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Key McDonald's Metrics
While focus and streamlined operations are key to restaurant growth strategies, we also continue to see evidence of the impact of innovation and nostalgia in driving visits. McDonald’s has had success with its past celebrity meal collaborations with Travis Scott and J Balvin, with our data indicating a mid-to-high teens lift in visits compared to the weeks prior to the promotion. However, McDonald’s "Adult Happy Meal" collaboration with streetwear brand Cactus Plant Flea Market might be its most successful collaboration today, with data suggesting more than a 30% increase in in-store visitation trends compared to the weeks leading up to the promotion (below). We’ve discussed the impact of limited-time offers (LTO) in the QSR space earlier this year, but McDonald’s has set a new bar for the industry (beating out Taco Bell’s Mexican Pizza launch in May).
Although QSR chains saw more resilient visitation trends than other restaurant categories for much of 2022, the gap between the QSR, fast casual, and full-service restaurant chains had narrowed in September as lower-income consumers continue to face inflationary headwinds from menu price hikes across the QSR space while higher-end consumers continue to dine out. Nevertheless, the impact of McDonald’s adult happy meal promotion is evident in not only the massive spike in visitation trends for the full QSR sector last week (below). While not everyone may love these promotions, they can be an extremely effective way to drive visitation growth.
We, the founding team, always loved data - ideating around it, engineering with it, understanding the world better with it.
But what captivated us most was imagining data products that can be used by tens of thousands of businesses across the world.
Among all the ideas and visions we bounced around before starting the company, one stood out for its simplicity and potential impact - building a ‘Physical Market Intelligence Platform’ to provide everyone in the offline world (a.k.a the ‘real world’) with aggregate insights for decision-making. Or in layman’s terms, “a dashboard to get instant insights for any place to understand its audience, surroundings, and competition”.
In 2016, the Placer founding team gathered in a basement and spent a weekend sketching out a plan to turn this idea into a massive world-class data company.
Whiteboarding without customers or tech debt is fun!!!
The more paper we stuck to that basement wall, the bigger the vision became! Everything is possible with the stroke of a pen…
But very quickly, we hit some glaring challenges:
The best way to approach a big challenge is breaking it down into smaller ones. So we worked hard to define Phase 1 - focusing on building a product that (1) was centered around the mobile location analytics dataset and (2) generated reports tailored for CRE and retail.
5 years and 5 funding rounds later, we’re FINALLY feeling “pretty good” about Phase 1: we launched a world-class mobile analytics product that’s used by over 1,000 customers, and thousands more are using our free products.
But it’s also been “frustrating” - we were always strapped for cash and resources. We’re yet to integrate most of the datasets we need; key reports for certain verticals remain in the product pipeline; and in terms of usability and workflow features, we still have a lot to do in order to create a truly comprehensive platform (vs “read only” status insights tool).
That’s why the $100M Series C funding we just announced is so momentous for me and the rest of the Placer team. It finally removes the shackles and equips us with the tools and materials we need for Phase 2 - rapidly building the full Placer.ai Market Intelligence Platform.
So let’s dive into what that means…
A Physical Market Intelligence Platform is a big data puzzle. Piecing it together - in a nutshell - consists of four phases:
A vast amount of interconnected data is required to create a truly accurate and complete picture of what’s going on at a location. This data falls into two broad categories:
Now consider all things you see going on in the world and imagine how POI and geospatial data can capture and quantify them…
Here’s a snippet:
We track dozens of data categories and thousands of datasets and vendors in order to identify new data that can help answer our customers’ questions.
This is 50% of our work and is a huge data challenge - but also great fun!
Through partnerships and our App Marketplace, we’ve recently integrated online reviews, credit card data, demographics, vehicle traffic volume, crime figures and planned construction into our platform. And we have lots more datasets in our pipeline: retail sales, property sales, financial data, leasing comparisons and climate data to name just a few.
If the data are the ingredients, then ingestion is the cooking. This includes complex data science processes:
Tagging data to POIs is a massive task. Placer’s POI database contains millions of entities: a commercial real estate asset in a customer’s portfolio; stores of a retailer’s chain or that hold a CPG brand’s products; a billboard used for out-of-home advertising; a downtown area being regenerated by a municipality or business improvement district. We geofence each one so data can be tagged to it.
But a much greater complexity than the volume of data-POI matching is the fact that our data structure is mutable - it changes. Stores, restaurants, strip malls and other POIs open, close, merge and move. Our physical environment is constantly changing. One of our platform’s standout attributes is that it always reflects historical change.
In practice, this means that, for each POI change, we not only adjust our data tagging but also re-tag 5 years of historical data to ensure any historical comparisons are “like with like”. This is a huge investment of resources on the part of our data science, devops and engineering teams - exponentially increasing our data management burden.
