#315 – Inside Our Industry – The Shifting Landscape of Location Strategy

Is your area/region ready to meet the demands of today’s (and tomorrow’s) forces driving location strategy for new industrial and commercial development? Ernst & Young consultants lay out the most significant forces for corporate location strategy.

The Shifting Landscape of Location Strategy

Five surging forces reshaping where — and how — companies grow.

Rod Garvin, Consulting Manager, EY Economic Development Advisory Services, Ernst & Young LLP & Antony Burton, Senior Consultant, EY Economic Development Advisory Services, Ernst & Young LLP, Q2 2026

The conditions that are influencing location decisions are experiencing accelerated change. Corporate real estate and site selection professionals are operating in an increasingly complex landscape that requires location evaluations that take a range of surging forces into account. Labor availability, housing affordability, population growth, infrastructure capacity and automation are among the dynamic factors contributing to the shifting landscape and are affecting relocation, expansion and capital investment decisions.

This piece draws on ongoing EY advisory work with communities and organizations across the U.S. to highlight some of the most significant forces for corporate location strategy — and what site selectors should be discerning.

The labor pool is contracting

Population growth in the U.S. is slowing. Projections through 2050 suggest the country is approaching peak population — a threshold that assumes continued net immigration. That assumption is now in question: Brookings estimates that 2025 marked the first calendar year with negative net immigration. If that trend persists, population contraction could begin closer to the 2030s than the 2050s.

For site selectors, this matters because labor force participation rates are also declining. The combination — a smaller pool of working-age adults and fewer of them active in the workforce — means that talent competition will intensify regardless of what markets do. Regions that appear labor-rich today may not hold that advantage for long.

The regional picture is particularly stark. In North Carolina, for example, roughly three-quarters of counties are projected to experience more deaths than births — meaning the only path to local labor growth is attraction from elsewhere. That dynamic turns talent competition into a zero-sum contest between regions, with meaningful implications for wage escalation, retention risk and the importance of affordability and a high quality of life.

What to watch: Analyze workforce projections — not just current labor availability — when evaluating locations. Ask whether a region has active talent attraction programs, employer relocation incentives or workforce retention strategies. Regions that have already internalized this challenge and built programmatic responses are more durable bets.

Click below for the remainder of the article that looks at housing affordability, population growth, infrastructure capacity, and automation.

Full report