Derive this from the market you are entering, not from a national figure. Open the public booking pages of the three to five nearest venues competing for your catchment and read their weekday-evening prices directly — that is your ceiling until you have a reason to be different. Peak typically carries a 30–50 % premium over off-peak.

Pricing off a national average is how projects end up 20 % above what their own catchment will pay. The correction — discounting after opening — damages perceived positioning far more than opening at the right price would have.

Set it from the same competitor survey as your peak rate, then sanity-check the ratio: off-peak below about 65 % of peak rarely buys enough incremental volume to pay for the revenue given up on price.

Off-peak pricing is where the model is won or lost. Peak hours largely fill themselves in a growing market; whether weekday mornings and early afternoons fill at a price that covers their marginal cost is what separates a 35 % utilisation hall from a 55 % one.

Peak is typically weekday evenings 17:00–21:00 plus weekend mornings — roughly 30–40 % of a 16-hour operating day. Count the hours in your own opening schedule rather than accepting a default.

Overstating the peak share inflates blended revenue across the entire model. It is the quietest way to make a marginal project look viable on paper.

Utilisation is booked court-hours divided by available court-hours. Break-even for a typical indoor facility lands at 35–40 %; established halls reach 45–55 %; a new venue realistically runs 25–30 % for its first six months before the ramp curve does its work. Set what you can defend, then read the break-even figure the model returns.

This input moves the outcome more than any other, and optimism here is the most common flaw in padel business plans. If your project only works above 45 %, you do not have a plan — you have a bet on demand you have not evidenced yet.

Sixteen hours (07:00–23:00) is standard for an indoor facility. What matters is not the number itself but that early-morning and late-evening hours enter the capacity denominator at a far lower realistic fill rate than peak ones do.

Extending opening hours to raise theoretical capacity lowers your utilisation percentage and adds staff and energy cost against hours that may not sell. Longer is not automatically better.

Memberships trade price for predictability. Model them from a realistic member count times a monthly fee, and be honest that members displace pay-per-play bookings in the hours they use.

Counting membership revenue on top of a full court-rental forecast double-counts the same hours. This is the most common arithmetic error in padel revenue models.

Food and beverage tracks dwell time, not court count. A lounge people stay in after playing produces it; a vending machine in a corridor does not. Year-one figures are typically half of maturity.

F&B is routinely modelled at maturity levels from month one. It also carries COGS, staffing and licensing that pure court hire does not — count the margin, not the revenue.

Coaching is high-margin but capacity-competing: a coached hour is a court-hour you did not rent. Model the split explicitly and count only the margin difference as upside.

Coaching programmes running in peak hours look profitable per hour while cannibalising your best-paying slots. Schedule them into off-peak and the number becomes real.

A double court installed runs £20,000–35,000, depending almost entirely on glass specification: full-panorama with all-glass back walls sits at the top, standard hybrid at the bottom. Get quotes from three installers — the spread between them is usually wider than the spread between specs.

On a six-court project the gap between cheapest and most expensive spec is roughly £120k. Real money, but only 8–10 % of total project cost. Teams routinely spend weeks optimising this line while under-speccing HVAC, which costs far more to fix later.

Hold six months of fixed costs — rent, payroll, debt service — in reserve. For a six-court hall that is typically £50,000–100,000. Calculate it from your own monthly fixed-cost line rather than a rule of thumb, and cover every month your ramp curve puts below break-even.

In months one to six revenue runs well below steady state while rent and payroll are already at full run rate. Underfunding this is a common cause of failure in otherwise sound projects: the business model works, the cash simply runs out before it gets there.

10 % on a warehouse conversion where the survey is done and the scope is known; 15–20 % on a ground-up build or any project with an unresolved question about the building. Contingency is priced off uncertainty, not off project size.

A contingency you have already mentally allocated to a nicer lounge is not a contingency. Projects that spend it early meet the real overrun in month eight with no buffer left and no appetite from the lender for a second conversation.

Public liability, building and contents, and business interruption. For a six-court hall £200–400 a month is typical. Get business-interruption cover quoted explicitly — it is the one that matters if a structural or water issue closes the hall.

Being underinsured on business interruption converts a six-week repair into a solvency event, since rent and debt service continue whether or not the courts are open.

Driven by lighting hours and HVAC duty cycle. An LED-lit hall at 500 lux per court running 16 hours a day is predictable; the variable is the building envelope. A poorly insulated warehouse with an oversized system can run 30–50 % above a well-specified one.

Energy is the operating line most exposed to decisions you cannot renegotiate later. A short energy audit before signing the lease is cheap relative to a decade of paying for someone else's insulation choice.

Budget 1–2 % of court and building capex annually. Courts need glass replacement, net and tension checks and turf brushing. Turf itself is a 6–10 year replacement item that belongs in your capital plan, not this line.

Deferred court maintenance is visible to players immediately, and it is one of the fastest ways to lose members to a newer facility down the road.

Front-load it. A pre-launch campaign, opening events and league partnerships cost several times the steady-state figure — £30,000–40,000 in year one against £25,000 by year three is a normal shape. Model it as a declining line, not a constant.

Under-spending pre-launch is a false economy. The community you build in the first three months is what fills your off-peak hours for the next three years, and off-peak is where the margin is.

Five FTE is a genuine minimum for a professionally run six-court facility: reception, court management, a coach and administration. In Germany employer social contributions add roughly 20 % on top of gross wages, so budget from loaded cost, not salary. Automated booking and access control can run leaner than this, but not to zero.

The line first-time operators get wrong most often, usually by modelling salaries instead of loaded cost and by assuming automation replaces supervision. Understaffing shows up as poor retention long before it shows up in the P&L — and retention is what the whole model rests on.

German lenders typically fund 60–80 % of a project like this and want the balance as genuine equity rather than shareholder loans. Above 80 %, expect to be asked for personal guarantees or additional collateral.

Modelling 85–90 % debt and discovering the bank will do 65 % means finding several hundred thousand in equity late — when your lease is signed and your negotiating position is at its weakest.

Price it from current commercial lending rates for leisure assets, plus a margin for an unfamiliar asset class. Then run the model 200 basis points higher: that is the stress case a credit committee will apply to you.

A rate assumption that only works at today's rate is a plan with a hidden expiry date, particularly on a ten-year term with a refinancing point in the middle.

Ten years is typical, and usually shorter than the lease. Match the term to asset life: courts and fit-out have a 10–15 year horizon, so a 20-year loan against them is a mismatch a lender will not accept.

A shorter term raises annual debt service and can push DSCR below the 1.2–1.5× lenders require, even on a project with healthy EBITDA. Check the coverage ratio, not just whether the payment looks affordable.

Applied to stabilised EBITDA. Padel facilities in Europe trade in a wide and thinly evidenced band; 5–7× is a defensible planning assumption for a single well-run site, with portfolios attracting more. Treat any number here as an assumption, not a forecast.

Exit value is the most speculative figure in the model and the easiest one to use to rescue a weak IRR. If the returns only work on the exit multiple, the operating business is not carrying its own weight.

The return you would need to justify the risk against your next-best use of the same capital. For an owner-operator taking construction and lease-up risk in an unproven local market, 12–15 % is a common floor.

Setting the hurdle below your genuine opportunity cost makes every scenario look acceptable, and removes the model's ability to tell you no.