The 400 Published Regional Markets in North America

Nothing in this paper constitutes an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any interest in a Woodfine direct-hold solution; any offering is made only by the applicable Private Placement Memorandum. Statements marked “planned,” “intended,” “targeted,” “may,” or “expected” are forward-looking and subject to change. Full disclosures appear at the end of this paper.

Working Paper WCP-005 · v0.1.0 · CC BY 4.0

This paper publishes the complete North American Regional Markets set: four hundred named markets that clear the anchor-composition gates, drawn from a qualifying pool of 1,121 across three countries. It is a data companion, not an argument. The reasoning behind the qualification method — why anchor composition rather than population, and why the published set is deliberately smaller than the qualifying pool — belongs to the methodology paper and is not restated here beyond what a reader needs to read the tables.

Two statements about what this is not, before anything else.

It is not a ranking. No rank and no score is published for any market in this set. The tables below are sorted by reference distance within each country purely so they can be read, and no market-to-market comparison is published or implied. A composite measure exists internally to support the selection; it is not published and has no bearing on how any market is described here.

It is not advice about any listed location. A market’s presence in this set means that independent large-format retailers have converged there in a qualifying combination. It is not a forecast about that market, not a recommendation, and not an indication that anything has been acquired, optioned, or developed there or anywhere near it.

1. How a market enters this set

A Regional Market is a named settlement — a legally incorporated place or equivalent administrative unit, whose name differs from that of its metropolitan reference point — whose retail co-location clusters, taken together, satisfy an anchor-composition test.

A market qualifies under one of three gates. A Regional Market carries a hypermarket anchor plus at least two of hardware, price club, lifestyle, electronics or sport, combined across all of the market’s member clusters. A District Anchor carries a hypermarket and a hardware anchor with no other optional category, across at least two distinct clusters. A Standalone Regional Centre meets that same condition in a market isolated from any other qualifying market beyond the outer geographic band.

Of the four hundred North American entries, 382 qualify as Regional Markets and 18 as Standalone Regional Centres — nine in Mexico, five in Canada, four in the United States. No North American entry qualifies as a District Anchor. The standalone class is where this set reaches genuinely isolated regional centres rather than settlements sitting in a metropolitan orbit.

A geographic coherence constraint applies: all of a settlement’s member clusters must lie within a 200-kilometre bounding box. Settlements failing it are name-collision aggregations — several unrelated places sharing a name — and are excluded rather than treated as one very large market.

Selection from the qualifying pool takes the four hundred markets with the strongest anchor composition per continent, with no per-country budget. A small per-country minimum floor prevents a country with genuine qualifying markets from being excluded outright and otherwise does not affect which markets are included. The per-country counts are therefore an observed result of one continental cutoff, not a quota set in advance.

Catchment population and consumer-spend figures accompany each market in the underlying data as descriptive context. They take no part in selection. Population is negatively correlated with the composition measure in every country tested, so selecting on population would systematically replace genuine regional markets with dense metropolitan-fringe suburbs.

2. How to read the table

Market is the settlement’s own name.

Metropolitan reference is the nearest major metropolitan centre in the framework’s continental reference set. It is a descriptive anchor, not a relationship: naming a centre beside a market is not a claim that the market functions as a commuter suburb of it.

km is the straight-line distance from the market to that centre. It is not a drive time and not a commuting estimate, and it is recorded rather than gated — distance takes no part in whether a market qualifies. A distance term was present in an earlier iteration of the selection method and was removed, because it caused standalone secondary cities to outrank genuine suburbs of major metropolitan areas.

T1, T2 and T3 are counts of the market’s co-location clusters at each composition tier. In North America, a Tier 1 cluster contains a hypermarket — Walmart Supercenter, Target, Meijer or H-E-B among them — a home-improvement warehouse such as Home Depot or Lowe’s, and a warehouse club such as Costco, Sam’s Club or BJ’s. A Tier 2 cluster contains a hypermarket and a hardware anchor without a warehouse club. A Tier 3 cluster contains a single recognised anchor category. A market may carry clusters at more than one tier; the figures are counts of clusters, not of stores.

3. Country summary

The United States publishes 298 of 916 qualifying markets — under a third of its pool, and the deepest reserve in either continental set. Canada and Mexico publish roughly half of theirs.

4. Composition and geography

The four hundred markets carry 708 co-location clusters between them — 479 Tier 1, 75 Tier 2 and 154 Tier 3 — an average of 1.77 clusters per market. Tier 1 presence is close to universal: 397 of the four hundred markets carry at least one Tier 1 cluster, and only two markets qualify on Tier 3 clusters alone.

Mexico is the exception, in composition rather than in qualification. Its 46 markets carry 54 Tier 1 clusters but 58 Tier 3 clusters — the only country in either continental set where Tier 3 clusters outnumber Tier 1.

