One of the most common requests from tenants and investors looking at a commercial property is simple: "What's nearby?" They want to know which retailers, restaurants, and services surround the site. A list of addresses doesn't cut it — they need a visual map that shows the surrounding tenant mix at a glance.
Building that map manually means researching every business within a half-mile radius, finding their logos, and placing them one by one. This tutorial shows you how to do it automatically using the category search and POI features in CRE Retail Maps.
Why Surrounding Tenants Matter in CRE
Before diving into the how-to, it's worth understanding why nearby tenant maps are so effective in commercial real estate marketing.
For retail leasing, prospective tenants want to see complementary businesses. A sandwich shop wants to know there's office density nearby. A nail salon wants to see foot traffic drivers like grocery stores and gyms. Showing the surrounding tenant mix on a map tells that story instantly.
For investment sales, buyers evaluate trade areas by the quality of nearby retailers. A property surrounded by national credit tenants — Starbucks, Chase, CVS, Chipotle — signals a strong location. A retail map with recognizable logos communicates that faster than any rent roll.
For site selection, retail chains and franchise operators analyze co-tenancy before committing to a location. A map showing nearby businesses by category helps them evaluate whether the trade area matches their target demographics.
In all three cases, the map does something a spreadsheet cannot: it creates an immediate, visual understanding of the location's retail ecosystem.
Step 1: Set Your Subject Property
Start by navigating to your property's location on the map. You can search by address or scroll and zoom to the site. Once you're centered on the property, you have your base map ready.
Choose a map style that works for your presentation. For surrounding tenant maps, the "light" or "default" styles tend to work well because they keep the background clean while still showing street names and landmarks. If you're creating a map for a nightlife or entertainment district, the "dark" or "night" styles can add visual impact.
Step 2: Auto-Find Nearby Businesses by Category
This is where the process diverges from the old manual approach. Instead of Googling "restaurants near 123 Main Street" and cross-referencing results, you use the built-in category search.
CRE Retail Maps lets you search by business category — restaurants, banks, grocery stores, pharmacies, fitness centers, coffee shops, and more. When you run a category search, the tool queries businesses in the visible map area and returns results with their exact locations.
Here's a practical workflow:
- Search "grocery" to find supermarkets and specialty food stores in the area. Place the ones most relevant to your narrative.
- Search "bank" to show financial institutions — Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo — that signal commercial density.
- Search "restaurant" to populate dining options. For a retail property, nearby restaurants indicate foot traffic and daytime population.
- Search "fitness" to show gyms and studios that drive repeat visits to the area.
Each search returns businesses with their brand logos pulled from a library of over 1,000 national and regional brands. Click a result to place its logo directly on the map at the correct location. No downloading, no resizing, no guessing where it goes.
Step 3: Fine-Tune Placement with Leader Lines
Once you've placed 15 to 25 nearby tenants on your map, some logos will naturally overlap or cluster together, especially in dense retail corridors. This is where leader lines and drag-to-group containers become essential.
Leader lines are connector lines that link a logo to its exact location on the map. You can move the logo to an open area of the map for readability while the leader line maintains the geographic connection. This keeps the map accurate without sacrificing legibility.
Drag-to-group containers let you cluster multiple tenants into a labeled group — for example, grouping all the tenants in a neighboring shopping center under a single container titled "Riverside Plaza." This organizes the map and tells a clearer story about the retail nodes surrounding your property.
Step 4: Save Locations to Your POI Database
If you work in the same market repeatedly — and most brokers do — you'll find yourself placing the same nearby tenants on multiple maps. The POI (Point of Interest) database in CRE Retail Maps lets you save locations so you can reuse them across projects.
For example, if there's a Target, a Whole Foods, and a Starbucks that show up on nearly every map in your submarket, save them as POIs. The next time you create a map in that area, you can pull them in with one click instead of searching again. Over time, your POI database becomes a curated library of your market's key tenants.
This is especially valuable for brokerage teams. Instead of every broker researching the same trade area independently, a shared POI database ensures consistency and saves collective time.
Step 5: Style and Export
With your nearby tenants placed and organized, apply finishing touches:
- Highway highlighting: Adjust the color, weight, and opacity of major roads to show access and visibility. A property on a highlighted arterial road tells a stronger location story.
- Label controls: Toggle street names, highway labels, transit stops, and water features on or off depending on what's relevant to your audience.
- Color scheme: Use your brokerage's brand colors with the custom color picker, or choose from 12 preset swatches for a polished look.
When the map is ready, export it as a high-resolution PNG (up to 4K) for digital use or as a PDF with branded templates for print materials. The PDF export is designed to drop directly into offering memorandums and property flyers without additional formatting.
The Bigger Picture
A surrounding tenant map isn't just a visual aid — it's a sales tool. It answers the "What's nearby?" question before it's asked, builds confidence in the location, and differentiates your marketing from competitors who are still pasting logos into PowerPoint.
With category search and the POI database in CRE Retail Maps, building these maps takes minutes instead of hours. The more maps you create, the more your POI library grows, and the faster each subsequent map becomes.
Try it on your next listing and see how much faster the process is when nearby tenants find themselves.