Footfall data for lease negotiations

Why lease negotiations stall on sales

Turnover rent ties the lease to the till, and for years that felt fair. It no longer tells the whole story. As shopping moves online, a physical store increasingly earns its keep as a showroom and a meeting place: people visit, try and compare, then buy later through another channel. None of that appears in turnover. So tenant and landlord end up arguing from numbers that measure different things, the landlord pointing at a location full of traffic, the tenant at a till quieter than the rent implies.

A number both sides can accept

Footfall data is neutral evidence because it measures the location itself. Bumbee Labs counts passers-by outside a unit, the share who enter (the capture rate), visits and dwell, consistently over time and anonymously throughout. The method is statistical, calibrated with manual control measurements, and validated by academia, partners and customers. It is also the only footfall method in Europe approved by a data protection authority, which matters when data will be shared between organisations as part of a negotiation. Delivery is flexible as well: the same numbers arrive through dashboards, scheduled reports or an API, so each party can read them in its own systems. What lands on the table is what the location demonstrably delivers, rather than an estimate from either side.

What landlords do with it

• Footfall-based terms. A flagship Stockholm shopping mall used Bumbee Labs data to move from sales-based to footfall-based rents: fairer terms as stores increasingly act as showrooms while sales happen online. The operator later rolled the approach out across its other malls.
• Tenant mix and placement. Visits per location and the flows between zones separate true anchors from dead zones, so each tenant sits where the traffic suits them, with numbers to back the placement.
• Tenant reporting. The same data can be offered to tenants as a value-added intelligence feed, turning a contested topic into a shared dashboard.
• Portfolio comparisons. The same metrics across buildings and seasons make asset performance comparable, and quantify what a refurbishment changed.

The operator playbook lives on mall operators & property owners; the estate-wide version on property companies.

What tenants do with it

A tenant negotiating a renewal can move the conversation from “your sales were down” to what the location actually delivered. If visits held up while purchases shifted online, that is the showroom argument with evidence behind it. Capture rate adds a second layer: it shows how a unit performed against the street it was given, so a location’s pull and a concept’s performance can be discussed separately. And where the landlord already measures with Bumbee Labs, tenants can be offered their own feed of the same data, so both sides read from one page.

Proven where the stakes were high

The Stockholm mall case is the reference: one of Sweden’s busiest shopping areas, with extremely high footfall and many entrances, moved its rent model onto measured visits, priced screens and event spaces on real exposure, and gave event renters fact-based reports on impact. Numbers that survive a negotiation have to survive scrutiny first, and these have, for years. Read the results on case studies, and see the full metric catalogue for everything that can sit behind a lease discussion.