Restaurant Feasibility Study in the Hilton Head Island-Bluffton-Port Royal, SC Metro Area

Hilton Head Island-Bluffton-Port Royal: sit-down dining at the head of the list

SBA's file for the Hilton Head Island-Bluffton-Port Royal, SC area puts full-service restaurants first among 39 classes (1 of 39), while the area itself holds position 136 of 821. Its 35 loans come to $22.9 million over FY2017 to FY2026. At 1.52x, the area's location quotient tells us restaurants of this kind outweigh their national share here, and its median loan of $350,000 comes to 1.27x the national figure. Larger-than-usual loans in a class that is already frequent make this a place where sit-down dining is both common and well financed.

The middle half of loans spans $216,100 to $901,700, a range that reaches from a small bistro to a sizeable dining room. Beaufort County holds 30 of the 35 loans and Jasper County 5, so the record is Beaufort's story first. No bank reaches 5 loans in this cell, so the page lists none. The franchise share and the split between 7(a) and 504 loans are not printed, since one side of each rests on too few loans.

A thin and uneven calendar

Three years can be shown. FY2018 had 5 loans worth $3.2 million. FY2025 had 10 loans worth $7.5 million, the largest single year in the file, and FY2026, a finished year, had 5 loans worth $2.3 million. Years from FY2019 to FY2024, and FY2017, hold too little to publish, so a reader cannot tell a steady flow from a burst. Two of the three printable years sit at the recent end, which a study should note without drawing a trend from it. Cancellations and charge-offs get no rate here; the Hilton Head cohort is under 30 loans. Area membership uses each project county on the 2023 delineation.

The case a Hilton Head study must make

A study for a table-service restaurant in this area has to show covers per seat, average check and the staffing needed to serve them, then set payroll, food cost and occupancy against sales to find what is left for debt. It should price the building against the $350,000 median, test whether the seat count suits the parcel and its parking, and show a ramp-up in which opening sales run below maturity. The appraiser will test the property against the business value, so the study should treat the two separately and give the lender both.