The pick that felt right
A site comes up. The trade area feels right, the co-tenancy is strong, the drive-by leaves a good impression. An experienced person says "this is the one," and often they are correct. Instinct built on years of walking sites is real, and it is worth something.
The trouble is not that the instinct is wrong. It is that "it felt right" is the entire record of the decision. Nothing else was captured: not the criteria that mattered, not the tradeoffs weighed, not the reason this site beat the one across the street. And an unrecorded decision fails the moment it meets anyone who was not in the room.
The three tests gut feel fails
A site decision has to survive three separate moments, and instinct alone survives none of them.
- The committee. When you present the site, someone asks why this one over the alternatives. "It felt like the better location" does not carry a room that is signing off on years of rent.
- A year later. When a question comes back after closing, the reasoning has to be reconstructable. If it lived only in memory, it is already gone, especially once the person who made the call has moved on.
- The organization. A good decision made ten times the same way is a process. A good decision that cannot be explained is a lucky streak. If the team cannot see how the pick was reasoned, they cannot repeat it or improve it.
The industry has already moved
This is not a fringe opinion anymore. The market has openly shifted from instinct to evidence. As one industry analysis puts it, brokers who "once relied purely on gut feel are now expected to back that instinct with numbers, or risk losing money to those who do." The winners "combine institutional knowledge with transparent, data-backed evaluation."
Read that carefully, because it is not "replace judgment with data." It is "back the judgment with a record." The instinct is still doing real work. It just has to arrive at the table paired with something a committee can inspect and a colleague can reuse.
Reconstruct means captured, not remembered
The difference between a decision you can reconstruct and one you cannot is whether the reasoning was written down as it happened. Not summarized afterward from memory, but captured in the moment: the criteria the team agreed mattered, the weight each one carried, the score each site earned, and the tradeoffs that decided it.
When that record exists, all three tests pass at once. The committee sees why the site rated the way it did. The question a year later is answered by opening the evaluation, not by chasing down whoever made the call. And the next analyst inherits a method, not a mystery. The decision reconstructs itself, because it was never only in someone's head.
Instinct, plus a structure to hold it
None of this is an argument against judgment. The point is not to hand site selection to a spreadsheet and hope. It is to give the judgment a structure that holds it: a shared evaluation where instinct becomes explicit criteria and weights, and the gut call becomes a decision you can defend, reconstruct, and teach.
That is what MYDealTeams is built to do. It is free during Early Access: Community free, Pro $69/month, everything free while we are in Early Access. Nothing to lose, and a deal team to organize.
Source: [GrowthFactor: data-driven decision-making in retail real estate](https://www.growthfactor.ai/resources/blog/ai-driven-decision-making)