We help franchisors and growth-stage retail brands move from awarded territories to opened stores across Ohio. Site sourcing, market validation, and lease execution at the cadence franchise systems actually need — not the pace a traditional broker delivers. Our team has supported franchise rollouts from emerging concepts opening their first Ohio locations to established systems scaling across multiple Midwest states.
Awarded territories sitting unopened is one of the most common pressure points in growth-stage franchise systems. The territory sells faster than the real estate executes, the franchisee gets frustrated, and the franchisor's growth narrative starts to wobble. The bottleneck is almost never the franchisee. It is the real estate execution infrastructure.
Most growth-stage franchise systems do not have internal real estate teams large enough to support multi-territory rollouts. The result is a patchwork of regional brokers, inconsistent processes, and a franchisor team buried in transaction support instead of running the playbook. We exist to fix that — operating as an integrated real estate function for franchise systems that need execution at scale without building the infrastructure internally.
Franchise real estate runs on a different clock than traditional tenant rep. The territory has been sold, the franchisee has signed, the brand needs the store open. We source sites across Ohio markets at the cadence the rollout requires — Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Dayton, Toledo, Akron, and the secondary corridors where strong franchise opportunities often hide in plain sight.
When a franchisor is evaluating a new Ohio market for territory release, the question is not just whether the market can support one store — it is whether the territory can support the unit count the franchisee will be expected to deliver. We produce market validation that answers the unit-count question, drawing on the same research methodology our team uses for national retailers.
Once a site is identified, the execution work begins. Letter of intent through signed lease, with the franchisor and franchisee in the loop at every stage. We negotiate from market knowledge, not from cold templates — which usually translates to better economics on the spaces that matter and faster signatures on the rest.
For franchisors with several franchisees operating in Ohio, we coordinate the rollout at the portfolio level — preventing territory collisions, sequencing openings to align with marketing and operations support, and reporting back to the franchisor team with the kind of structured transparency franchise performance reviews actually need.
CRE360 has supported franchise and growth-stage retail rollouts across multiple states, including a 20-site PickleRage rollout delivered in 7 months that fueled one of the fastest pickleball franchise expansions in the country. That work included site sourcing across multiple markets, lease negotiation, and the kind of coordination required when a franchisor is opening locations faster than most real estate teams can support.
The PickleRage engagement is one of several growth-stage franchise rollouts in our track record. Across the franchise category broadly — pickleball, health and wellness, experiential concepts, value QSR, service formats — we have built a methodology that translates from one franchise system to the next. The market dynamics differ. The execution discipline does not.
Ohio is being underwritten by the franchise category as a tier-two market, and that mispricing is creating real opportunity for systems willing to look past the headline metros. The Cleveland-Akron-Canton corridor, the Columbus growth ring, the Cincinnati-Dayton corridor, and a long list of secondary Ohio markets are delivering franchise unit economics that compete with much larger MSAs — at site costs that often run materially below the coastal franchise markets.
The franchise systems winning in Ohio right now are the ones that ran the unit economics in advance, sourced sites from market reality rather than national broker templates, and executed at the cadence the franchisee base required. That is the work we do.
Most franchise engagements with CRE360 start at one of three moments. The franchisor is preparing to release a new Ohio territory and needs market validation before commitments. The franchisor has awarded territories sitting unopened and needs to accelerate site execution. Or the franchisee is operating in Ohio without strong real estate support and needs an experienced partner to source and execute.
All three entry points work. The engagement scope adjusts based on which problem we are solving and who is signing the contract — franchisor, franchisee, or both. We can operate as the franchisor's exclusive Ohio real estate partner, as the franchisee's tenant rep, or in a hybrid arrangement that supports the system at multiple levels.
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Sam is the Managing Director for CRE 360 Partners. He manages both the research and transaction business within CRE 360 Partners. Sam is instrumental in both tenant and landlord relationships throughout the country. Sam has more than 20 years of experience in value creation of retail commercial real estate assets, including more than a decade of management and strategic leasing of major projects in portfolios owned by publicly traded REITs in the mall sector. Sam’s deep experience and wide array of national relationships, combined with his ability to effectively drive compelling deals have enabled him to propel leasing volume and cultivate an increasing mix of national and regional retailers within the portfolio. Collier received BS degrees in both Finance/Economics and Accounting from Lipscomb University, and he now resides with his wife in Nashville, TN. He is also a member of the International Council of Shopping Centers and holds a CPA certification.
CRE360 Partners
Commercial Real Estate intelligence that combines rigorous data research with national transaction expertise.
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