The five numbers that decide whether a centre gets built

Almost every centre concept that reaches us arrives with a revenue number attached. Someone has counted the courts, multiplied by an hourly rate, multiplied by opening hours, and produced a figure that looks extraordinary. It is always extraordinary, because it assumes every court is full for every hour the doors are open.

Nobody builds a centre on that number. Banks do not lend on it and boards do not approve it. What gets a project funded is a much smaller set of figures, worked out in a specific order, where each one constrains the next.

1. Sellable court hours

Start with supply, not demand. A court hour is the unit you actually sell, and you have fewer of them than you think.

Take the hours you will genuinely trade, not the hours the lease allows. Subtract the time courts are held for coaching blocks, competition nights, maintenance and resurfacing. Subtract the graveyard hours you will open for but never fill. What remains is your sellable inventory for the week, and everything else in the model is a percentage of it.

This is a supply-side number. It does not care about your catchment, your marketing or how good the coffee is. Get it wrong and every downstream figure is wrong by the same margin.

2. Realistic utilisation, split by daypart

Utilisation is the share of those sellable hours that get paid for. It is also the number people are most optimistic about, because they picture the venue at 7pm on a Tuesday and quietly apply that feeling to the whole week.

Model it by daypart instead. Weekday mornings, weekday middays, weekday evenings, weekend mornings, weekend afternoons and weekend evenings behave like six different businesses. Peak evenings and weekend mornings will carry the venue. Weekday middays are where a centre either finds a second audience, through seniors, social competitions, corporate bookings, schools and pennant, or sits dark and drags the average down.

A single blended utilisation figure hides all of this. A daypart model shows you exactly which sessions you have to solve before the numbers work, and that is a far more useful thing to hand a lender.

3. Yield per court hour

Not your rack rate. Yield is what a court hour earns after discounting, memberships, off-peak pricing, packages and no-shows are all accounted for.

Every centre we have worked on ends up with a real yield well below its advertised hourly rate, because the mechanisms that fill the quiet hours are the same mechanisms that discount them. That is fine, and it is the right trade, but it has to be in the model rather than discovered in month four.

Yield is also where the sports diverge sharply. Padel, pickleball, tennis and futsal do not price the same way, do not fill the same hours and do not carry the same number of paying players per court. A multi-sport centre needs a yield line per sport, not one number for the building.

4. Fixed cost per trading week

Rent or debt service, wages, utilities, insurance, systems, cleaning and maintenance. The floor you pay before a single booking is made.

Utilities deserve their own attention on a covered centre. Lighting and, if you have it, climate control are not a rounding error, they are a structural cost that varies enormously with how the facility was designed. Decisions made at the design stage set this number for the life of the centre, which is one of the reasons we do not treat feasibility and design as separate exercises.

Put fixed cost per week against yield per court hour and you get the figure that matters more than any other: the number of court hours you must sell each week to break even. Suddenly the question is not “will people come” but “do we need 180 paid hours a week or 320”, and that is a question a catchment can answer.

5. The ramp

The last number is the one most often left out entirely. A centre does not open at steady-state utilisation, and the gap between opening day and mature trade has to be funded.

How long the ramp takes depends on whether the sport already exists in that catchment. A tennis or futsal centre in an established area inherits demand. A padel or pickleball venue in a suburb where nobody has played either may need to build the market first, through introductory sessions, coaching, social leagues and clubs, before the courts fill on their own. That is a real cost and a real timeline, and it belongs in the model as working capital rather than as optimism.

Why the order matters

Work these in sequence and each number constrains the next. Sellable hours cap utilisation. Utilisation and yield produce revenue. Revenue against fixed cost produces the break-even court hours. Break-even against the catchment tells you whether the site is viable. The ramp tells you how much cash you need to get there.

Work them out of order, and you end up defending a revenue figure rather than testing a business.

What this changes about a site

The useful thing about running the numbers first is that it changes how you look at property. Once you know you need a given number of paid court hours per week, you know how many courts the site has to hold, which tells you the floor area and the clear height, which rules most buildings out immediately.

It also tells you when to walk away. We would rather tell a client in week two that a site cannot carry the model than help them spend a year discovering it. That is usually the most valuable thing a feasibility study produces.