opinion, how accurate are those traffic based volumes? And or how accurate are the estimates that they provide?

Mike Law: 08:38

And what's the risk when people treat them as the ground truth, so to speak?

Kevin Bissell: 08:45

Yeah. So when it first came out, the cell phone traffic data was incredible. It was kind of the hole that everybody was looking for. They were always saying, Hey, we need this type of information. They would ask us, Estimate what the trade area is.

Kevin Bissell: 08:59

And I think that's where Placer or other cell phone providers are very strong, is where you can see the trade area that they're pulling from. It's a good estimate and I like looking at it when I'm out doing a sales forecast where's the competition pulling from, where is it not pulling from. And it really helps you define a trade area. Where I think it's weak is where they are saying they can predict sales. We reviewed sample data and I hear this all the time from clients that sometimes it's spot on, but most of the time it's off.

Kevin Bissell: 09:36

I like to use the statement that even a broken clock's right two times a day. So it's a good piece of information. I always think of cell phone traffic is when you're looking at a site and evaluating it's a jigsaw puzzle. If it's 20 pieces sometimes that cell phone data is going to help you get three or four of those pieces, other time it's going to be less than that. So it's just something to add on and help you get to your final answer.

Kevin Bissell: 10:08

Again, when it first came out, I knew people who were literally saying this is the silver bullet. This is going to answer all our questions. Talking recently with a couple of those people, they've learned that, yeah, it's another thing you can trust, but verify it. It's just another piece of information that you need or helps you make a decision.

Mike Law: 10:28

I love it. Everyone knows that AI is improving. It's making real impacts to people's jobs. And it's even getting better at modeling. I think you shared that your gravity model is even adding AI assisted balancing.

Mike Law: 10:50

Where does AI help you right now and where does it still fall short?

Kevin Bissell: 10:56

Actually, right now we're not using AI, but we do see it coming up in the future for us, being able to do some things that help us with our labor, scripting things that are gonna make things that were more, where we had to have a lot of man hours to produce it, that it's going to cut that time virtually down to nothing some of our like a grocery potential study. We see that as a huge savings. Again, it's going to have to be one of those things where we run it and we have somebody double check it and make sure it makes sense. But you mentioned the model. We just had our big conference last week in Florida.

Kevin Bissell: 11:36

It's basically a gravity modeling conference. And they were showing us how they're going to start using AI to help balance. This is the premier tool in the industry. They're saying it's only going get you 75% of the way there Because there's so many it's all those nuances that the AI is not going to know. It's not going to know ingress, egress.

Kevin Bissell: 11:59

It's not going to know why are there five let's say, and I'm using this as just an example, five Kroger stores. Well, which one's the best? Which one's the worst of those stores? And that's the analyst who knows that from being there. So when the model produces a sales forecast, you go in and you validate that model by looking at where you're getting market share from.

Kevin Bissell: 12:20

And if it's taking it from the best store and not from the worst store, you know something's wrong. So it's a self check and that's the analyst who knows that type of stuff. There is going to be AI, definitely more in modeling and I think it's going be a huge time saver for us. Man, I would love to have the model get 75% there before I start working on it. Some of these things can take a couple of days to what we call balance.

Kevin Bissell: 12:45

If it can get us there in a few minutes and I can get it done in an hour, that's a massive time savings. I'm looking forward to that. But there's always going to be that little bit of doubt to make sure everything's right and correct, and it's going to take that human eyeball to make sure you go in and make sure everything makes sense.

Mike Law: 13:04

It's still worth the drive out to the market in other

Kevin Bissell: 13:07

It is. That's the key information right there.

Mike Law: 13:10

So that's exactly the kind of insight that's hard to find anywhere else. We're gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors at CRE three sixty Partners. We'll be right back. This episode of The Ground Truth is brought to you by c r e three sixty partners. Retail real estate decisions are too expensive to make on intuition.

Mike Law: 13:34

A bad site, a misread trade area, or a tenant that doesn't fit, those mistakes show up on the p and l for years. C r e three sixty pairs rigorous market research with full transaction execution so retailers, landlords, and municipalities make decisions backed by data. Research driven, transaction ready. Make better decisions with CRE three sixty partners. Learn more at cre-360.com.

Mike Law: 14:00

Alright. We're back. Kevin, one thing that we were talking about, at the top of the show was the field research and and what you discover when you're walking into a store. I was hoping you could unpack that a little bit more. So what can you learn in the first fifteen minutes inside a store that you can't get from any data tool?

Kevin Bissell: 14:23

When we're out in the field, we try and get in the store two to three times. That's just to verify what we've seen at different times. When you walk in the store, the first thing you're looking for again is you're looking at the labor. How many check stands are open? How many people are in the different departments?

