Economic development RFPs are more than administrative documents. When a corporate real estate team, site selection consultant, or public agency issues one, the quality of the questions asked determines the quality of the intelligence received — and ultimately shapes whether a location decision holds up over five, ten, or twenty years.
Why the RFP Is the Underestimated Stage of Site Selection
Most corporate real estate teams focus their analytical energy on the shortlist phase, running financial models and touring buildings. The RFP stage gets treated as a formality — a template circulated to economic development organizations to open the conversation. That framing costs teams real leverage.
A well-structured RFP forces every responding jurisdiction to answer the same questions on the same terms. That comparability is analytically invaluable. When responses arrive in a consistent format, scoring across communities becomes a disciplined exercise rather than an exercise in interpreting incompatible narratives.
The RFP also signals sophistication to the jurisdictions you are courting. Economic developers who receive a vague, generic questionnaire from a prospect will devote proportionally vague effort to their response. A sharp RFP signals that the evaluating team will hold responses to a standard — and that shapes the quality of the offer you receive.
Experienced site selection advisers treat the RFP as a filtering instrument. The questions you include determine which variables surface early, before site visits consume budget and before incentive negotiations become entangled with real estate negotiations. The 9 Questions to Include in an Economic Development RFP framework below gives corporate and public teams a disciplined starting point.
Question 1: What Incentive Programs Are Available, and What Are Their Qualification Thresholds?
The incentive question is where most RFPs begin and, unfortunately, where many also end. Asking simply "what incentives do you offer?" produces a marketing brochure, not an analytical input. The question needs to be structured so that responses describe specific programs, their statutory authority, their qualification thresholds, and the approval process each requires.
A jurisdiction might offer a job tax credit, a property tax abatement, a sales and use tax exemption on capital equipment, and a discretionary cash grant — four distinct instruments with different eligibility rules, different timelines, and different levels of certainty. Without separating them in the RFP, a responding jurisdiction can aggregate all four into a single headline figure that overstates the likely package.
Ask respondents to list each program separately, state whether it is statutory or discretionary, identify the approving authority, and confirm whether legislative action is required to make an award. That structure alone transforms how responses can be compared across jurisdictions.
Incentive packages vary significantly by state, county, and municipality, and the specific terms are always governed by the written agreements and applicable law. Any figures cited in an RFP response are starting points for legal and financial diligence, never final commitments. Requiring jurisdictions to acknowledge this in their response reduces the risk of overreliance on preliminary estimates.
Question 2: What Is the Timeline from Project Announcement to Incentive Agreement Execution?
Incentive value is a function not just of the gross award but of when that award becomes contractually binding. A jurisdiction that promises a large package but requires twelve months of agency approvals before execution may expose a project to meaningful execution risk — particularly if the business case depends on incentive proceeds arriving in a specific budget year.
Ask each jurisdiction to map the approval sequence: which bodies must act, in what order, and on what meeting schedule. Many economic development incentive programs route through a city council, a county commission, a state economic development authority, and sometimes a legislative appropriations committee. Each step carries both a schedule and a vote, and votes can fail.
Require respondents to state the earliest realistic execution date given their current approval calendar, not an aspirational date. The difference between a jurisdiction that can close an incentive agreement in sixty days and one that realistically needs nine months is a material variable in project planning and financing.
This question also reveals the depth of the economic development organization's internal process expertise. A vague answer about timeline — one that simply says "as quickly as possible" — signals either a lack of experience or a lack of internal clarity about how their own approval process works.
Question 3: What Available Sites Meet the Following Specifications?
Site and building availability is where economic development RFPs frequently collapse into generality. Asking for "available sites" without specification produces a list of everything the jurisdiction wants to move — not a curated response tied to your project requirements. The question must include the minimum and preferred building size, clear height requirements if industrial, power availability, fiber capacity, zoning classification, and environmental status.
For build-to-suit opportunities, include the minimum acreage, the preferred lot configuration, and any flood zone or environmental restriction that would disqualify a parcel. For existing buildings, specify whether a certificate of occupancy is in place, what tenant improvements have recently been completed, and whether the landlord has demonstrated financial capacity to fund required modifications.
Require respondents to include the status of each site's environmental history. Sites with prior industrial use should come with Phase I Environmental Site Assessment status and, where applicable, the status of any remediation action under the relevant state environmental program. This filters out sites that look compelling on a map but carry years of regulatory entanglement.
The specificity of the site criteria in your RFP directly determines whether the responses save your team time or create it. A precisely worded site question produces a shortlist; a vague one produces a haystack.
Question 4: What Is the Labor Market Profile for the Target Job Functions?
Incentive packages attract attention, but labor availability is what makes or breaks facility performance over time. An RFP that does not ask about labor market depth forces the evaluating team to source that data independently and outside the response framework — which makes cross-jurisdiction comparison harder.
