These webpages are a great place to start. Some even let you download the location list provided! How up to date these pages are depends on how proactive the brand is, but it’s better than relying on Yelp or Google.

These public pages can provide great details about a site, its specifications, or its owners. However, the availability, level, accuracy and timeliness of that information varies wildly based on local practices. No matter what, you will not be able to collect the same details at the same time frequencies when it comes to publicly available government location data.

This is the first question you need to ask a potential location data provider about updates. It’s simple, but it’s serious.

Say an amazing location becomes available, and four months later your company is still working with outdated data that shows the location is occupied. You would have snapped up that location, but a competitor beat you to it. Now, you’re stuck explaining why you missed out on great real estate and revenue to your stakeholders.

You don’t want your answer to be outdated data. It’s a fixable problem, and the solution costs a little but saves a lot of time and money. Hindsight is 20/20, but it doesn’t bring back your lost opportunities, time or money.

This is why regular data updates are important. Ask your supplier what their standard update frequency is, and how strictly that is followed. Beware of outlandish, vague or non-committal answers.

We’ll save you the task of asking us this question. 

At ChainXY, we update data every 30 to 90 days.

It’s a specific, reasonable time frame, and we have a track record of delivering it. That’s once a month or once a quarter, which is frequent enough to build reliable location strategies. If you need a lifesaver update, we can make that happen too.

You can say you’ve cleaned your room if you’ve cleaned a corner of it. It’s technically true. The corner is a part of your room that has been cleaned, so your room has been cleaned (in part). No lies detected; it’s just your room is not completely clean.

This kind of language trick can come into play when you’re talking about data updates. It’s a dangerous omission.

The key is to understand the difference between updated data and up-to-date data. Updated data can have some updated attributes – it doesn’t mean all attributes of the data were updated. It’s basically a sneaky way to hide update shortfalls.

On the other hand, up-to-date data is consistently updated across all data attributes. It’s the only way you can be sure that your data is complete and reliable.

That’s why we’ve developed a unique locator code for all our points of interest – we call it a HashID. This helps ChainXY maintain consistency between updates, and it means you won’t see things like:Our team also updates and verifies every attribute each time a chain’s data is collected. That way you know that your data is up-to-date and not just updated.

• duplicates of the same location
• the same location come and go
• dropped locations due to changes in attributes

Our team also updates and verifies every attribute each time a chain’s data is collected. That way you know that your data is up-to-date and not just updated.

Automated data collection is the industry standard when it comes to location intelligence. Data providers leverage open-source location data collection tools like web scraping to make quick work of gathering data.

There is also a move towards Artificial Intelligence (or, “AI”) on every industry and location data is no different. That said, the technology isn’t perfect – it often needs a human touch. Quality assurance is the role humans have to play in data updates.

At ChainXY we’re proud of our unique quality assurance process.

• First, we collect data from primary sources through automated processes.
• Then we review the data and the source to determine the information available and how often it should be updated.
• Our Data Extraction team of Geographic information system (GIS) professionals review and validate all attributes collected after data updates.
• Our Quality Assurance team then verifies and approves each attribute before it’s published to our library.

The Data Extraction and Quality Assurance teams at ChainXY are passionate about ensuring that our data can be relied on as soon as you begin to work with it. That’s because we know how accurate geocodes are essential to market research and modeling, and we really care about giving our customers a quality product.

As the American journalist Norman Cousins once said, 

"history is a vast early warning system."

If you don’t have historical details in your data, you don’t get the full picture of the developing trends shown in the latest data. Accurate past data helps you analyze the current state of markets that you and your competitors occupy while informing future strategies.

You can use data like store openings and closings to identify markets that are emerging and ones that are dying. That’s why ChainXY offers a vast collection of historical data on every chain we update.

With tools like our changes-over-time reporting, you can run historical analysis on chains that are important to you in the specific geographies that matter. Now you can more confidently identify market trends.

ChainXY offers a history of all our data updates, so you can undertake a historical analysis to reveal insights at every level.

• High-level details like number of specific brand locations changed per state
• Mid-level information like regions with the most growth over time
• Nitty gritty specifics on things like trade areas specific to your markets