Monday was the first day non-essential office workers could return to work in Boston. There was NO rush back to the office. Using mobile tracking data from Advan Research, overall foot traffic was up 7.3% in the Seaport waterfront last week compared to 2 weeks ago. Compared to one-year ago, foot traffic is down 83%. Numerous employers have pushed back their plans to return to the office between Independence Day and Labor Day, significantly limiting overall foot traffic for the foreseeable future.

As the US restaurant sector starts to get back on its feet, we have been monitoring foot traffic numbers with interest to see which are turning around most quickly. The 3 chains we analyzed saw significant falls in traffic between mid-March and the end of April. This was most dramatic for Darden, where foot traffic fell to almost zero given the sit-down nature of the chain’s restaurants. Yum brands saw a 60% fall in foot traffic at the nadir and Chipotle a 70% drop.

Geolocation data gives us an almost infinite number of ways to track and measure the extent and impact of relaxing social distancing measures, such as we are starting to witness in many states across the country. For us – based on our extensive analysis of this kind of data – “miles driven” is a key leading indicator of behavior. Our proprietary miles driven index is an accurate way to track how many miles individuals in the US are driving on a daily basis.

Over the past several weeks, meat processing plants around the world have been receiving increased attention in the media. The high numbers of COVID-19 cases in these locations, where physical distancing can be difficult, has affected meat supply chains across the country. While some plants closed, many have now reopened. Physical distancing measures are in place but the number of workers on production lines remains depressed with many having fallen sick and others cautious about returning to work due to the risk of infection.

Authorities around the world are working hard to understand how people are altering their behavior as rules around social distancing begin to change. Gathering data on where people are congregating is a valuable measure for understanding risks and calculating the likelihood of a second wave of infections. To help provide these insights, we developed our Hotspots map. We define a Hotspot as a city block in which more than 50 people are gathered at the same time for more than 15 minutes - excluding homes and other residences.

Cellphone geolocation data has proven to be an invaluable tool in helping us understand how COVID-19 is evolving, and to support our recovery. We have been working closely with clients and other partners to help track the evolution of the pandemic and how it is impacting different sectors, among the most important of which is hospitals. To help visualize the environment that hospitals are operating under, as well as to provide a measure of hospital bed utilization which is an important metric of the available capacity of the hospitals, we generated a detailed analysis of hospital traffic, filtering out doctors, staff, and visits that did not result in long-term admissions, in order to estimate the actual hospital bed utilization during the pandemic.

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The biggest mall operator in the US, Simon Group, announced this week that it will open dozens of locations across the US. With Macy’s and other retailers following suit in states where restrictions have been relaxed, investors, consumers and retailers will be watching with interest to see how soon visitor numbers begin to recover. One indicator of customer appetite for returning to stores in the US is to look at how foot traffic to malls in China has fared since restrictions began to be lifted in late February and early March.

When we launched Advan 5 years ago, we were really excited at the prospect of developing a new type of dataset. One that would give investors an alternative view into the companies and markets that they care about. We are data geeks at heart and we spent years agonizing over how to make our data more precise; manually drawing geofences around millions of locations, for thousands of companies. Normalizing data became almost an obsession.

This week in our Covid-19 report using foot traffic data from Advan we examine the impact of the virus on student housing. We looked at three student housing buildings, located in College Station (Texas A&M), Boulder (University of Colorado) and Syracuse. All three universities sent students home and switched to online learning in mid-March. Knowing how quickly tenants reacted to the shutdown and when they come back allows owners, operators and leasing agents to make focused decisions that could potentially enhance value and lead to outperformance.