The Situation
Casa Padel was positioned to be a first-mover in introducing padel — the fastest-growing racket sport in the world — to U.S. markets through physical facility expansion. The challenge was fundamental: padel had essentially no U.S. track record, meaning there were no existing domestic locations to run regression analysis against. The site selection model had to be built from first principles.
Who plays padel globally? What demographic and lifestyle characteristics predict participation? Which U.S. markets have the highest concentration of those characteristics? The model had to answer these questions before it could answer the real estate one.
The Approach
Working directly with Casa Padel's founders to establish and weight the selection criteria, we built an Opportunity Index from the demographic profile of existing padel, racquetball, and tennis players internationally. Key inputs included target household income, geographic concentration of the target demographic (including Latino/Hispanic population, a strong predictor of padel participation given the sport's European and Latin American roots), cost of living, concentration of racket sports participation, and five-year projected population growth.
We screened all 380 major U.S. metros, scored each against the Opportunity Index, and produced a ranked national market list paired with geographic heat maps showing where the highest-scoring concentrations existed within each top market. The transparent weighting methodology allowed Casa Padel's founders to see exactly why each market ranked where it did.
When there's no historical data to run regression against, you build the model from the customer profile. Understand who buys, then find where they live.