Kevin Bissell: 14:41

We always look at pharmacy and you can tell pharmacy kind of has a schedule that they use for the labor in that pharmacy. So if you see a tech and somebody just up front working and a pharmacist, that's an okay pharmacy. But if you see several people back there, several pharmacists, and you're looking at the stock level, the scripts that are going out, that's an indication that's a very busy pharmacy which adds to the store sales. Again, the other thing you're looking at is just all the perishables, fresh products. So in produce, you're looking at the wet rack.

Kevin Bissell: 15:17

Those are that's something that has to be maintained and trimmed. Several times a day, the produce person will start at one end, go to the other end, just just cleaning off the that wet rack where the product's turning brown. So it'd be cutting leaves off things or trimming it back. And if it's stocked stocked very well and highly stacked, that means the store is doing a lot of business. If it's low and just barely covering the wood, that means it's a slow store.

Kevin Bissell: 15:43

Same thing with the meat department. You look at the meat where they have meat out in a service area. If the meat is stacked up, that's a busy store. If it's not stacked up, there's only a few choice cuts of meat out and it's wrapped in saran wrap, that's a slow store. Bakery the same way.

Kevin Bissell: 16:01

You look at the different bakery products and if they have a minimal amount of bakery products, you know that it's a slow store. The deli. The deli is another one that you look at. The service deli, if they have a lot of salads out stacked high and not covered, again that means that that's an indicator that the store is doing very well. Check stands, the labor in the check stands.

Kevin Bissell: 16:24

Just how many check stands are open. I know a lot of grocers are having the self scans now, so it's a little harder, but they need to have at least one check stand open. But if they have several check stands open, that's a good indicator that the store is busy. So again, when you walk into a store, you're looking for hints. You can walk through a store and get a really good impression within fifteen-twenty minutes of how that store is performing overall before you even talk to anybody.

Kevin Bissell: 16:53

It's a good way to figure out the questions you're going to ask the people in the store. Is just by that first blush. Again, it's a jigsaw puzzle. You're putting all the pieces in place from what you're seeing and you can build a story out that way.

Mike Law: 17:06

You've been doing this a long time, but without naming any current clients or anything like that, what's a field research moment that you've had in the last six months or so even that completely changed the outcome of a transaction or of a decision?

Kevin Bissell: 17:23

Yeah, actually had a site in a somewhat rural area that I was a little concerned about. They're talking to a major grocer or client. I always try and not get any preconceived notions, when I get out in the field I like just learning things and kind of taking it new. But I do my homework before I go there. I'm looking at the demographics.

Kevin Bissell: 17:44

I'm looking at the competition. I'm trying to figure out the road network before I get there. I'll look at aerials. I'll even try and drive it like with Google Maps or Earth where I can drop my guy in and look at the roads. And I went out and did the fieldwork for the site and actually was very excited when I realized that this was a very viable site for a national grocer that was looking at it.

Kevin Bissell: 18:11

So it was an moment. I've had other ones where I remember when I was at Weingarten, we were looking at a center for an acquisition in Seattle. Very preliminary information we got. We didn't have the flyer or the site package yet. I was asked to go out and look at it.

Kevin Bissell: 18:29

So all I could look at it was from Google Earth from above. And I went, wow, this is a great center, great location. Went out and saw it and parking was very limited and did not realize from looking at it from above on the aerial that it was a two story shopping center, which Weingarten at the time was not interested in doing. I don't think anybody from the company realized it at that point. And the second story was actually kind of like a basement level that went out the back of the center with virtually no parking and a lot of shop space.

Kevin Bissell: 18:59

So just from my going out there and being able to write a quick report, the company dropped that site. And again, that's something a company like Weingarten was like a coiled spring when they were looking at an acquisition. You would have leasing people go look at it, you would have the deal makers looking at it, you would have senior management looking at it, Legal would be looking at it, property managers, a whole slew of people. And if you can kill a site early that's just not going to work for you, it ends up saving the company a lot of money. So there's two examples of one that was a successful site and one that was kind of one that we dropped quickly because of our research.

Mike Law: 19:37

You've mentioned to me that that sometimes you'll visit ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen stores in a day, which is which is pretty mind blowing. And you'll come out and sometimes forget where you park just because, you know, all the parking lots look the same. But what does a typical field research day look like? I mean, walk me through your 5AM to 7PM day when you're out there in the field.

Kevin Bissell: 20:01

Yeah, so typically we like to get in the stores by 07:00 in the morning. Part of the reason for that, actually the main reason for that, is the people that know what's going on in the stores always work early. So all the department heads are there, the store managers are there, typically Monday through Friday. Wednesday can be a missed day because a lot of department heads and managers have Wednesdays off. But that's why you want to get into stores early.

Kevin Bissell: 20:29

So you see these people, start at 05:00 in the morning or maybe seven and they're out of the store by 01:00, 02:00 in the afternoon. So that's your basic good casing timeframe is that 7AM to one or 02:00 in the afternoon. After that, if you're going into stores, it's hit and miss. You know, and we'll we'll be there till five, 06:00 at night sometimes working going in stores. But a lot of times you're doing the other things after that one or 02:00.

