For restaurant brokersYou already know the block. This is what happened on it.
2ndSight holds the City of Chicago’s licence record for every restaurant that has traded since 2002 — who was at an address, how long each lasted, and what replaced them. Put in an address and it comes back in seconds, with the survival odds for the concept your client has in mind.
What it does for a listing
- Answers the question before it is asked. Every serious tenant eventually asks what happened at the space. Having the answer first is better than being asked for it.
- Tells a client which concept fits. Ranked alternatives at that address, so “this space is wrong for you” becomes “this space is wrong for that, and right for this”.
- Gives you something to leave behind. A shareable read, on your listing, with your name on it.
What it will not do
It does not predict whether a business will succeed, and we will not let it pretend to. It ranks: given two restaurants, it is right about which is likelier to last roughly 63% of the time, measured on 2,428 openings the model had never seen. It is not a credit model and must not be used to decline anyone a lease or a loan.
What it costs
One full read a month is free, so you can try it on a live listing before deciding anything. Beyond that it is a flat monthly fee for unlimited reads and the Chicago dashboards — current pricing is on use2ndsight.com/pricing.
We are signing a first group of Chicago brokers as design partners: unlimited co-branded reads at no cost, in exchange for telling us what is wrong with them.
2ndSight, a product of 2nd Gen Kitchens · Chicago · use2ndsight.com
What a read actually shows
Three of the seven findings from our analysis of the city, because they are the ones that change what you tell a client.
What they open matters more than where they open it
Ranking two decades of openings by one signal at a time, the concept — cuisine and service format together — carries almost the whole effect. The two location signals rank last. That is the opposite of how this business talks, and it is the most useful thing you can tell a tenant who has fallen in love with a space.
The same food, served two ways, is two businesses
Sandwich / Sub as fast food survived four years at 88.9%. The same cuisine as fast casual managed 48.1%. Same dishes, same city, 40.8 points apart.
Nobody can tell you who closed last year
A licence lapses long after a dining room goes dark. We measured it: one year on, the public record shows only 17.7% of the closures that have already happened, and it takes three years to see them all. Any “restaurants that closed last year” figure — ours, a trade paper’s, a national vendor’s — is short by roughly five times. We publish openings monthly and closures only at the lag the data supports, which is why the rest of these numbers can be trusted.
Every figure here is generated from the City of Chicago’s licence record and moves when the model is retrained. Method: use2ndsight.com/methodology · Full report: use2ndsight.com/chicago/report