How do I Choose the Right Location for my Dental Office?

Do you know what to look for and what to avoid before choosing a dental office location? Or are you relying on a friendly realtor connection and hoping everything falls into place?

The truth is: Most dentists make the wrong decision long before the floor plan stage.

A friendly realtor can find you a space, but without dental expertise, they can also cost you years of growth. What feels like a safe choice today becomes expensive tomorrow, because the wrong location always costs more.

In this article, you’ll learn why choosing the right site for your practice matters far more than most dentists realize, and how the proper guidance can save you years of frustration and lost revenue. By the end, you’ll know exactly how to evaluate your options and build the right team to help you select a site that supports long-term practice growth.

How Do I Know Where to Look for My Dental Practice?

The best dental office locations strike a balance between visibility, accessibility, and long-term growth potential. 

Some key factors when choosing a site include:

• Patient visibility (presence and signage)
  
  
• Demographics (matching your ideal patient community)
  
  
• Ease of access (parking, public transit, convenient entry)
  
  
• Traffic flow (traffic patterns that support new patient growth)
  
  
• Expansion options (room to grow in the future)

At Design Ergonomics, we analyze each of these factors to help you choose a site that maximizes new patient flow and long-term success.

When a Promising Building Sits in the Wrong Location

A client once brought us several sites and asked for quick blocking diagrams. He didn’t want to spend the time or money evaluating those sites for their potential as treatment rooms. Some of these might have made great buildings... but the locations were terrible: Poor visibility, too much competition, or they simply didn’t match the demographics he was trying to reach.

That’s when it became clear: Most dentists set themself up for failure long before they even hire a designer. What they really need is a better understanding of what truly matters when choosing a site.

That’s why we developed our Site Selection process.

With so many factors to consider: traffic exposure, synergy with neighboring businesses, and future growth potential, it’s easy to feel uncertain about making the right decision. We understand how critical this choice is to your practice’s success. That’s why we’ve developed the world’s best selection toolkit, specifically designed for creating the nation’s most successful practices.

Should I Rent, Renovate, or Build My Dental Office?

As designers focused on sustainability and community impact, we also consider the bigger picture: How your building choice affects your practice, your patients, and the environment.

In general, your options fall into three categories:

1. Tenant Improvements
2. Renovations
3. Ground-Up Construction

Tenant improvements can be a great way to launch your practice, but they often lead to investing heavily in a space you may eventually outgrow. It’s crucial to ensure the location allows for future expansion, offers strong visibility, and has minimal load-bearing walls or floor-level changes that could complicate renovations or new layouts.

Renovating an existing office, especially a solo, stand-alone building, can be appealing. You’re often purchasing the entire practice: the facility, the equipment, and sometimes even the team from a retiring doctor. With luck, you’ll also inherit many of their patients, giving you a strong head start. However, renovations come with limits. Meaningful changes can quickly drive up the budget, and major updates may require temporarily closing the practice. You may also find yourself dealing with the “ghosts” of someone else’s decisions, constraints, and outdated design choices.

Ground-up construction offers complete design freedom, but it also requires the highest upfront investment. Approvals, land costs, and bank requirements are often the biggest hurdles. Many of the same location factors discussed earlier still apply, such as visibility, access, traffic flow, surrounding anchors, and demographics, but for ground-up projects, these considerations become non-negotiable because you’re creating a practice entirely from scratch.

Who Should I Talk to When Choosing a Location for My Dental Practice?

You should talk to a real estate advisor, local contractors or architects, and a specialized dental site-selection team like Design Ergonomics to ensure you choose a location that supports long-term growth and avoids costly mistakes.

If you’re in the early stages of thinking about starting a new dental practice, building the right team should be one of your first steps.

Think about it this way: if you’re just learning how to play soccer for fun, you probably don’t need a coach. But if you’re trying to be the best, or even just avoid big mistakes, you want guidance from people who know the game.

To build your dental practice:

• Ask local contractors or architects what they’re seeing for current build-out pricing. Construction costs can swing wildly, and you need real numbers, not guesses.
  
  
• Talk to a real estate advisor to understand the pros and cons of owning versus leasing, and consult a realtor to review the terms of any lease agreement. The right structure can reshape your entire financial picture.
  
  
• And talk to a Dental Office Design Expert - because that’s what we’re here for. We spot the opportunities, the red flags, and the growth factors that most people never notice until it’s too late.

A quick success story:

A doctor we worked with was ready to lease the first attractive, affordable unit he found. On paper, it checked the boxes. But after running our full Site Selection analysis, the location scored well below what he needed for long-term growth.

Instead, we identified a different site two miles away with better visibility, synergy, and traffic flow. Fast forward: After opening in the higher-scoring site, he hit his first-year production target early, and now tells us the only reason he didn’t make a six-figure mistake was because he brought us in before committing to a location.

That’s the power of the right team.

If your goal is to build something exceptional, start with the team that knows how to get you there.

Choosing the wrong location is one of the most costly mistakes a dentist can make. Partner with Design Ergonomics and let our nationally recognized Site Selection process guide you to the right decision.