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.

Over the past weeks we have been working on new ways to analyze foot traffic, in order to help our clients understand how patterns of movement are changing, and what this means for businesses. As part of our COVID-19 package we have developed over 200 indices for multiple sectors and industries including restaurants, grocery stores, electronics, cloth-ing/accessories. These sectors can be segmented by US state as a way to visualize the response to COVID19 by using foot traffic as a proxy for social distancing.

Average daily traffic to Amazon warehouses spiked dramatically in March as the retailer ramped up its staff. Average daily traffic in March was up 43% compared to year earlier, far outstripping seasonal staffing increases. In the first few days of April the number of Amazon employees seen at their warehouses has continued to grow, as demand for home delivery surges, with increasing numbers of people following strict orders from local authorities to stay home.

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.

Last week using data from Advan we showed the impact of Covid-19 on retail real estate. Our analysis this week looks at the impact of the virus on office real estate. Using data from Advan that tracks anonymized cell phone movement over time, Eigen10 Advisors examined the change in foot traffic for a New York City office building. The building’s vacancy rate did not change significantly between first quarter 2019 and 2020, from low single digits to mid-single digits.

The coronavirus pandemic that is reverberating across the country and the globe has impacted commercial real estate in ways unforeseen from previous “black swan” events. This impact has not been even across sectors or markets or even subsectors within a property type. Fortunately, with today’s technology and analytics we are able assess some of the impact as it is happening rather than waiting in arrears for the data. Using data from Advan that tracks anonymized cell phone movement over time, Eigen10 Advisors examined the change in foot traffic at a sample of different types of retail centers in different markets.