The five questions an investor asks your economic development site in the first minute

How a site selector reads your website

Whether it is a consultant shortlisting locations for a manufacturer, a founder deciding where to open a second office, or a regional operator looking for a warehouse, the person evaluating your community is working through a list. They have several communities open in other tabs. They are not reading; they are checking.

What they want to know is concrete. Is there a building or a serviced lot that fits? Can I hire the people I need, and what will they cost? Is the power, water and internet adequate? Is there any money on the table? Who do I talk to, and will they answer?

What they often find on an economic development website in Atlantic Canada is a hero image, a tagline about opportunity, a welcome from the mayor or the chair, a paragraph about quality of life, and a navigation menu organized by the department’s internal structure. The answers may be in there. The site selector will not spend the time to find them. They close the tab and your community drops off the list without anyone knowing it was on.

The first minute is the whole game. Here are the five questions, and what answering each one actually requires.

Question one: what land and buildings are available?

This is the first thing most investors look for and the thing most sites handle worst. The usual failure is a page that describes the industrial park in general terms with a PDF map from several years ago, or a link to a listing service that is out of date, or nothing at all because “they can call us for that.”

What works is a current, filterable inventory: each available site or building with size, zoning, servicing, price or lease rate where it can be disclosed, a map location, photographs and a date showing when the entry was last confirmed. If the inventory is maintained by a provincial agency or a commercial broker, embed or link it directly on your page rather than describing it.

The “last confirmed” date is not decoration. A listing without one reads as probably stale. A listing confirmed within the last month reads as a community that is paying attention.

Question two: who will I hire, and what will they cost?

Workforce is where vision statements do the most damage, because every community claims a skilled, loyal, hardworking labour force. The investor has heard it. What they need is data: labour force size for the commuting area, the sectors people currently work in, the presence of relevant post-secondary programs (and the number of graduates where available), typical wage ranges by occupation, and the trend in population.

Much of this is available from Statistics Canada and provincial labour market sources. Your job is to assemble it for your commuting area, present it clearly, cite the source and date it. You do not need to editorialize. A page that says “here is the labour market, here is where the numbers come from, here is when we last updated them” does more than any adjective.

For Atlantic Canada specifically, immigration and settlement supports are a real part of the workforce story. If your region has active programs for attracting and retaining newcomers, describe them in practical terms and link to the people who run them.

Questions three and four: utilities, broadband and incentives

Utilities and broadband

This question gets skipped on websites because the people building them assume it is obvious. It is not obvious to someone evaluating from Toronto or Boston, and it is often the thing that quietly disqualifies a rural site.

State what is available at your industrial sites and commercial areas: electrical capacity and the utility provider, natural gas availability, water and wastewater capacity, and broadband speeds and providers, including whether fibre is available and where. If the honest answer varies by location, say so by location. An investor would rather learn now that one site has fibre and the other does not than discover it after a visit.

Where capacity data is held by the utility, link to it or state how to get it. Where you have made recent infrastructure investments, say what they were and what they enable.

Incentives

Incentives in this region are layered: federal programs, provincial programs through agencies in each province, regional development funding, and sometimes municipal tools such as tax arrangements or serviced land pricing. A site selector does not expect your municipality to administer all of these. They expect you to know what they are and to point them to the right door.

A single page that lists the relevant programs by level of government, with one plain sentence about what each does and who is eligible, plus a link and a contact, is enough. Keep it current; programs change, and a page listing a program that closed last year costs you credibility on everything else.

Resist the urge to oversell. Investors have been burned by incentive promises that did not survive the application process. A sober list with real links is more persuasive than enthusiasm.

Question five: who do I call?

This is the easiest question to answer and the one most often fumbled. The contact page offers a generic form that goes to a shared inbox, or a phone number for the municipal switchboard, or a list of the whole department with no indication of who handles what.

Put a real person on the site. Name, title, direct phone, direct email, a photograph, and a sentence about what they help with. Put that person on the homepage and on every one of the five answer pages, not only on the contact page. Make it clear what happens when someone reaches out: who responds, how quickly, and what the next step typically looks like.

Investors are choosing between communities, and in the end they choose people. The site that shows them a person they can call tomorrow has an edge that no amount of design makes up for.

Keeping it current, and measuring enquiries

An economic development site is a data product, and data products need maintenance schedules. Assign an owner to each of the five pages. Set a review cadence (monthly for land and buildings, quarterly for the rest) and show the review date on the page. Treat a missed review as a service failure, because to the investor it is one.

Then measure what matters. Page views tell you very little. The numbers that tell you whether the site is working are the enquiries it produces: contact submissions, direct emails and calls that reference the website, requests for the land inventory, and downloads of the workforce data. Log each with the sector and the source where you can learn it. Report those to council or the board alongside what happened next, because an enquiry that becomes a site visit that becomes a lease is the only story that justifies the budget.

In our experience, the economic development organizations in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia that do this well are not the ones with the largest budgets. They are the ones that decided the website exists to answer questions and measured whether it did.

An investor does not need to be inspired by your community. They need to be able to evaluate it.

What to do first

Open your own site in a private window and time yourself answering the five questions as a stranger would. Note where you stopped, where the data was missing and where it was dated. Then, before touching the design, fix the contact: a named person with a direct line on the homepage, today. The rest of the restructuring can follow, but the phone number is the cheapest and fastest change and the one that is most often absent.