Quick Service Restaurant Feasibility Study in the Knoxville, TN Metro Area

Knoxville's quick-service leader

Limited-service restaurants top Knoxville's list (1 of 39), where a location quotient of 1.34x puts them above their national weight in local lending. The record holds 41 loans over the ten fiscal years, $24.1 million in all. Typical size is $350,000, 1.13x the national mark, and the quartile edges are $265,500 and $625,900, a notably tight and high lower bound. Knoxville is 81 of 779 once every metro and micro area is ranked.

Brands and programs

Franchise share is 61.0%, so six in ten loans carry a brand. Program tallies read 36 for 7(a) and 5 for 504. Knox County, TN supplies 36 loans, almost the whole record, so the study area is essentially one county.

A sparse timeline

Only two years print: FY2021 with 6 loans and $3.9 million, and FY2024 with 6 and $2.6 million. Ten other years are withheld for thin counts, so Knoxville's trajectory cannot be read from this page. No holder clears the listing line either.

Blanks

Knoxville quick service has no published cancellation rate and no charge-off rate, a result of thin cohorts and not a signal of zero. Knox County is tied to the metro by the name in the 2023 area list.

What a Knoxville study has to answer

The tight lower bound of $265,500 suggests that few quick-service projects here are tiny, so a study should show what is being bought: a pad site, a leasehold, or a conversion. Test traffic on the corridor, university-calendar effects on sales, and the franchisor's unit economics against nearby units. Run coverage at $350,000 and near $625,900, and have the appraiser value building, equipment and franchise rights on separate lines. Knoxville's lender-facing picture is thin because so little is published, which places the weight on the project's own evidence. A study should therefore document comparable sales from nearby units of the same brand, delivery and drive-through mix, labor availability in a university town, and the lease or purchase terms for the pad. A lender will also read the franchisor's disclosure document, so the study should reconcile its sales ranges with what the corridor can really produce.