How National Distributors Decide Where to Build Next

For a company running dozens of distribution centers and hundreds of branches, where a building sits determines what a customer actually experiences: an order that arrives next-day instead of two days late, a delivery route that runs efficiently instead of wastefully, or a new metro area that gets served well instead of left thin. Ferguson, the building-products distributor, put it plainly when announcing a new Ohio facility: "Our distribution centers are the heart of our supply chain," said Al Byrd, the company's senior vice president of supply chain. The site itself shows the logic in practice: a 400,000-square-foot distribution center on a 77-acre site in Celina, Ohio, chosen specifically for its proximity to Ferguson's other Midwest locations, letting the company reach customers even next-day.

None of those decisions get made on a hunch. They get made by comparing dozens or hundreds of candidate sites against the same set of questions: how big is the available parcel, what's already built on it, how close is it to the customers and suppliers that matter, and how much room is there to expand later.

Answering those questions at the scale a national network operates at means working from data that covers the whole country consistently, not a patchwork of local surveys pulled together site by site. A network strategy team comparing a candidate site in Texas against one in Oregon needs both evaluated the same way, on the same resolution, updated on the same schedule, or the comparison isn't really apples to apples.

If you're evaluating a single site, this is easier than it sounds. You commission a survey, you walk the property, you make the call. The moment you're comparing that site against dozens of others in different states, the math changes. You can't schedule a site visit for every candidate before a quarterly planning deadline, and you can't trust a different local vendor in each state to have measured a parking lot or a floodplain the same way. What you need instead is one dataset, built the same way everywhere, so a site in Ohio and a site in Texas are actually being judged on the same terms.

That's where building footprint and land cover data earn their keep. Knowing the precise footprint, height, and layout of what's already built on a parcel tells a site-selection team how much of a lot is usable before they ever schedule a site visit. Land cover data shows what's actually on the ground around a candidate site, pavement, vegetation, open land, which shapes both site readiness and how much future expansion room realistically exists. And because a distribution center's footprint typically includes acres of parking and staging area, parking and lot data matter just as much as the building itself when comparing candidate sites for truck court capacity and dock access.

EarthDefine's Building Footprints 3D dataset covers over 183 million commercial and residential structures across the continental United States, derived from LiDAR and 60-centimeter-resolution aerial imagery, precise enough to distinguish a building from the trees around it. Land Cover and Impervious datasets classify what's on the ground at the same resolution, and Parking lot data maps and staging capacity directly. All three are built to be compared consistently, market to market, which makes a nationwide site-selection process comparable rather than relying on region-specific data.

Good data narrows a long list of candidates down to the handful worth that kind of scrutiny; it doesn't replace the scrutiny itself.