local merger analysis - care homes

How a leading international competition team used Sloc to deliver robust advice in under 24 Hours

15,000+

Care home sites in England

< 24hrs

From instructions to advice

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“With Sloc, the conclusions felt far more defensible and scientific than anything we could have produced ourselves using Google Maps”

Of Counsel

,

GCR Global Elite firm

The Challenge

Tight deadlines, huge dataset

A global elite law firm advising on a major healthcare merger needed a same-day antitrust risk assessment for a local merger matter involving  15,000+ care home sites. The client required a strategic steer before any formal process began. The UK’s competition regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA),  assesses local geographic markets using drive-time catchments of 15 to 20 minutes, with extended catchments for rural areas.

Under the traditional way of doing things, the firm faced the following issues:

  • Scale - Delivering analysis and maps of hundreds of local markets is simply not possible without specialist tools.

  • Time - The client needed a risk assessment within a day. Testing a sufficient range of scenarios to provide confidence in findings posed a real problem.

  • Budget - As the matter was at an early stage, the client had not been allocated budget or time to instruct external consultants.

Manual analysis using standard mapping tools would have taken days or even weeks of associate time and produced results too late to be commercially useful.

The Solution

Smarter analysis, from Sloc

Using Sloc Local, the team was able to source market data, upload more than 15,000 sites, and run CMA-aligned drive-time analysis across the entire dataset. Overlaps and concentration hot spots were identified in minutes, with minimal manual effort.

The team could then test multiple market definition scenarios in line with CMA decisional practice within a single workflow - including flexing catchment areas by urban/rural split, and limiting to homes providing elderly and/or dementia care. Each scenario was analysed without additional configuration or technical support.

By the end of the day, the firm had a robust, data-backed assessment of potential competition concerns, enabling informed client advice at an early stage of the transaction.

The Results

Earlier insights, better decisions

Same-day assessment: CMA-methodology-aligned risk assessment of over 250,000+ drive-times across 15,000+ sites completed within 24 hours.

Economist-grade, in-house: Complex local merger analysis completed entirely in-house, eliminating manual work and reliance on third parties to boost time recovery.

Better client outcomes: Comprehensive, robust merger advice delivered earlier in the deal process, enabling faster and more informed client decisions.

“I’ve found Sloc really intuitive. Aside from the huge time saved, it feels like a much more accurate and defensible review than anything I could produce on Google Maps.”

Associate

,

GCR Global Elite firm

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Whether reviewing local overlaps or complex concentration analysis, Sloc helps teams move faster with confidence.

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