A few years ago, a retail offering memorandum led with the rent roll and the demographics. Today it leads with a foot traffic chart. Owners use it to sell a center, tenants use it to choose one, and lenders use it to decide how much to advance against it. The question I hear most often is not whether foot traffic data matters. It is what the data actually proves.
I put that question to Elizabeth LaFontaine, Director of Research at Placer.ai, when she joined me on The Real Finds Podcast. Her answer was more disciplined than most marketing decks. Foot traffic is powerful, but it is one piece of the puzzle, and the people who get the most from it are the ones who know where it stops.
Where the Numbers Come From
Foot traffic platforms do not count people at the door. Placer.ai, for example, describes its data as coming from a panel of tens of millions of mobile devices, stripped of personal identifiers, then aggregated and extrapolated with modeling to estimate visits to a location. That matters for how you read the output. The numbers are estimates built from a sample, which makes them very good at showing direction, comparison, and change over time, and less suited to treating any single figure as an exact count.
Consumers Voting With Their Feet
Elizabeth describes foot traffic as consumers voting with their feet. It captures what shoppers actually do, close to real time, rather than what they tell a survey they intend to do. Before foot traffic data was widely available, retail analysis depended heavily on sales information, which arrives later and is usually private.
For a retailer or an investor, that speed is the advantage. A change in behavior shows up in visits before it shows up in a tenant’s sales report or a missed rent payment. Her example from this year is the clearest one I have heard: once national gas prices moved above roughly $4 per gallon, Placer.ai saw shoppers change categories, visit less often, and shift channels. That is a signal an owner can act on months before it reaches the rent roll.
One Language for Owners, Tenants, and Lenders
The benefit I see most in practice is the one Elizabeth called a single source of truth. A landlord, a prospective tenant, and a lender can look at the same visit trends for a center and argue from the same facts. Before this data existed, each side brought its own numbers to the table. Now a negotiation over rent or a loan request can start from a shared view of how a property is actually used.
What Retailers Learn
Retailers use foot traffic to decide where to go and what to build. Elizabeth was clear that the era of opening stores for the sake of fleet growth is over. Retailers are trying to put the right format in the right center for the right customer, and in many cases that means a smaller, convenience-oriented store rather than a default big box.
- Site selection: comparing visit levels and trends across candidate centers before signing a lease.
- Customer fit: seeing whether the shoppers already visiting a center match the brand’s customer.
- Format decisions: judging whether a location calls for a full-size store or a smaller footprint.
- Migration: following households as they move, which is how Placer.ai identified the suburban renaissance that began in 2020 and has strengthened as millennials and older Gen Z start families.
What Investors and Lenders Learn
On the capital side, foot traffic is a diligence tool. It shows whether a center’s visits are growing or fading, how it compares with competing centers nearby, and whether its tenants are drawing customers. Elizabeth also uses malls as a barometer for discretionary spending, which makes visit trends useful well beyond a single property.
When I asked her which trends investors and lenders should actually underwrite, she pointed to two that the data shows have persisted since the pandemic: the K-shaped split between upper income and constrained lower and middle income shoppers, and mission-driven shopping, where consumers spread their trips across more chains than they did before. Both favor value, convenience, and well-mixed centers. Both are visible in foot traffic long before they appear in an appraisal.
What It Cannot Tell You
On the podcast, I told Elizabeth that I find foot traffic useful about ninety percent of the time. The other ten percent is where people get hurt. Her explanation was that foot traffic sits at the top of the funnel. It shows the decisions a shopper makes before walking in the door, not what happens at the register.
Since the pandemic, shoppers have been visiting more retailers and visiting more often, but that does not always translate into larger baskets or higher conversion. A busy center is not automatically a profitable one. That is why she recommends pairing foot traffic with sales and transaction data for a complete view of the customer. I would add the lease itself. Visits do not tell you the rent a tenant can afford, the term remaining, or whether the anchor has a right to go dark.
Reading It in a Changing Market
Context changes what the numbers mean. Return to office nationally is still at about 70 percent of the 2019 baseline, according to Elizabeth, so a downtown lunch corridor and a suburban grocery-anchored center can show very different patterns by day of the week. Mall formats also rotate. Indoor malls led growth in 2025, while open-air lifestyle centers are leading in 2026 and outlet centers lag. A single year of data can mislead if you do not know where a format sits in that cycle.
How I Would Use It
For owners, lenders, and tenants across Lake County, Illinois and the Chicago suburbs, the practical approach is straightforward. Use foot traffic to see direction early, compare a center with its real competition, and test whether a tenant is drawing customers. Then confirm it with sales, the rent roll, the leases, and the condition of the property before you price anything. For current Chicagoland market conditions, see the daily-updated RFP Chicagoland Commercial Real Estate Index. If you have vacant retail space that needs a plan, our guide on leasing a vacant commercial building faster is a good place to start, and our brokerage, management, and development team can help you read the data on a specific property. Catch the full conversation with Elizabeth on The Real Finds Podcast.
Van Vlissingen and Co. has been the Midwest’s oldest commercial real estate brokerage, development, and management firm since 1879, and today is independently ranked the #1 commercial real estate agency in Chicagoland, home to the #1 independently ranked agent, Gordon Lamphere, and the region’s #1 ranked commercial property management team. If you own, lease, or invest in retail, shopping center, or mixed-use property across Lake County, the North Shore, the Northwest and O’Hare corridors, DuPage and the I-88 corridor, Will County, or southern Wisconsin’s Pleasant Prairie, Kenosha, and Racine markets, contact Van Vlissingen and Co. at 📞 847-634-2300 or 🌐 vvco.com. For a market-wide view of where these dynamics sit today, see our State of the Chicagoland Commercial Real Estate Market for Q3 2026.