Every location decision is a bet on six things at once: that enough people walk past, that they can reach you easily, that the neighbourhood isn't already saturated, that you'll have real competition rather than an empty block, that the area is growing, and that the site doesn't keep killing the businesses that tried it before you. Miss any one of them and the other five won't save the lease.
The six pillars
This is the framework behind every Hoodly report. Learn to read each one and you'll know which corners are worth the lawyer's time and which to walk away from before you spend a dollar.
- Foot traffic — measured pedestrian volume, not vibes. The single strongest predictor in the whole model.
- Transit access — how many seats per hour of rapid transit serve the block. A subway stop and a bus stop are not the same thing.
- Market depth (demand) — residents per cafe and per restaurant in the neighbourhood, against the city baseline.
- Competitive cluster — where your peers already are. Counterintuitively, the isolated corner is the risky one, not the crowded one.
- Momentum — the development pipeline within 500 m. Are people about to move in, or is the block static?
- Stability — business churn. A site that has seen three closures in two years is telling you something.
The numbers behind the framework
These are the measured figures the guides draw on — not industry folklore, but what the data actually shows.
- Survival: in Toronto's licence register (12,146 storefront food businesses, 2018–2023), 94.3% survive year one, 74% reach two years, 41.8% reach five. Sit-down beats take-out at the two-year mark — 76.5% vs 71.2%.
- Isolation is the risk: new Toronto cafes with no other cafe within 400 m had the lowest two-year survival of any density band (68.9%), against 79.5% for those opening into a strip with eleven or more peers.
- Demand varies hugely by city: residents-per-cafe runs from ~750 (Montréal) to ~6,800 (Winnipeg). The neighbourhood figure is what matters, and it swings an order of magnitude within a single city.
- Foot-traffic coverage is uneven: Toronto has ~6,400 measured count stations, Ottawa ~2,800, Montréal ~750, Vancouver ~240 — and a dozen smaller cities fewer than 100 combined. Where counts are thin, the model matters more.
The guides
The full decision framework: the six pillars, what "good" looks like on each, and the numbers that actually predict survival.
Cafes live and die on morning foot traffic and the rent-to-sales ratio. Here's the cafe-specific read.
The number every independent operator should know before signing a lease — what it is, what it should be, and how to stress-test it.
How foot-traffic data is measured, why some counts are modelled rather than observed, and how to read the numbers honestly.
A punch-list version of the framework you can run against any corner in an afternoon.
Rather read a number than a guide? Drop a pin on the
interactive map and get a paid per-address report — a 0–100 composite score, the five nearest competitors, the demographic profile, and the development pipeline for your specific corner. From $5 CAD, delivered by email in about 60 seconds.
Want to understand the terms used here? Start with the FAQ, or see which cities Hoodly covers.