Co-location is the investment thesis that positions professional real estate within immediate proximity of established, capital-intensive national retailers. The logic is mechanical: national retailers select sites through independent, rigorous demand analysis; clustering professional supply beside that validated demand transfers the retailers' foot-traffic guarantee onto the office product.

The strategy inverts the conventional market-sentiment approach to office site selection. Rather than forecasting future demand, co-location identifies existing demand already proven by independent retail capital commitment and positions professional centres to capture it.

The proximity requirement

A professional centre qualifies for co-location deployment when it is located within 1.0 kilometre of a power centre — a retail hub anchored by multiple big-box national retailers. This threshold reflects pedestrian and light-vehicle catchment: the professional building must be accessible within the retail draw area without a separate destination trip.

Retail Select deployments operate within the same 1.0-kilometre radius. Tech Industrial deployments extend to 4.0 kilometres to accommodate last-mile logistics operations, where the retail adjacency requirement is for supply-chain proximity rather than foot traffic.

The retail independence criterion

The co-location framework is built on the independence of the retail site-selection process. Each national retailer — a warehouse club, a home-improvement superstore, a general merchandise chain — runs its own capital-allocation analysis before committing to a site. When three or more independent operators have committed capital within 1.0 to 3.0 kilometres of one another, their convergence constitutes objective corroboration of demand. No single analyst view or market forecast carries the same evidentiary weight.

This independence criterion is formalized in the co-location methodology and operationalized through the ranking system.

National retailers as anchor infrastructure

Co-location treats national retailers as permanent civic infrastructure rather than optional amenities. A warehouse club or home-improvement superstore generates destination trips from the regional population. A professional centre occupying the same catchment area captures daily foot traffic that it could not produce independently.

The anchor retailers are not tenants of the professional building. They are external capital commitments that validate the demand environment in which the professional building operates. The co-location strategy depends on their continued operation rather than on any contractual relationship.

Regional market focus

Co-location targets regional markets — cities and metropolitan areas with populations typically between 50,000 and 300,000 — rather than central business districts in major metro areas. Regional markets exhibit the retail investment patterns and underserved professional real estate demand that co-location requires. Central business districts in major metros face different competitive dynamics: legacy office oversupply, declining anchor retail, and transit-dependent occupiers rather than the drive-based catchment that powers co-location deployments.

Relationship to the direct-hold solution

Co-location is the site-selection framework; the direct-hold solution type determines the physical form the professional centre takes. A Professional Centre co-location deployment is a multi-storey office building optimized for mix-of-use tenancy. The co-location criterion establishes where to build; the standardized fixed floor plate and building systems establish what to build.

The systematic repetition of the co-location process across multiple regional markets is the rollout program — the mechanism by which Woodfine's site selection pipeline converts validated demand into institutional real estate at scale.