Restaurant Feasibility Study in the Evansville, IN Metro Area

Evansville: table-service dining is the first-ranked class

For Evansville, IN, SBA's files rank table-service restaurants first of the area's 39 classes (1 of 39), and the area itself sits at 127 of 821 for this class of loan. Evansville's location quotient of 1.60x says dining rooms make up a bigger slice of its loan book than of the national book. Its median loan, $346,900, runs 1.26x the national median for the class. In all, the file holds 37 loans and $17.4 million for FY2017 to FY2026 together. Read together, those figures describe a place where sit-down restaurants are the commonest SBA borrower and are financed above the usual size, which is a different starting point from a market where such loans are rare.

Half of Evansville's restaurant loans fall between $193,000 and $705,000. Franchise units account for 35.1% of the 37, so roughly two in three loans went to concepts outside a franchise system. Evansville's tally by program is absent, because one program side is too small to publish. The First National Bank of Carmi appears as holder of 6 loans carrying $3.1 million; SBA lists it as the present holder, and the page claims nothing further. Vanderburgh County alone contributes 29 of the 37 loans, so the evidence is overwhelmingly one county's.

A patchy calendar and a cancellation floor

Evansville's yearly counts: 5 loans and $1.8 million in FY2019, 6 and $2.2 million in FY2020, 5 and $2.8 million in FY2021, then 9 and $5.1 million in FY2024. FY2025 and FY2026, both finished fiscal years, each show 0 loans and $0. FY2017, FY2018, FY2022 and FY2023 hold too little to publish. For loans approved FY2017 to FY2024, at least 18.9% were cancelled after approval; as a floor, the true share could be higher. We leave out the charge-off rate and the upper cancellation bound. SBA files give each Evansville loan a county, and the July 2023 area list turns that county into the metro; loans with no matching county are dropped everywhere.

Questions an Evansville dining study must answer

Before a lender commits, a study of a new Evansville restaurant should show that sales per seat, average check and turn can carry wages, food cost and occupancy and still leave room for the loan payment. It should price the dining room and kitchen against the $346,900 median, spell out how many months the concept needs to reach stable sales, and test the lease or purchase terms against what an appraiser will support. With cancellations at or above 18.9% of approvals, site control and permits deserve settling early. Our study gives the lender the independent view of whether this site earns its keep.