Someone on your board asks who owns the empty building on the corner. You know the answer is somewhere: an old email, the county website, the memory of whoever ran the program before you. Twenty minutes later you have a name and no phone number.

That small moment is why buildings sit vacant longer than they should. The city cannot help with a space it does not know about, and a future shop owner cannot rent a space they cannot find.

Shane Hampton and Joi Cuartero Austin of Main Street America make a similar point in their Main Spotlight piece, Understanding Vacancy and What You Can Do About It. They note that in Main Street America's annual survey, 22% of Main Street leaders named vacant spaces as a top challenge for their community. One of the steps they suggest is to build an inventory of the buildings and lots in your district, vacant and occupied alike.

Here is how to build that inventory, and how to put it on a map that helps get stores into those spaces.

What Is a Downtown Building Inventory?

A building inventory is a record of every building and lot in your district, whether or not there is a business in it. A business directory follows the business. An inventory follows the building, so it still has an entry when the tenant leaves.

It also goes past the ground floor. A storefront can look full from the sidewalk while two floors above it sit empty. If you are already tracking which storefronts are vacant or occupied, the inventory is the next layer down: the facts about the building itself.

What to Track in Your Building Inventory

Start with a short list you can actually fill in. For each building or lot:

• Address and a photo.
• Owner and best contact. Note whether the owner is local or out of town.
• Square footage and number of floors.
• What is in it now, on the ground floor and above.
• Vacancy status. Occupied, partly vacant, or fully vacant.
• Rent and lease terms, when the owner will share them.
• Condition. Anything that stands between the space and a tenant: a roof, a missing second exit, no kitchen hookup.

To collect it, walk the district with a phone for photos and what is open or dark, pull ownership and square footage from your county assessor's site, and send owners a short form to confirm the rest. A half-filled inventory of the whole district is more useful than a perfect record of one block.

Why Your Building Inventory Belongs on a Map

A spreadsheet holds the facts. A map shows you the pattern, and it is something you can put in front of other people. Plot the inventory and you see what a list hides: three vacancies in a row on one block, a run of empty upper floors, several struggling buildings that all belong to the same owner.

This is where Proxi helps. Each building is a listing on your map with its photo and details, and vacancy status is a category or tag, so you can filter to "fully vacant" in one click. You can import the spreadsheet you already have and bulk edit after a walking survey.

You also do not need one inventory for your team and another for the public. In Proxi, each field can be internal or public facing. Owner phone numbers, condition notes, and why a space is empty stay visible only to you. The photo, square footage, and leasing contact show to everyone. The same goes for forms: owners can send you details through a form, and you decide which answers stay private.

Once it is mapped, the inventory has two audiences that can actually fill buildings.

How to Present Vacancy Data to Your City's Economic Development Team

The economic development staff at city hall control things you do not: incentives, zoning, permitting, and business recruitment. What they often lack is a clear picture of downtown, building by building. You can bring them one.

Instead of a spreadsheet, open the map in the meeting. Filter to vacant buildings and the conversation gets specific fast.

• Show where the problem is. A cluster of empty storefronts on one block is a different problem than vacancies scattered across the district.
• Show why each space is empty. Hampton and Austin group the causes into ownership, owner capacity, regulation, financing, and the market. Note the cause on each vacant building, in an internal field, and you can walk the city through which ones need a grant, which need a zoning fix, and which need a phone call to an out-of-town owner.
• Back up your ask. Their article points to Quincy, Illinois, which built a rental rehab program aimed at empty upper-story space downtown. A map of every unused upper floor is the case for a program like that.

Then share the public link, so city staff can pull it up when a business calls them looking for space.

How to Use a Public Map of Available Spaces to Recruit New Stores

The second audience is the public, and especially the person who has been thinking about opening a shop. Right now they are guessing which spaces are available and who to call.

Because the private details are in internal fields, the same map can go public. A visitor filters to available spaces and sees what a future tenant needs: a photo, square footage, what the space would suit, and the leasing contact.

Then put it where people will find it:

• Embed it on your website under a plain label like "Open a Business Downtown."
• Put a QR code in the empty window. "Picture your shop here. Scan for details." The vacant storefront becomes its own listing.
• Send it to brokers, your chamber, and your small business center, so everyone is pointing to the same list.
• Add a signup form for people looking to open or develop in your town. Give it a plain name, like "Interested in developing in North Bend?" and ask what kind of space they need. Now you have a list of future tenants and developers to email the day something opens up, and a list worth showing your city.

You can also ask residents what they want to see in those spaces. We wrote about that in how to collect community input on vacant storefronts. Telling a prospective bakery owner that two hundred neighbors asked for a bakery is a strong pitch.

Start With One Block

Pick your most visible block and fill in every building on it this week. Map it, show your board, then show the city. An empty building that people can see, with a photo and someone to call, has a much better shot at becoming a store. If you want to see how the listings and filters look, take a look at how a Proxi directory works.