Seaker March '22 Monthly Traffic Snapshot
As the first implementation partner for Placer.ai, The Seaker Group works closely with the location-data company to provide analytics around foot traffic.
Placer.ai uses anonymized location information from a panel of 30 million devices and processes the data using industry-leading AI and machine learning capabilities to make estimations about overall visits to specific locations.
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At Seaker, one of the many things we do is monitor our clients’ retail environments. These insights help real estate, operations, marketing and financing teams make more informed decisions.
To help you and your team make more informed decisions, here is a snapshot of March ‘22 foot-traffic based on hundreds of locations in every region of the United States which includes nearly all real estate types.
At Seaker, we know from decades of experience working with and within a variety of Brands that March is a critical month for location-based businesses.
January and February are always the lowest traffic months of a calendar year due to typical seasonality trends following a heavy holiday shopping season and colder weather.
We like to say consumers are in a cold and dreary holiday hangover during these months and March is when we expect to see them returning.
Context is everything when it comes to understanding location-data and visitation patterns.
For example, if we didn't know better, we could assume that the increase in foot traffic from February to March this year was confirmation that consumers are "over" COVID and that its impacts are behind us.
While there’s no arguing that we are all over COVID, we know from our experience that this is not the core driver of March traffic in 2022, which is around 11% higher than February 2022.
It could be the first signs of warmer weather, or Spring Break driving vacations and consumer spend, but whatever the case we know that COVID did not create this seasonal norm.
Because we know that historically, March always drives more traffic than February, we should not be too quick to assume that retail traffic has fully recovered from the impacts of COVID.
We also understand that while retail foot traffic has vastly improved from last year, we can't say it is fully recovered compared to 2019 numbers. Below is further detail of our findings for this critical month.
When we look at all types of centers across the country, we see that March traffic in 2022 was around 20% higher than March of 2021 (Last Year), but still around -5% down from 2019.
For Enclosed Shopping Centers the average trend is similar however we do see differentiation in other categories.
The Lifestyle Centers/Outdoor Mixed-Use Centers we measured were almost flat to 2019 at around -2%. Outlets followed a similar trend.
Those real estate types and regions that were the most impacted from COVID, such as Casinos, Hotels, Airports, Street locations and high-density markets will show the highest increases from 2021. This is not correlation but causation given there is a greater area to climb vs those areas that saw less negative impacts or recovered faster.
Home Goods for example was a segment we all watched in wonder as sales and traffic soared during the pandemic and during parts of 2021. A decline in that segment now would not be a sign of problems but rather the normalization of business.
And thus, real estate types that are less impacted from the pandemic will obviously show less impressive increases from last year, not because they aren't performing well but because they were performing better in 2021.
While we should all celebrate the wins of business, we should only take action on those wins when we understand the metrics in a pre covid and post covid lens.
Again context is everything!
If you have questions about this snapshot or want to know more about your Brand’s traffic and visitation patterns please reach out to us via our website or by emailing questions@theseakergroup.com.
Alway be Seaking!