The set spans 110 distinct metropolitan reference points. Vancouver is the reference for 13 entries and Toronto for 12 — the two largest, both Canadian, in a set that is three-quarters United States markets. Baltimore carries 10, and Boston, Minneapolis, Montreal, Mexico City and Nashville between eight and nine each.

Recorded reference distances run from 12 to 694 kilometres, with a median of 81. Just under half the set — 198 of 400 — sits within 80 kilometres of its reference point, and 109 sit beyond 150. Mexico accounts for much of the long tail, with a median reference distance of 152 kilometres against 75 for the United States and 90 for Canada.

5. Catchment data coverage

Catchment population and consumer-spend figures are recorded for all four hundred North American markets, with no country-level gaps — in contrast to the European set, where more than a third of entries carry no catchment population at all.

Two methods produce those figures, and each record discloses which applied. For 192 markets the figure is a deduplicated union of catchment cells across all of the market’s member clusters. For the remaining 208 it falls back to the strongest member cluster’s own figure, because a full union could not be computed. The two are not interchangeable, and a reader comparing catchment figures between markets should check which method produced each.

6. The markets

Listed by country, and within each country in ascending order of reference distance. That sort is descriptive, not ordinal: no rank or score is published for any entry, and a market’s position in a table says nothing about it beyond how far it sits from the centre named beside it.

United States — 298 markets

Canada — 56 markets

Mexico — 46 markets

References

Ester, M., Kriegel, H.-P., Sander, J., and Xu, X. 1996. A density-based algorithm for discovering clusters in large spatial databases with noise. Proceedings of KDD-96, 226–231.

Haklay, M. 2010. How good is volunteered geographical information? Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 37(4): 682–703.

OpenStreetMap contributors. Open Database Licence (ODbL) 1.0. https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/

Overture Maps Foundation. Open map data — places, buildings, transportation, addresses. https://overturemaps.org/

Contributors

Prepared by Woodfine Management Corp.

How this paper was produced

This paper is grounded in the operating and development work the preparing staff do themselves, and in what they have learned from the people they work with routinely: the graphic designers, web developers, and software developers and engineers who build the platform alongside them, and the architects and structural, building-services, and civil engineers they develop buildings with. No outside professional reviewed or approved this paper, and nothing in it is professional advice. It was drafted and edited with AI assistance under editorial direction, and the analysis and conclusions are Woodfine’s own.

Disclosures

Woodfine Capital Projects Inc. (“Woodfine”) is the author of record and owns the framework and the resulting dataset published here; Woodfine Management Corp. maintains the data and runs the analysis. Woodfine develops and promotes commercial property in markets of the kind listed, so this paper publishes a dataset in which we have a direct commercial interest. This work was funded internally; no external research funding was received. Nothing in this paper constitutes an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any interest in a Woodfine direct-hold solution; any offering is made only by the applicable Private Placement Memorandum, which prospective investors should review with their own professional advisors. Inclusion of any market in this list reflects the screening criteria described in Section 1 and does not indicate acquisition, option, or development activity, committed or planned, in that market or any other. No rank, score, or market-to-market comparison is published, and nothing here is a forecast of any market’s performance. The named retail chains appear as the subject of a site-selection method; their inclusion is not a statement about their businesses. Some statements above describe planned or intended future work; language such as “planned,” “intended,” “targeted,” “may,” and “expected” marks this forward-looking content, which is subject to change and does not constitute a commitment regarding future performance.

Data and reproducibility

Every row in Section 6 is reproduced from the published country tables, not re-derived for this paper, so the figures here and the figures on the published country pages are the same figures. The co-location data behind them is drawn from OpenStreetMap under the Open Database Licence — freely downloadable, usable commercially, on terms requiring that a derived database be shared on the same basis — filtered by canonical chain identifiers so that the same company resolves consistently across borders, and supplemented by civic-anchor records from an openly licensed global places dataset. Cluster boundaries are computed in two passes over the anchor locations. A reader with those sources can reconstruct the composition assessment for any market in this list. The figures describe the current dataset build; a September 2026 rebuild superseded an earlier and incomplete selection of 369 United States, 23 Canadian and 8 Mexican markets, so any copy of this list carrying those counts is a stale one. The set is a curated editorial selection derived from the live market layer and does not replace or alter that layer, which remains unranked and uncurated at its full qualifying count of 1,121. Counts move between builds as chain coverage grows and as clusters re-form, so this is a dated snapshot rather than a permanent statement. Market display names are reproduced as the underlying settlement records carry them, including inconsistent use of state and province suffixes; no market’s identity or geography has been altered. No independent party has audited this dataset, reproduced these figures, or reviewed these claims.

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