Footfall is asset value, start measuring it

The job to be done

You own and manage commercial real estate (offices, retail-at-grade, high-street units, mixed-use schemes, whole portfolios) and you’re judged on asset value and yield. The recurring questions cut across the portfolio: What is a location actually worth, for rent-setting and valuation? How do I base rents on the attraction and footfall a property delivers, not just on comparable deals? Which buildings and units pull people, and which underperform? How do I show a prospective tenant the traffic their unit will see? How do I prove the effect of a refurbishment or development, before, during and after? Where is space being wasted, and how do I optimise it? And how do I benchmark one asset against another across the portfolio and across seasons? Today most of those answers are guesses.

Footfall measurement across a property portfolio

Bumbee Labs measures the attraction of your buildings: passers-by outside, people entering, how long they stay and where they go, usually over the Wi-Fi already installed across the buildings, topped up only where coverage is thin. The data rolls up the way an owner thinks: a portfolio overview for asset management, per-building dashboards for property managers, and a value-added feed you can offer tenants. It is also the only footfall method in Europe approved by a data protection authority, so an estate-wide deployment adds no privacy risk.

How Wi-Fi people counting works →

What data you get

• Passers-by and capture rate per building: the pull effect of a property, its frontage, its location and its tenants; the raw material for rent negotiations.
• Visit counts for whole buildings, floors, zones and individual units.
• Dwell time and visitor paths: how long people stay and how they move through a property.
• Building-to-building benchmarking: the same metrics across the portfolio and across seasons, so asset performance is comparable.
• Development and refurbishment impact: measure the effect of a project on visitor pull before, during and after.
• Peaks, trends and crowding: for facilities planning, maintenance scheduling and safety.

This is the data that moves a rent conversation from “the market says” to “here is the footfall your location delivers, and here is what it’s worth”, and the basis for offering tenants footfall data as a value-added service. For the negotiation itself, from either side of the table, see footfall data for lease negotiations.

→ The full metric catalogue and delivery formats

Proof: a major Stockholm retail asset

The portfolio pattern property companies recognise is already proven on a major Stockholm retail asset: reliable visit, capture-rate and dwell data let the owner shift to footfall-based rents, price space and event areas on real exposure, and separate true anchors from dead zones, then extend the same approach to the rest of the estate.

Read the property case study →

Where this fits

If the asset in question is specifically a shopping centre, the operator’s playbook (tenant mix, food court, screens and event spaces) is covered in depth on mall operators & property owners. Screens and billboards across your estate are a revenue line of their own (see outdoor & DOOH advertising analytics), and the surrounding catchment that drives footfall to your buildings is the subject of city-centre & smart-city analytics.