The H-E-B checklist: Does your neighborhood have what it takes to land the next store?

Want to know if your neighborhood qualifies for Dallas’ next H-E-B, once the supermarket chain opens its first-ever city store at Hillcrest and LBJ sometime in the next couple of years?

Then answer these three questions:

First, does your neighborhood have an empty lot – or one with buildings that can be torn down without too much fuss – that’s about the size of a city block?

Second, is that land located at the intersection of major highways, traveled by tens of thousands of cars a day? And do lots of high-income families live around that land, say, six-figure Plano-style high income?

Finally, it can’t be near a Central Market because H-E-B doesn’t want to cannibalize its existing brands.

If the answer to each is yes, then Come On Down! your neighborhood has a chance of landing the next H-E-B in Dallas. Which is the good news.

The bad news?

There aren’t a whole lot of sites in Dallas that meet those requirements – like maybe one, and even that might be stretching things a bit.

“The first thing to know is that H-E-B has picked its locations in north Texas in support of a strategy,” says SMU professor Ed Fox, one of the leading retail gurus in the country. “These are big footprint supermarkets that leverage efficiencies for logistics and sourcing, and even marketing.”

But the Observer, with Fox’s help, has done a fair amount of sleuthing to figure out what H-E-B looks for in store locations, using data from where it has built stores in the Dallas area. Know this is informed speculation; H-E-B does not comment on the subject, and almost a dozen Dallas real estate brokers and experts – who might work with the grocer — either declined to be interviewed for this story or did not respond to requests for interviews.

Nevertheless, there are several certainties:

SIZE
This, more than anything, eliminates most of Dallas. There just isn’t enough affordable land of the right size with the demographics H-E-B looks for. The Plano and one of the Frisco H-E-Bs are 118,000 square feet; the Park Lane Whole Foods is about half that size. And for those who ask, “What about Oak Cliff?” the Dallas Central Appraisal District lists an H-E-B-owned property, some 106,000 square feet, at Beckley and Davis, kind of catty corner to Bishop Arts. But, says Fox, that looks more like a site for a Joe V’s than an H-E-B. (Although some would contest it’s perfect for an H-E-B.)

LOCATION
Which is not just about high-income neighborhoods. Fox says H-E-B has put its north suburban stores in a more or less straight line, north and south, not unlike a train track with each store as a station. This makes it more cost-effective and more efficient for delivery trucks to stop at each store in procession, instead of driving willy-nilly around the DFW area.

TRAFFIC
As in lots and lots of it. Check out this part of the North Central Texas Council of Governments website, where you can plug in an intersection to see how many cars go through it each day.

CANNIBALIZATION
There can’t be any H-E-B sister concepts nearby. This rules out some of the wealthiest parts of Dallas, since there are already Central Markets serving the Park Cities, Preston Hollow and Bluffview, and North Dallas. 

Which leaves?

Not a lot, the best candidate being the shopping center at the southwest corner of Mockingbird and Abrams, which would attract customers from Lakewood (median household income $171,767) as well as Lake Highlands. The center, built for a supermarket, hasn’t had one since 2016, and the traffic counts are good.

So, what’s the catch?

Yes, it’s sort of close to the Lovers Lane Central Market and it doesn’t fit the train tracks strategy. But perhaps more importantly, H-E-B reportedly bought the lease for the supermarket on the site a decade ago, only to close it (as well as a store at a center on Northwest Highway and Ferndale in Lake Highlands). So if the chain didn’t want the site then, why would it want it now?

On the other hand, it took H-E-B 10 years to decide to turn the empty Albertson’s in Uptown into a Central Market, which it had bought the lease to in the same deal.

So who knows? This is H-E-B we’re talking about.