What Site Selectors See First — and Why It Usually Isn't Your Data Room
Before a consultant ever opens your incentive package, they have already formed an opinion from your website, your photos, and whether your community looks like a place their client would move a family to.
Placeholder article. Ask a site-selection consultant how a shortlist really gets built and the answer is rarely a spreadsheet alone. Long before the RFI responses are scored, someone on the team has quietly visited every community’s website, scrolled its photos, and asked a simple question: does this look like a real place?
The first-impression problem
Most EDC sites open with the same three things: a stock photo of a handshake, a slogan about being “open for business,” and a data table that the consultant already pulled from a subscription database. None of it tells them anything they didn’t know.
What they are actually looking for is evidence. A real industrial park with real trucks in it. A downtown with people on the sidewalk on a Tuesday. A school, a hospital, a Friday night. The things that make a plant manager comfortable telling two hundred employees this is where they’re moving.
A community that shows its real face is easier to trust than one that hides behind stock imagery.
What to do about it
Start by auditing every image on your site and asking whether it was taken within fifty miles of your city limits. Then replace the ones that weren’t. Authentic imagery is not a design preference; it is a credibility signal that site selectors read whether or not they say so out loud.