Drive down the road, in any central business district and you’ll see a sign on almost every property. To you and your “site acquisition team” it would appear as if finding a site will be easy. Then, apply your site criteria: type of real estate, ideal size for the space, target submarket, and demographics; water in the bucket is beginning to get shallow. Just when you think you have a reasonable number of options, many landlords will not deal with you for existing non-complete agreements in their current leases, or they simply want to limit competition for their existing tenants in a strained economy. There is also the challenge that many landlords are publicly traded entities, who grossly overpaid for their properties in the last boom. Accordingly, the fiduciary obligations these groups owe to their shareholders and values they leveraged with debt, force them to solely deal with companies who, in their opinion, have made it, and will stand the test of time continuing to pay substantial rent until the economy begins to rebound from its current downturn. Then, you layer in challenges for zoning and parking, and after that, you realize that use restriction ordinances may require obtaining a conditional use permit.