Ask respondents to describe the current unemployment rate, the size of the workforce within reasonable commute distance, and the concentration of workers in the target occupational codes relevant to the project. If the facility will employ skilled trades, logistics workers, engineers, or financial professionals, say so explicitly and ask for data relevant to those classifications.
Wage data is a critical input for a lease or facility financial model. Ask each jurisdiction to describe the prevailing wage range for the target job titles based on whatever publicly available labor market sources they use. Many economic development organizations maintain access to occupational employment statistics from state labor agencies. Requiring them to cite those sources — rather than assert general competitiveness — improves the quality of the information.
Workforce development incentives are a separate but related dimension. Some jurisdictions offer pre-hire training grants, customized training programs delivered through community college systems, or wage subsidies for new hire training periods. Ask explicitly whether such programs exist and what a qualified project would need to demonstrate to access them.
Question 5: What Infrastructure Exists, and What Would Need to Be Upgraded?
Infrastructure questions are frequently too vague — asking about "access to utilities" produces responses that confirm electricity exists, which is not useful. The RFP should ask for specific utility capacity at each proposed site: available power in megawatts or kilowatts at the meter, water and sewer flow rates and capacities, natural gas pressure and availability, and telecom carrier options with confirmed fiber specifications.
For projects with significant power requirements — data centers, advanced manufacturing, cold storage — the question should include a request for the utility provider's interconnection timeline and any transmission upgrade requirements. A site that theoretically has access to adequate power but requires a substation upgrade may add twelve to twenty-four months to the project schedule, which is a material risk. Jurisdictions should be required to describe any known infrastructure gap and the funding mechanism available to address it.
Transportation infrastructure matters equally for distribution, logistics, or high-headcount facilities. Ask for the distance to the nearest interstate interchange, rail access and the name of the serving carrier, the nearest port or intermodal facility, and commercial air service within the relevant commute radius.
Question 6: What Are the Permitting Timelines and Approval Risks?
Speed to occupancy is often as valuable to a corporate real estate team as the incentive package itself. A delay of six months between construction completion and certificate of occupancy can cost a project more in deferred revenue or carrying costs than many incentive grants are worth. The RFP should ask each jurisdiction to describe its permitting process for the type and scale of project being evaluated.
Ask for the typical elapsed time from building permit submission to issuance, the number of departments involved in plan review, and whether a concurrent or sequential review process is used. Sequential review — where each department completes its review before the next begins — can extend timelines significantly relative to jurisdictions that have invested in parallel review infrastructure.
Ask also whether the jurisdiction offers expedited or dedicated review for qualified economic development projects, and if so, what the qualification criteria are. Some states have passed legislation creating fast-track permitting programs for projects meeting investment or employment thresholds. Where those programs exist, the RFP response should describe them in enough detail to evaluate their practical value.
Question 7: What Is the Community's Demonstrated Track Record with Similarly Scaled Projects?
An economic development organization's past behavior is the most reliable predictor of its future behavior. Ask each jurisdiction to describe two or three recent projects of comparable scale — not necessarily in the same industry, but of similar capital investment, employment, and timeline characteristics. Ask what the promised package looked like at the time of announcement and what was ultimately delivered.
This question serves two purposes. First, it tests whether the jurisdiction can produce specific examples rather than generic claims of competitiveness. Second, it surfaces any pattern of overpromising during the competitive phase and underdelivering during execution. A jurisdiction that cannot name recent comparable projects, or that describes projects significantly smaller in scale, is communicating something important about its capacity.
Ask also who the primary point of contact would be throughout the project lifecycle, from pre-announcement through the incentive compliance period. High turnover in economic development offices is a known risk in this asset class — a project may be won by one team and administered by an entirely different staff. Understanding the depth of institutional knowledge behind the offer matters.
Question 8: What Are the Clawback Provisions and Compliance Monitoring Requirements?
Incentive agreements almost always include performance commitments that must be maintained to avoid recapture of awarded benefits. These clawback provisions and compliance monitoring requirements are frequently underweighted during the selection phase because teams are focused on the gross incentive value rather than the conditions attached to it.
Ask each jurisdiction to describe, for each program in their proposed package, the specific performance commitments required: minimum employment levels, wage floors, capital investment minimums, and the period over which compliance will be measured. Some programs measure annual averages; others require a minimum employment count on a specific census date. The difference matters significantly for workforce planning.
Ask also who performs the compliance monitoring, on what schedule, and what happens in the event of partial non-compliance. Some jurisdictions have cure periods; others trigger full recapture immediately upon a missed threshold. Understanding the structure of the downside before the agreement is signed is a standard discipline in competent site selection practice, not a negotiating posture.
This is also the moment to ask whether the jurisdiction has experience modifying incentive agreements when business conditions change — through acquisitions, strategic pivots, or macroeconomic downturns. A jurisdiction that has navigated agreement modifications before is a meaningfully different partner than one that has not.
Question 9: What Is the Decision Timeline, and How Should We Communicate?
