Site selection with footfall and catchment data

An expensive decision, often made on thin data

Site selection is the most expensive decision a multi-site operator makes. A new establishment commits years of rent, fit-out and people to one bet: that enough of the right visitors pass this spot at the right times. Yet most major investment and leasing decisions are still made on assumptions or thin data, a drive past the site, a broker’s brochure, a hunch about the neighbourhood. The movement that decides the outcome, who passes, where they set out from, how flows shift by hour and season, is measurable before the lease is signed.

Catchment: where people actually set out from

Cellular (4G/5G) network analytics measures movement across whole districts, streets and open outdoor areas using anonymised, aggregated mobile-network data. For site selection it answers the wide questions: where visitors travel from (origin and catchment), total flows along a corridor or high street, travel patterns between areas, and peaks and trends at city scale. Because the input is network data, there is no hardware to install at a site you do not yet occupy, and the method reaches where Wi-Fi and sensors are not built to go.

Comparing candidate sites

District-level flows put candidates side by side: which street actually carries traffic, when it carries it, and how movement runs between the areas in question. Timing matters as much as volume here. Peaks and trends by hour, day and season reveal whether a corridor that looks busy on a Saturday viewing is quiet on the weekday evenings your format depends on. For destination formats, catchment shows how far a location’s pull would need to reach, the same lens retail destinations use to understand the trips people already make to them.

Your existing sites sharpen the comparison. Passers-by, capture rate and visit counts per building quantify the pull of locations you already know, and because property companies measure the same metrics across the portfolio and across seasons, a candidate can be read against a benchmark instead of a guess.

De-risking the decision

Three practical moves take the gamble out of an establishment decision:

• Check the flows, then the unit. Confirm at district level that the area carries the visitors you need, before debating frontages within it.
• Trial before you commit. A time-boxed pop-up is a deliberate test of a location before a long lease. Its capture rate shows how the concept performed against the street it was given, so a strong location cannot flatter a weak concept, and the reverse.
• Measure what you build. Where you develop a site, visitor pull can be tracked before, during and after the project, so the investment case is tested against reality.

However the analysis is run, the metrics arrive through the same dashboards and documented API as every other Bumbee Labs method, so a siting study sits beside the rest of your footfall data instead of in a separate report.

Privacy at district scale

Mobile-network data is anonymised and aggregated before it is analysed. Movement is measured as flows across large areas, never as individuals, and there is no device-level tracking. The analysis rests on the only footfall method in Europe approved by a data protection authority, so a siting study never turns into a surveillance question. The full set of metrics behind a location decision, from catchment to capture rate, is laid out on data deliverables.