~/sajjad $ cat projects/leasing-analysis
← cd ../projects
Data & reporting
Pub estate leasing analysis
Delivered Sep 202611 venues assessed
Before talking terms on leasing venues from a regional brewery, I built the numbers the brewery hadn’t published. Scraped all eleven venue pages, matched them to official rateable values, hygiene ratings, company charges and job adverts, and estimated weekly sales from two independent sources — which agreed.
How the data was built
- A scraper collected each venue’s page — address, rooms, contact details — and flagged leasing-relevant features from the text: food, garden, parking, function room, letting rooms, sport, real ale.
- The Food Standards Agency’s API supplied each venue’s hygiene rating and council, rather than scraping it.
- Each venue was matched against the national business rates list — a dataset of over 100 MB — to get its official rateable value.
- Company filings, heritage listings, recruitment adverts and review data filled in the rest.
Estimating what nobody published
The brewery doesn’t publish trading figures per venue. Rateable values imply roughly £1,500 to £9,000 a week in sales for the pubs; the brewery’s own adverts for managers, paid a share of takings, imply £2,000 to £5,400.
Two independent sources landing in the same range makes the estimate a usable baseline to test the brewery’s real figures against — and the report says plainly that it is a baseline, not a substitute for them.
What it found
- Only two venues looked clearly profitable before rent; most locals break even at best, so any meaningful rent would push them into loss.
- The brewery was advertising a management model, not leases — managers paid a percentage of sales, holding no lease and building no saleable business. The first question to ask before any meeting.
- Fifteen outstanding charges on the companies, several naming specific venues — brewer charges can come with supply ties that limit what you can stock.
- A shortlist: two to pursue, three only on the right terms, two to hold or clarify, four not recommended.