The stage that kills gyms

We watched a team plan a 2,700 square metre facility in regional NSW. A catchment model covering more than 100,000 people, sourced suburb by suburb. A construction budget itemised across nineteen trades. Over two million dollars, planned to the dollar. The project ended on the electrical question, whether the building could carry the load the facility was designed to draw. That question can be opened with a free phone call. It was asked last. Case study the anonymised project behind our field guide; budgeted figures, the facility never opened.

Site selection tends to get done in the order things are interesting, not the order they are cheap. Catchment analysis is interesting. Layouts are interesting. Meanwhile the questions that actually disqualify a building are boring, take a phone call each, and get left until you have already spent months and are least willing to hear a bad answer.

Six gates, in cost order

The fix is ordering. Six gates, arranged so the cheapest question that can kill the site is always the next one you ask. You do not move to the next gate until the current one is clear.

1. Physical supply, a phone call each. Power, water, sewer, floor loading. Your electrical load is driven by air conditioning and continuous wellness equipment, not treadmills, and the buildings available at gym rents were supplied for uses that drew a fraction of it. Our screening threshold: if you want air conditioning and saunas, do not seriously consider a site under 200 amps per phase. Operator experience our build and fit-out experience, as at August 2026. A screening threshold, not an engineering figure.
2. Planning and use, a phone call and a search. Is a gym permissible in that zone, what is the realistic approval pathway, and are there hours-of-operation conditions that kill a 24/7 model?
3. Structure and access, a walkthrough. Ceiling height at the lowest obstruction, the column grid, parking at your peak hour not the average, and how equipment physically gets in.
4. Catchment, a day at a desk. Population in drive-time rings, not kilometres, every suburb sourced to the census.
5. Competition, a day in the field. Count who in your catchment already pays to train, then divide: your projected membership over the locally served paying market. That share is a claim you have to be able to defend to a bank.
6. Deal economics, a week and some advisors. Whether the rent and the build can be serviced at achievable membership, and whether the ramp to break-even is funded.

If a site stops at gate 1, you have lost a morning. If it stops at gate 6, you have lost a year.

The lease itself

For context, prime industrial net face rents ran roughly $144 to $228 per square metre per year across the major markets. Published rate Knight Frank, Q1 2026, Melbourne to Western Sydney. Incentives ran around 20 to 22%. Your street rent is site specific, and no published range replaces the agent's asking rents in your actual area. Expect a bank guarantee of roughly 3 to 6 months of rent plus GST as security. Published rate Sprintlaw, AU commercial lease guidance; the ACT caps at 3 months by statute. Rates as at 25 July 2026.

The single cheapest insurance in this whole journey: make the lease conditional on the gate 1 and gate 2 answers you are still waiting for. Your lawyer drafts that condition.

Who verifies this stage

Screening is yours. Verification is not. Before signing anything: a licensed electrician on supply and maximum demand, with the distributor's answer in writing; a town planner or building certifier on permitted use and the approval pathway; a structural engineer on floor loading, mezzanines and anything off slab on ground; a commercial lease lawyer on the lease and its conditions. Nothing on this page or in the field guide is engineering, planning, legal or financial advice.