Restaurant Feasibility Study in the El Paso, TX Metro Area

El Paso: one county, one restaurant market

El Paso County supplies all 52 of the metro's restaurant loans, which makes the metro and the county one and the same here. Full-service restaurants lead the area's classes, 1 of 39, with $28.1 million approved between FY2017 and FY2026, and the metro lands 98 of 821 on that count. With a location quotient of 1.19x, restaurants take a larger share of local borrowing than of national borrowing, and a median of $350,000 works out at 1.27x the national figure.

How the loans are built

Half the amounts fall between $133,500 and $742,500. By program, 7(a) loans number 43 and 504 loans number 9, and franchise units are 30.8% of loans, a meaningful minority beside a majority of independents. Only First Savings Bank clears the naming bar among 7(a) holders: 5 loans, $1.7 million, a modest average and that line comes from SBA's holder file. The thin lender list is itself informative: most of the lending is spread across institutions each holding only a handful of these loans, so a borrower is not facing a single dominant source of credit, and a study should not be written as though one lender sets the market.

El Paso prints an empty year: FY2022 shows 0 loans and $0. The other printed years are 7 loans in FY2017 ($2.5 million), 5 in FY2019 ($2.8 million), 5 in FY2020 ($2.6 million), 7 in FY2021 ($2.3 million), 6 in FY2023 ($4.6 million), 10 in FY2025 ($6.3 million) and 6 in FY2026 ($2.0 million). FY2018 and FY2024 are withheld, which is a different statement from an empty year. Cancellation took at least 19.4% of the FY2017 to FY2024 cohort; neither the strict count nor any charge-off figure is offered.

Building a case for an El Paso restaurant

A restaurant plan for El Paso should rest on trade-area evidence that comparable units achieve the sales being forecast: who lives and works within reach, how many competing dining rooms sit nearby, and what a typical ticket buys. The budget for kitchen, dining room and signage has to be set against a median ticket of $350,000, and the debt must be serviceable even if opening months disappoint. With a cancellation floor near a fifth of approvals, the plan should lay out how land or lease, permits and equipment will be secured before the loan is needed. A lender will set the sales forecast beside an appraisal. Nothing here promises a result.