EVERY "close in fighting"/CQB/indoor PB place I've seen is a horrible mess min 1 after the first PB game starts.

I'm sure this place will be great right up until then.

There's something to be said about outdoor PB places...they're messy too, but less so with the natural wind/rain/sun.

Owner appears to be a building contractor in the Mississauga area.

Why would you want anyone to play on a partial completed field unless you ran out of money to complete it?

I'm all for new venues.. the more the better

However in my experience a new place will be the flavour of the month till it's played out.

Unless you can change the configuration, and alter the access of advance or lines of fire places like this get old fast.

This is a "wait and see" for sure

I would also like to see if they are serious about running airsoft, ie are they going to clean all the paint off atleast periodically.

Meh. Splatters has scarred me for life.

Indoor paintball venues are catastrophically disgusting. It sucks that there isn't enough critical mass in GTA airsoft yet that a venue doesn't have to resort to filling their interior with sand, crazy children, paint that smells like barf and feet, and turning off all the lights.

For anyone who is into the various popular airsoft YouTube channels like crazyncman, echo1, shwell11, evike, etc, it looks like dedicated (clean) airsoft facilities are springing up all over the place down in the US. If any metro area has the potential to have at least one facility for airsoft-only in Canada, it would be the GTA, but I'm unsure how far we have to go for the numbers to be high enough. Things are obviously on an uptick.

I've talked to at least one retailer who was considering opening a field, so it's not out of the realm of possibility.

An airsoft-only venue would be extremely hard to keep running, considering the costs of zoning, insurance and all that other stuff...while its an awesome idea/dream, the numbers of airsofters regularly attending would have to be a lot to cover costs. With running a dual facility (paintball/airsoft) its easier to run since paintball is still a lot more popular and well-known, thus more customers.

Winnipegs had for for years.
Next time I goto Trenton for training I'll bring my gear. Rent a car and meet up in gta

I've run the numbers, it's borderline viable, if you can get some professionals using the facility for training it becomes borderline profitable.
Add additional revenue streams from sales, and it becomes profitable.

key aspect is capitalization, if the business is started with borrowed money it's far more risky.

but if you had a couple hundred thousand sitting around, you could probably get your money back out over a 10 year operational period.

Yea but that being said, not many people who have that sort of money laying about have it cause they invest in something that may make a profit and when it does its not a whole lot of profit. Even then mistakes someone makes running the business would be all the harder to recover from.

If I had more time to devote to the project I would have done it by now.

I've run the numbers enough to know that there is money to be made if it is combined with the right supporting revenue streams.

I guess if anyone was to do it, you would be the person, seeing as you have experience with TAC3

I'm not debating that it's hard. Every business is a struggle. What's not up for debate is that there are at least several fields in the US that have pulled it off. The US is a big market, but I think the GTA is wealthy and populous enough to do it, assuming the sport continues to grow.

Like Brian says, there are ways to make this happen, it just takes some careful planning, diversification in revenue sources and good marketing. For this reason, my money is on a retailer trying it first, but I could see someone like Brian doing it first too. Or someone like Brian in conjunction with a retailer.

If there was a place with a decent enough setup, I might be willing to pay a fairly substantial annual membership fee. I've only had one person actually survey me on whether I'd be warm to the idea or not, so I'm not sure the potential is even being measured or is well-understood.

It's pretty well understood by some,

lets run some numbers

10$ a foot is a decent cost for warehouse space

lets say we want 20 000 square feet , that is $200 000 a year rent

Utilities for such a space , call it 2000 a month , = 24000 a year

Insurance - 10 000 a year

Employees , 60000 a year

rough total $294000 a year operating costs , that is monthly carry costs of $24500 a month

Lets say we charge $20 a session, that is 1225 session a month , lets say you run every day .

That is 40 sessions a day

So you need on average 40 people a day to play , every day

How do you get to that? .. sessions are time limited , say 1.5 hours of $20

so most people will want to play 3 hours so now you only need 20 people a day to make it run.

that does not sound like much .. but it is..

you could supplement this by renting the facility out for Police training.

and you could add more revenue as well by having a pro shop

Add more with selling snacks and such.

Add more by renting guns and gear

now you have a business, but YOU still have not made any money

for you to draw a reasonable living from this you need another 10 sessions a day,

The killer is start up costs.. to renovate 20000 square feet well .. it's big dollars.

and you would need to be able to reconfigure the space regularly or it would get stale and revenue would suffer..

Now .. carve 4 months time out of the year as no one wants to play indoors when they can go outside.. so you need to earn all that money over 8 months .

During the winter months you would need to be grossing 40 000 a month to make the enterprise worth doing .. that is 67 sessions a day every day of the week

Lets say most people want to play 2 sessions , rent a gun and some gear , and buy a snack while there , so the revenue per player would be on average 20 +20+20+ 5 + 65 - So to make your $40 000 per month you would need about 620 players, Say 30% are repeats. So you need about 430 players to play every month .. carve out the revenue for people with their own guns .. and you are back to 500 players

Basically Every airsofter in the city would need to play at your facility every month at least once to make this work.

wise
 

this is a wise statement guys you need to take note

brian is 100% right
biz is numbers and they dont add up
im running weekly indoor games in hamilton this winter ends in march
im lucky to find this place...........not viable all year im this area yet
but guys this is how things get bigger
im glad ppl are contributing to discussions like this

Brian, I really appreciate you taking the time to share this model with us. This definitely puts it in perspective. Some questions would be:

1) To what degree can the cost of the real estate be brought down, and how?

2) Do you think US AS-only fields are starting from a money-losing operation and then gradually trying to recover using various other sources of revenue (retail in particular), or do you think they're benefiting from very cheap land? I guess I'm wondering to what degree the field mentioned by the original poster is potentially benefiting from very cheap space.