40th Annual Corporate and 22nd Annual Consultant Site Selection Survey Results

For decades, the bedrock question of corporate site selection was some version of the same calculation: where can we do this most cheaply? Labor arbitrage, tax incentives, real estate costs — the disciplines of location strategy were largely organized around the pursuit of the lowest delivered cost. That era is not simply fading. According to the results of Area Development's 2026 Annual Survey of Site Selection Consultants, it has ended.

What has taken its place is something more complex and, in many ways, more demanding: a relentless focus on operational certainty. The question companies are now asking their advisors is not "where is cheapest?" but "where can we be sure this will actually work?" The shift — from cost optimization to risk mitigation, from lowest-cost to most-reliable — is reshaping how sites are evaluated, how communities compete, and how the profession of site selection itself is practiced.

Click here to read the original article from Area Development.