Kevin Bissell: 20:57

You're going in and you're just getting a feel for the store and you may come back the next day in the morning to try and get the information out of the employees. Another aspect of work we do, that's kind of the casing work, but we've been hired to do when somebody, a client is buying a shopping center, we do tenant interviews. So we will show up at the shopping center and start at one end and we'll go in and interview tenants and we're trying to just see how they're performing just by talking to them, discussing how they perform, where they rank out of their district operating area. Then just ask the likes and dislikes of the store. And we produce a report for the shopping center owner for that when they're looking at an acquisition.

Kevin Bissell: 21:44

So they can be very long days and it gets monotonous. When you're in your tenth or twelfth store for the day and you walk out and you forget what your rental car looks like and you forget where you parked because all the parking lots after a while look the same, it can get monotonous.

Mike Law: 21:58

All the rental cars look the same too, don't they?

Kevin Bissell: 22:01

Yes. And my door unlock key has saved me many times when I can't find my car, I start chirping at, and there's the car.

Mike Law: 22:08

You kind of alluded to my next question, but for a developer or landlord that might be listening in right now, someone kind of making a decision about whether to pursue a specific tenant, what's in the CRE360's research reports that would help them validate their decision and be of the most value to them?

Kevin Bissell: 22:27

Yeah, well, there are several aspects to that question, Mike. When it's an acquisition, first thing that always pops into my mind is why are they selling? Sometimes it's just the term. They only wanted to hold it for five years and now they're ready to flip it and move on to something else. But other times it could be, and we saw this a lot up in Dallas, where a bunch of Kroger and Tom Thumb and other grocery centers came up for sale over the last three or four years.

Kevin Bissell: 22:54

And as it turned out, it was HEB moving into the market. HEB is a very dominant grocer. They're doing incredible in that market. And so the landlord of that existing center was trying to sell it before HEB opened and really hit that center hard. So we're able to go out in the field, deploy and ascertain where those HEB stores are coming in and be able to tell the potential buyer that, Hey, you've got a XYZ store here doing X amount, but when that HEB opens, it's going to hit you for 20%.

Kevin Bissell: 23:28

So it's not going be the same center you're buying right now. So that's one of the key pieces. For a new development, it's just that sales forecast. The sales forecast is and sometimes we run sales forecasts and they don't come in well. They're weak.

Kevin Bissell: 23:46

Other times we run the sales forecast and it's a stellar site. And that helps the landlord figure out what he's going to be able to charge in rent to the grocer. If you've got a very high sales forecast, that grocer is going be able to afford a little more money to pay for that lease. And also if it's a bad sales forecast, maybe it's time to drop the site and walk away from it. So it's plethora of things.

Kevin Bissell: 24:12

Like I said, we do multifaceted research. We're always identifying things, sometimes positive, sometimes negative, that help those decision makers make a decision on if they want to acquire a shopping center or if they want to do a new development.

Mike Law: 24:27

Who thinks the one data point a decision maker should insist that they have before they sign off?

Kevin Bissell: 24:33

Yeah, so we've just started working with a major shopping center developer across the country, and they are going to use us for every site that they do to first look at the grocery potential of the site and then build a model to prove up the site for any grocer. And again, sometimes that answer comes back, it doesn't work for grocery. And that's what they want to know. They just want to it's a double check and it's a very cheap double check to do. It's better than being pursuing a site and getting well down the road with it and all of a sudden deciding you don't want to pursue it anymore and you lose a ton of money, money that you've had to put down on the site.

Kevin Bissell: 25:11

So that's probably the biggest thing that I would urge decision makers to do is start early and get a site proved up sooner rather than later. And that's why, again, when we're out in the field, we're very open minded and we're trying to take everything in. It just helps us make a decision on the site and helps us build that model and do a very accurate sales forecast. Again, we go back to that accuracy where we have to be within 5% or we're shooting for five percent. And if anything, we're a little conservative on our sales forecast because we don't want to overstate the position of that site.

Kevin Bissell: 25:51

But yeah, it's a lot of different key data points that we use to help us make these decisions.

Mike Law: 25:59

Kevin, this is exactly what I was hoping for for this episode. You have thirty years experience in the field and you make it sound like common sense, which is a breath of fresh air. For anyone who's listening and working through a site decision or trying to position a center, or maybe you're just trying to understand what's really going on on the ground in your market, this is exactly the kind of intelligence that CRE360 Partners brings to the table every single day. You can find more information about them at cre360.com. That's cre360.com.

Mike Law: 26:36

If something Kevin has said today is relevant to a decision you're facing, you should reach out. They have those kinds of conversations every day and would love to connect. Kevin, thanks for joining us again here on The Ground Truth. It's been great having you, and I look forward to chatting with you again soon.

Kevin Bissell: 26:53

Great. Thank you for having me, Mike.

Mike Law: 26:54

This has been The Ground Truth and your host. I'm Mike Law saying thanks for listening. Hope you guys have a great day.