What You Actually Get: A Real OpenReady Report, Section by Section

September 7, 2026 · OpenReady · updated September 7, 2026

Every OpenReady report is three sections, delivered as a PDF and readable in your account: Location Fit, Lease Pressure, and Due Diligence. This page walks one of them end to end, in the order you receive it.

The example is a coffee shop evaluating roughly 1,450 square feet on an urban commercial corridor, at an illustrative 1240 Market Street, Midtown, on a 60-month lease at $3,500 a month. It is a useful sample precisely because it is not a clean verdict: the location scores well, and the report still spends most of its length on the one thing that could sink it.

The section opens with the LocIQ Score — a single 0 to 100 number and a tier — and then immediately spends the rest of the page arguing with it. The score is computed from data; it is never the whole answer, and the report is written on the assumption that you will read past it.

The location profile

Before any component score is broken out, the report states what this location is good for and what it is not — in the report’s own words, with the demand mode named. This one is an intercept business: it lives on people already moving past the door.

The four component scores

The composite is built from four scored components. All four are shown with their own number, so you can see which one is carrying the score and which one is dragging on it — here, an unusually high foot-traffic reading against a merely adequate demographic base.

Market Saturation runs the opposite way to the other three. A high saturation score means more competing businesses of the same kind nearby, which is worse. Every other component reads high as good. The report never asks you to hold that rule in your head: the bar always fills toward the favourable end, and the conclusion is printed in words next to the number.

How those four combine into one number is described on how the LocIQ Score works.

Strengths and risks, each with its evidence

This report returned four strengths and four risks. Every one of them names the signal it came from, states the evidence behind it, and explains why it matters for this business type — a finding with no evidence attached is an opinion, and you are not paying for opinions. Risks additionally carry a severity and a concrete mitigation. Here is one of each, as they appear.

Where the signals disagree

When two readings point in opposite directions, the report says so rather than averaging them into a smooth sentence. This one surfaced three such tensions; the sharpest is the one that undercuts its own best number.

Tension. The foot traffic score of 93 signals a highly active corridor, but the venue-level data shows that peak activity at nearby establishments occurs at midday and afternoon, not during the 6am-10am morning window a coffee shop depends on most. Interpretation. Both readings are true simultaneously: this is a genuinely busy corridor overall, but busy at the wrong hours for a coffee-first concept, and you must verify morning-specific foot flow before treating the high foot traffic score as confirmation of morning viability.

The recommendation that closes the section

Location Fit ends with a single recommended action and the reasoning behind it. There are three possible actions — proceed with verification, investigate further, or reconsider — and the reasoning always names the specific thing that would change the answer.

This is the section customers say they re-read. It introduces no new scoring — it takes the lease terms you entered and turns them into the two numbers that decide whether the deal is survivable: what you are committing in total, and what you would have to earn every month for that rent to sit in a normal range for your business type.

$210,000 is the number most first-time tenants have never written down. It is the base rent alone, before build-out, before equipment, before a single cup is sold — and on a five-year term with no break, it is owed whether or not the morning traffic shows up.

Rent as a share of revenue

Rent is only meaningful against revenue. Every business type has a range of occupancy cost — rent as a percentage of gross sales — that operators tend to survive within. The report inverts that range against your actual rent to produce the revenue the lease requires.

For a coffee shop the range applied here is 6 to 10 percent. At $3,500 a month that is a monthly gross revenue requirement of $35,000 to $58,300 — the lower revenue figure corresponding to the higher percentage, and vice versa.

The report then states plainly what that implies, without softening it:

That is a meaningful bar for a single-unit independent coffee shop, and whether this corridor delivers the morning foot volume to support it is the central question your in-person visits must answer. A 60-month term with no verified morning traffic count is a significant commitment: if the block is quieter than the corridor-level data suggests, you will have limited flexibility to exit.

If you enter your own expectation for rent as a percentage of revenue, the report uses your figure verbatim and attributes it to you, instead of the estimated band. If you enter no lease details at all, this section says so and the rest of the report is unaffected.

The report closes with the specific checks to run before signing — ordered, addressed to you, and written so that each one can be finished in an afternoon. They are derived from this location’s particular risks, not a generic checklist: three of the five below exist only because of what the foot-traffic and saturation data showed.

1. Before anything else, contact your city zoning office and confirm that a coffee shop is a permitted use at this specific address as-of-right. A location that scores well but cannot legally operate as a coffee shop is worth nothing. Do this before spending time or money on any other due diligence.
2. Visit the block at 7:00am, 8:00am, and 9:00am on two separate weekdays and once on Saturday morning. Stand outside the storefront location for at least 20 minutes each visit and count people passing on foot. This is the single most important verification step: the foot traffic score reflects corridor-wide activity, and you need to know whether that activity is present specifically in front of your door during coffee hours.
3. Visit the donut-and-coffee shop two blocks away between 7:00am and 9:00am on a weekday. Observe how busy it is, how long the line is, and what the customer profile looks like. If it is at capacity during morning rush, there is likely unmet demand on the corridor. If it is quiet, that tells you something important about morning foot volume in this neighborhood.
4. Walk the corridor on a Tuesday at noon and a Friday at 7:00pm to understand the full rhythm of the block. Note which businesses are drawing people, where foot traffic concentrates, and whether the movement patterns suggest a customer base likely to stop for coffee. Pay attention to the health-sciences campus and the community health clinic on the adjacent avenue as potential sources of regular daytime foot traffic.
5. Confirm with the landlord or broker that the monthly figure you have been quoted is the correct all-in number before relying on any rent math in this report. Then ask whether a shorter initial lease term with renewal options is available, or whether a rent abatement period can be negotiated. For a coffee shop whose morning revenue model has not yet been verified in person, a 60-month commitment at full rent from day one is a meaningful risk to manage before signing. Also confirm whether the space requires a grease trap, hood system, or health department build-out for coffee and food preparation, and budget accordingly.

Note what the first step is. The highest-scoring location in the country is worth nothing if the use is not permitted, so zoning goes first — ahead of anything the score has to say.

What else ships with every report

Alongside the three sections, each report carries a fixed appendix defining what each component measures in plain English, the score version it was computed under, and a snapshot of the underlying data as it stood at generation time — so a score can be explained months later rather than re-litigated. The whole thing arrives as a PDF attached to your email and stays readable in your account.

What a report will not do

It will not tell you the location is a sure thing, because no data set can. It does not predict revenue — the revenue figures above describe what a rent requires, not what a location will produce. It does not replace standing on the corner at 8am, which is why this sample spends five verification steps sending you there. And it does not negotiate your lease.

What it does is put the whole picture in front of you in one document, with the evidence attached, before you sign something for five years.