A new interactive, real-time database that tracks cellphones used by “representative office occupiers” in major North American cities reveals that Vancouver foot traffic is down 63.3% today compared with March 2, 2020, a week before the global pandemic was declared.
The Vitality Index was developed by commercial real estate agency Avison Young using data from Orbital Insight, which aggregates anonymized cellphone location data geofenced to unique locations to estimate total foot traffic in each city and industry.
The data, which tracks 20 North American cities, goes back to June 2019 in the U.S. and the beginning of 2020 in Canada, which allows comparisons to pre-pandemic levels.
“The Vitality Index is wildly important for people looking to understand what is happening in real-time and over time in major markets. It measures the pace so that leaders can make decisions based on concrete information and analytics,” said Sheila Botting, Avison Young’s president of professional services for the Americas.
The index is revealing, and likely unnerving, for employers who were counting on a widespread return to the office this September.
The cellphone tracking shows that total foot traffic in all 20 commercial cores profiled has fallen by 76.3% from pre-pandemic levels.
In Vancouver, recent traffic for what the index refers to as downtown office workers is down 63.3% from numbers prior to the pandemic. On March 2, 2020, for example, a week before the global pandemic was declared, a daily average of more than 4,700 office workers was detected. As of September 6, 2021, that number had fallen to 1,900.
Traffic in Calgary is down 55.2% this month compared with pre-pandemic levels, while Toronto office-worker traffic has plunged 85.2% from March 2, 2020, the data shows.
The index can be custom-tuned to compare any dates. It reveals, for example, that in the week following the July 1, 2021, announcement of the return of health restrictions in B.C., downtown foot traffic fell by 4.2%.
Botting noted that the Vitality Index is showing a steady increase in foot traffic in major cities this year, but is still trending significantly below pre-pandemic levels. The widespread return in the fall that many hoped for has yet to materialize. In fact, the whole nature of office work has apparently undergone a fundamental shift, the index suggests. •