The final question in a structured economic development RFP addresses process rather than substance — but it may determine whether the competitive process runs smoothly or collapses into an asymmetric negotiation where one or two jurisdictions have more information than others. Ask each jurisdiction to confirm their availability for follow-up questions, their capacity to provide supplemental data within a defined turnaround window, and any blackout periods due to legislative sessions, elections, or fiscal year constraints.
Specify the evaluating team's decision timeline in the RFP itself. This signals seriousness and allows jurisdictions to mobilize their internal resources appropriately. An economic development organization that knows a site visit is planned within six weeks will prepare differently than one operating without that anchor.
Ask each jurisdiction to identify the appropriate point of contact for elected official introductions. At the finalist stage, executive teams often want to meet the mayor, county executive, or governor's economic development director before making a final commitment. Jurisdictions that can facilitate those introductions quickly and without friction signal organizational sophistication.
Scoring the Responses: Building a Comparable Analysis
Once RFP responses arrive, the temptation is to rank jurisdictions by the headline incentive figure. Experienced advisers resist that approach because it conflates programs with different certainty levels, different timelines, and different performance conditions. A scoring matrix that weights incentive certainty, labor market depth, infrastructure readiness, and permitting risk separately produces a more defensible shortlist.
Effective rate calculations — converting gross incentive values to present value equivalents using a discount rate appropriate to the organization's cost of capital — allow programs with different payment structures to be compared on the same basis. A front-loaded cash grant has a meaningfully different present value than a property tax abatement spread over fifteen years. Without a lease NPV or project NPV framework applied consistently across jurisdictions, the comparison is misleading.
Property-level financial modeling should run alongside the incentive comparison. For owned facilities, that means modeling the capital investment, depreciation, and carrying costs net of incentives. For leased facilities, it means calculating effective rent, total occupancy cost, and lease net present value across the shortlisted options. These models should carry the same assumptions about headcount growth, wage escalation, and capital expenditure so that the community-level differences — not modeling differences — drive the conclusion.
Maintaining Confidentiality During the Process
Economic development site selection processes are routinely conducted under a confidentiality protocol to prevent competitors from learning about a potential expansion, to protect the organization's negotiating position, and to avoid premature real estate market reactions. The RFP itself should address how respondents are expected to handle the project information, who within the jurisdiction may be briefed, and under what conditions public disclosure would be required.
Some states have public records laws that make certain economic development communications subject to disclosure requests. Understanding which jurisdictions operate under such requirements — and how they manage confidentiality within those legal constraints — is part of the pre-RFP diligence. Many jurisdictions have designated project code names as a standard practice; asking each respondent to confirm their internal confidentiality protocol is a reasonable component of the RFP process.
Disclosure events — such as an incentive application that becomes public record upon filing, or a city council vote that must be noticed publicly — should be mapped in advance. If a jurisdiction's approval process requires public action before an agreement is finalized, the evaluating team needs to plan the announcement strategy accordingly.
Integrating RFP Findings with Broader Site Selection Work
An economic development RFP does not operate in isolation. The responses arrive into a broader analytical framework that includes property research, demographic analysis, competitive market intelligence, and in many cases a parallel commercial real estate search process for specific buildings or land parcels. Keeping those workstreams connected — so that the best site in a jurisdiction is evaluated alongside the best incentive package from that same jurisdiction — requires deliberate process management.
Connecting the RFP to Longer-Term Portfolio Management
The economic development process ends at project announcement for many teams, but the obligations created by incentive agreements persist for years — sometimes decades. Property tax abatements with fifteen-year compliance periods, job tax credits that require annual certification, and training grants with multi-year performance windows all become portfolio obligations that need active management.
The discipline of thinking through clawbacks, monitoring schedules, and renewal options at the RFP stage — rather than treating them as post-closing administrative details — is what separates a commercial real estate CRM approach to portfolio management from a purely transactional one. Obligation tracking, critical date management, and relationship continuity are not soft considerations; they are financial risk management.
Structuring the Final Shortlist Presentation
When the RFP responses have been scored, the financial models have been run, and the site visits have been completed, the final shortlist presentation needs to do more than identify a preferred jurisdiction. It needs to document the reasoning behind each inclusion and exclusion in enough detail that a board, executive committee, or investment committee can evaluate the recommendation rather than simply ratify it.
A well-structured shortlist presentation includes a scoring summary showing how each jurisdiction performed across the weighted criteria, a financial comparison showing the present value of each incentive package net of compliance risk adjustments, a site comparison showing how each building or land parcel performs against the original brief, and a risk register noting the open items — permits, approvals, negotiations — that remain at the time of recommendation.
Economic development responses sometimes summarize program parameters in ways that drift from the underlying statutory or regulatory source. Having the original program documents, the specific statutory citations, and the written representations from the jurisdiction in a form that can be checked against the final recommendation protects the team and strengthens the presentation.
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