Avison Young Creates Index to Measure Cities' Foot Traffic
People coming to work in their offices in the US declined the least in Boston (55.2%) and the most in Miami (88.8%), according to the index.
Foot traffic in 20 metro areas in the United States and Canada is up but still below 2019 pre-pandemic levels, said Avison Young’s The Vitality Index, a new real-time window into city life.
The initial report noted that hopes of the widespread return to work after Labor Day did not materialize and there is a fundamental shift with the nature of office work that has taken place.
From March 6, 2020, at the start of the pandemic, to September 6, 2021, foot traffic/people coming to work in their offices in the US declined the least in Boston (55.2%) and the most in Miami (88.8%)
For Canada, Calgary down 57.9% had the least shrinkage since the pandemic and Ottawa the most severe at 88.8%.
“COVID essentially represented the largest change management activity across the globe. Suddenly people realized that they could work anywhere, anytime, anyplace,” commented Sheila Botting, Avison Young’s President of Professional Services for the Americas.
In introducing The Vitality Index, Botting said it was designed to help decision makers in all parts of commercial real estate—from companies deciding future occupancy strategies to property owners looking at buy/hold/sell decisions to developers determining the next project.
The index utilizes data from Orbital Insight, Avison Young’s geospatial intelligence and location analytics partner to anonymized cell phone location data geofenced to unique locations, to estimate total foot traffic in each city and industry.
The Vitality Index is one of the many indices that seek to capture various aspects of CRE operations.
As another example, Kastle Systems, a maker of building access controls, has a Back to Work Barometer that uses keycard, fob and KastlePresence app access data from the 2,600 buildings and 41,000 businesses it secures across 47 states.
For the week ending September 1, Kastle, a maker of building access control systems, reported building occupancy rates declined, bringing the 10-city average down 1.5 percentage points to 31.6%
“This resumes the downward trend that began in July, coinciding with the recent surge of COVID-19 cases. Dallas saw the greatest decline in building occupancy, down 2.5 points to 44.3%, followed by Philadelphia, down 2.1 points to 31.3%,” said the Kastle study.