Hesperia, California Focuses on Retail Recruitment Strategy

Rod: Hi, I’m Rod Yahnke I work for the city of Hesperia located in southern California Lisa: Hi, I’m Lisa LaMere I work for the city of Hesperia in our Economic Development Department. Rod: The city of Hesperia is approximately 75 square miles, it is very large geographically. The region, or trade area if you will, is generally pushing 440,000 people. It’s actually located right on Interstate 15, and that has afforded us an awful lot of opportunities for retail attraction because obviously one of the things that they enjoy the most is your traffic, your visibility, and so on and so forth. Hesperia offers both of those aspects to any kind of retail development taking place. We have utilized Buxton in numerous ways. All the way from determining what our individual demographic is, we’ve had such a very large change in our demographic, which obviously changes the different retail type components or venues that you go after. Then actually putting together marketing packages where we can go after those retailers that we do match up with. Lisa: I think one of the things that we’ve learned from Buxton is what information retailers want to see, what they need to see. And so we put together retail booklets on an annual basis, that includes that information. We source everything that we receive from Buxton, whether it’s the trade potential numbers, demographics. We can sit there all day long and pat ourselves on the back and tell people how wonderful the city is and how we are the best location and they should be there, but we have Buxton to validate that, and so it only makes sense to use much of that of the deliverables in our marketing material and we are very glad to promote Buxton in that material. Rod: We just have an absolute wonderful relationship and I honestly don’t think in all the years that I’ve ever worked with, you know, a group of people that are more down to earth, very genuine, extremely hard working, and incredibly intelligent in being able to analyze the data and turn around and break it down into some very common sense, you know, data point, which really helps somebody like myself and a retailer determine whether or not they should be in a certain geographic area, specifically where. They know exactly what their customers are going to look like.