The 78-out-of-100 problem
A black-box score that says "78 out of 100" is useless the moment you cannot explain what drives it. It reads as rigor and collapses under the first real question. The most effective site-selection platforms now do the opposite: they show every variable and weighting so teams can understand and challenge the model rather than blindly trust it. The industry has a name for the distinction, glass box versus black box, and the direction of travel is clearly toward the glass box.
The reason is not philosophical. It is what happens in the room. A committee member who cannot see why a site scored well will either overrule the score or rubber-stamp it, and both are failures. A score you can open up is a score you can defend.
Weights are where scoring models live or die
The variables matter less than what you multiply them by. For most retailers the heavily weighted factors are foot traffic, demographic alignment, the competitive landscape, and financial viability, but the right weights vary by vertical and are not a matter of taste. The sound approach is to back-test against your existing portfolio: find which factors most strongly correlate with your top-performing stores, and let those carry the weight. If your best locations all share high weekday traffic and strong co-tenancy, then traffic and co-tenancy should outweigh raw demographics.
A scoring model whose weights came from a vendor's default template is scoring someone else's business. Your weights should come from your own results.
Standardize the package, and reviews get shorter
There is a practical dividend to transparency that gets overlooked. When a team standardizes its committee package, one template covering traffic, demographics, cannibalization, financials, and comparables in a consistent format, reviews take an hour instead of a half-day debate. The committee sees the same structure every time, so attention goes to the substance of this deal rather than to decoding a new layout.
Consistency is not bureaucracy. It is what lets a group of busy people make a good decision quickly, and make it the same way twice.
Transparency is the product, not a feature
This is the standard MyDealTeams is built to meet. Scoring is weighted, multi-scorer, and visible: every criterion, every weight, and every scorer is on the record, and the decision reconstructs a year later because the audit trail is part of the evaluation, not a memory of it. The weights are yours to set and yours to defend.
We are deliberate about what the tool does and does not do. It does not hand you a number from a model you cannot inspect. It gives you a transparent structure for the judgment your team already brings, and a record of how that judgment was applied. That is the difference between a score that ends an argument and one that starts one.
MyDealTeams is free during Early Access: Community free, Pro $69/month, everything free while we are in Early Access. Nothing to lose, and a deal team to organize.
Sources: [PassBy: the retail site selection process](https://passby.com/blog/site-selection-process/) · [SafeGraph: retail site selection checklist](https://www.safegraph.com/blog/retail-site-selection-checklist/) · [GrowthFactor: retail site selection software](https://www.growthfactor.ai/resources/blog/retail-site-selection-software) · [CRE Daily: retail location intelligence](https://www.credaily.com/briefs/retail-location-intelligence-sharpens-site-selection/)