GameStop Corp (NYSE: GME) has been the focus of the investment community for the last couple days and for a justifiable reason. A lot has been written about the technicals of the trade and the various market participants, how they affect the supply and demand and drive the stock price. But we have decided to spin it a different way and look at the fundamentals of the issuer. This is our second blogpost about GME, our first one back in October 2019 explored the misconceptions that can result from using location data incorrectly.

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).

There’s no question that the retail sector has been hit hard this year. Foot traffic at Macy’s, which was already struggling prior to the pandemic, was down 64% last quarter compared to the same quarter in 2019. Like many of its peers, Macy’s has relied on its online business to bolster revenues during a period when many of its stores were closed. But, although overall sales have slumped, an interesting trend has emerged for those who do visit stores.

For investors, foot traffic data is fast becoming a critical weapon as part of an alternative data armory. The value of tracking real-time visitation numbers to retail and consumer-facing compa-nies is widely recognized. Yet, as we explore here, measuring traffic to industrial companies can offer even more effective signals to predict top line performance. It is intuitive that the number of employees at production facilities should be an indicator of pro-duction, which in turn would help forecast revenues.

The current and forthcoming earnings seasons will be one of the most unpredictable many of us have encountered. Anticipating and modelling sales performance will be challenging on multiple levels, given massive disparities across the country in terms of store openings and closing. With the ability to monitor daily foot traffic at every store in the country, Advan’s location data provides the unique ability to identify which stores are open or closed in almost real time.

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.