After months of travel restrictions and lockdown, there is some hope on the horizon for hotel chains such Hilton. Foot traffic is a very accurate measure of performance for hotels, as well as for cash-heavy businesses such as casinos. For such type of companies tracking performance by transaction data is tricky, due to the fact that the booking date is different than the visit day and hotels have to book the revenue when the patrons visit the hotel, not when they book it (by GAAP standards).

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As we continue our trip across the property types analyzing the change in foot traffic using Advan data and the impact of Covid-19 on commercial real estate, Eigen 10 advisors examines the industrial property sector this week. The data this week comes from the Port of LA and an industrial warehouse park outside of Chicago. The industrial park is a mix of food distribution, light manufacturing, auto part distribution and other uses.

In New York City, the MTA has stated that it’s seen “ridership tick down a bit in the last week or so.” For anyone who lives there, it probably feels like more than a bit of a tick down, with subway platforms empty at rush hour and the usually bustling Grand Central terminal eerily quiet. In order to visualize what is happening at one of the busiest train terminals in the world, we looked at year-over-year foot traffic numbers at Grand Central to see just how much visitors numbers have fallen in the past few weeks.

The New York auto show, due to take place in April at the Jacob Javits Center, has been postponed until late August. Is this just a temporary setback for the Javits center - one that is likely to be seen across all convention centers, as the appetite for large gatherings dwindles with the spread of COVID-19? Or is it a sign of a longer term hit to the convention industry as a whole?

Has travel been affected by the coronavirus, and if so by how much and where? The overall volume of passengers traveling by air affects many of disparate industries - not just airlines but travel sites and aggregators that sell tickets, hotels and car rental companies that rely on airports for a large volume of their business, credit card companies, restaurants and retailers. The list can go on. To try and gauge the impact that a reduction in travel due to the coronavirus might be having on these sectors and more, we analyzed foot traffic in key US and international airports.

Each company trades based on different metrics, but it is fair to say that most consumer discretionary companies, especially those with a growing footprint, are judged by their comparable store sales. This is defined differently by each company, as it is not a standardized GAAP metric, but it typically means “we only measure the performance of stores that have been open for a certain amount of time”, usually anywhere from 3 to 13 months, depending on the company.

Usually the first considerations when a company acquires another is how to realize economies of scale, cross-marketing opportunities, and areas of common improvement. If one knew which shoppers visit each location and quantified the cross-visits between malls then they could make educated decisions about which malls to focus on for improvements, tenant acquisition, or cross marketing. With traditional measuring methods this is hard to achieve, but cellphone location data is the perfect fit for such an exercise.

Markets have reacted very strongly to the potential effects from the coronavirus epidemic in China. MGM, Las Vegas Sands and Wynn Resort stocks have been hit particularly hard, dropping 20% since the news, mostly on fears that their Hong Kong and Macau locations will see materially reduced visitors during the annual Lunar Year celebrations. But are the actual effects on business and travel what the market expects or is this an over-reaction?