Retail co-location tier methodology
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content(gis): GIS/location-intelligence cluster consolidation (final of 5 flagged clusters) — merged the one genuine duplicate (pointsav-gis-engine.md into location-intelligence-substrate.md; its own body said its core logic lives in app-orchestration-gis). More significant: found and fixed a corpus-wide wikilink collision — 7 articles cited [[co-location-methodology]] as the retail-cluster tier-scoring methodology, but that slug resolves to a real, unrelated article about data-center FACILITY co-location siting. No article for the real retail methodology existed under any slug, and the one place a scoring mechanism WAS described in detail (app-orchestration-gis.md) described a Haversine formula the real SCORING-METHODOLOGY.md V3 confirms was replaced by a 4-tier gate system — with 2 more articles describing the mechanism differently again, none matching each other or reality. Created substrate/retail-co-location-tier-methodology.md as the single source of truth (facts from the verified real methodology doc) and repointed all 7 citing articles (14 files EN+ES) to it. Fixed architecture/_index.md's MOC description, which had also mischaracterized the real co-location-methodology.md article. All content-matrix clusters now resolved.
@@ -0,0 +1,106 @@ --- schema: foundry-doc-v1 title: "Retail co-location tier methodology" slug: retail-co-location-tier-methodology category: substrate type: concept content_type: topic quality: complete status: active audience: public bcsc_class: public-disclosure-safe language_protocol: PROSE-TOPIC last_edited: 2026-08-01 editor: pointsav-engineering paired_with: retail-co-location-tier-methodology.es.md cites: - ni-51-102 - osc-sn-51-721 --- A retail co-location cluster earns a tier by passing a fixed set of gates, not by accumulating points toward a score. The [[location-intelligence-platform|Location Intelligence]] platform assigns every cluster one of four tiers — Regional, District, Local, or Fringe — by testing composition, catchment population rank, civic support, and overlap with stronger neighbors against country-specific thresholds. A cluster either clears every gate for a tier or it does not; there is no partial credit and no composite number a customer would need to interpret. ## Why gates instead of a score An earlier version of this methodology combined proximity distances into a single continuous score. That approach was retired: a composite number invites the reading that the platform is forecasting financial outcomes, when what it actually measures is spatial proximity and brand diversity. The gate-based system makes that boundary explicit in the mechanism itself — the tier is a classification, not a projection of revenue, foot traffic, market share, or a recommendation to acquire, develop, or lease any site. ## Tier definitions | Tier | Name | What it represents | |---|---|---| | 1 | Regional | A major trade-area anchor — top decile nationally by primary catchment population | | 2 | District | A significant multi-format node — top quartile nationally by primary catchment | | 3 | Local | A hardware or wholesale hub with civic support | | 4 | Fringe | Any cluster that does not clear a Tier 1–3 gate | Tier names follow the shopping-center industry's own Regional → District → Local hierarchy, so the labels mean the same thing here that they mean in a leasing broker's vocabulary. ## What a cluster must clear Every tier requires all of its gates to pass — composition, catchment rank, civic support, and non-overlap: - **Composition** — which categories of capital-intensive anchor must co-occur. Regional requires a warehouse-club or lifestyle anchor alongside a hypermarket; District requires a hypermarket alongside hardware or warehouse; Local requires a hardware or warehouse anchor on its own. - **Catchment population rank** — each cluster's primary catchment population is ranked against every other cluster *within its own country*, not globally, so a Tier 1 cluster in a smaller market is compared to its own market's distribution rather than penalized for that market's overall size. Regional requires the top 10% nationally; District the top 25%; Local the top 50%. - **Civic support** — a minimum count of regionally or locally classified hospitals within the cluster's outer catchment ring. Regional requires a regional-grade hospital; District accepts a regional or district hospital; Local accepts any classified hospital. - **Non-overlap** — a cluster that sits mostly inside a stronger neighboring cluster's own catchment does not additionally qualify at a lower tier for the same geography. This is measured as the overlap between the two clusters' catchment areas; Regional clusters must be almost entirely non-overlapping with any stronger peer, District clusters allow more overlap. Threshold precision is intentionally coarse — the goal is separating nationally significant clusters from local ones, not producing a precise numeric ranking. Threshold refinement is an active area of ongoing work. ## What is deliberately excluded Neighborhood grocery formats (operating in the thousands of small-footprint locations per country) are not ingested as anchors. Their density would produce a large number of low-value clusters below any threshold useful for site selection — a deliberate scope decision, not a data-coverage gap. ## Relationship to the platform The tier assignment is what the [[location-intelligence-platform|map interface]] renders directly — the [[location-intelligence-ux|Conclusion-First design]] shows a cluster's tier, not the gate values behind it, so a user comparing markets sees the conclusion first and drills into the underlying anchors only when a cluster has earned that attention. [[app-orchestration-gis]] computes tier assignment from the cleansed cluster data; the result renders through [[location-intelligence-substrate|the platform's rendering stack]] as the tiered map layer. ## Forward-looking information Statements regarding threshold refinement and future methodology changes are intended targets subject to change. Actual timelines depend on operator review, data coverage, and development velocity. [ni-51-102] [osc-sn-51-721] ## See also - [[location-intelligence-platform]] — the platform this methodology scores clusters for - [[app-orchestration-gis]] — the engine that computes tier assignment - [[location-intelligence-substrate]] — the technical architecture that stores and renders tiered clusters - [[location-intelligence-ux]] — the interface design that displays tier conclusions