To complete the cooking metaphor, after selecting ingredients (datasets) and cooking them (data ingestion), we then lay out a buffet-style feast of solutions for our users:
The most basic level of the platform is converting the data into real-world constructs that can be understood by industry professionals: tables, charts, maps and other graphics displaying cross shopping, trade areas (below), cannibalization, risk analysis, visit frequency and so on.
A key tenet of the Market Intelligence Platform is the approach that insights like those are often not the answer to the questions that our customers are looking for. Rather, they are just part of the explanation behind the answer. That means providing a comprehensive suite of Solutions SUPPORTED by insights, not just a library of uncontextualized insights.
An excellent example of this is Void Analysis. A key question for retail real estate is “who is my ideal tenant?” While our platform offered important insights (such as retailers’ average monthly foot traffic and cannibalization) for reaching an answer, landlords were doing a lot of legwork. The Void Analysis tool we released late last year enables CRE professionals to instantly analyze thousands of potential tenants through automatically generated reports that include ranking according to our unique Relative Fit Score. This significantly improves the speed and scope of a search for new tenants.
We are now working on the many additional solutions like Void Analysis in our development pipeline - sales forecasting, site selection for retail chains, market selection, market change reports, product optimization for CPG to name a few.
To be truly useful, solutions must also be delivered in a way that fits various users’ workflows. A dashboard is a good start, but a full platform must offer a range of access points. This means data feeds, REST APIs, and other methods of programmatic access.
We’ll also add to that a rich layer of data exploration tools such as GIS, templates, graph builders, pivot table functionality and advanced entity search. This will provide users with maximum flexibility in how they explore and visualize our data.
The lion’s share of the work is still ahead of us here - more widgets, third party integrations, report generators, scheduled intelligence reports and alerts, and much more.
The platform’s user interface must be fully customized to fit the needs of its different user types across verticals AND within companies (business users, data scientists, data analysts, third party users). An example of how we’ve begun to do this is a portfolio overview section for CRE analysts to rapidly scan properties’ performance metrics. Another is our COVID-19 Recovery Dashboard, particularly used by civic organizations to assess the impact of the pandemic on local economic areas.
As we presented “just data”, we quickly realized some customers were looking for humans to add a “research layer” and context around the data. So an analytical research team has become part of the product. They capture and present key market intelligence, respond to the latest industry trends and customer interests. “The Anchor”, a weekly CRE executive intelligence report launched last September, has now become an inbox staple for many of our customers.
To our current understanding, we’re just “5%” of the way to our Market Intelligence Platform vision. The remaining 95% will be built by scaling POI coverage, datasets, answering more questions and developing the other core components of the platform.
So our focus now is on ramping up the velocity of this development. And to do that, we need even more of the world’s best talent across the company.
So, during 2022, we will use our new capital to double the size of our engineering team and significantly expand the data at our disposal. In parallel, we will also channel more resources to supporting our customers and contributing to industry understanding through our analytical research department and educational content.
Placer.ai is committed to transforming the way real-world businesses make decisions. And we don’t want to waste any time going about it.
LOS ALTOS, CA (January 12, 2021)--Placer.ai, the leader in location analytics and foot traffic data, announced today the closing of a $100M Series C funding round at a $1B valuation. The round was led by Josh Buckley with participation from WndrCo, Lachy Groom, MMC Technology Ventures LLC, Fifth Wall Ventures, JBV Capital, and Array Ventures. The round also included the participation of leading commercial real estate investors and operators, including J.M. Schapiro (Continental Realty Corp), Eliot Bencuya and Jeff Karsh (Tryperion Partners), Daniel Klein (Klein Enterprises/Sundeck Capital), Majestic Realty, and others. The funding will be used to expand the company’s R&D capabilities to further increase the pace of innovation.
“Placer experienced significant growth during 2021 as a consensus formed across the market that accurate, reliable consumer behavior analytics is indispensable to brick and mortar decision-making,” said Noam Ben-Zvi, CEO and Co-Founder of Placer.ai. “Yet, location analytics is just the foundation for a much broader and more comprehensive vision. With this funding, we will accelerate the development of the Placer.ai platform, adding an unprecedented range of new data sets - such as vehicle traffic, planned construction, web traffic, purchase data, and much more - as well as more advanced solutions to empower any professional with a stake in the physical world to make better decisions, faster than ever before. ”
Since launching in November 2018, Placer.ai has been adopted by over 1,000 customers including industry leaders in commercial real estate and retail like JLL, Regency Centers, Taubman, Planet Fitness, BJ’s Wholesale Club, and Grocery Outlet. In the wake of COVID-driven upheaval, the company saw widespread adoption among a series of new categories, among them hedge funds and CPG leaders including Tyson Foods and Reckitt Benckiser.
"Placer provides instant, simple and actionable insights to questions we've been asking as operators for over 30 years. The pace of innovation, the unique trust that the company has developed, and the massive market demand all point to the magnitude and scale of what this team can achieve,” said Jeffrey Katzenberg, Founding Partner of WndrCo.
"We have long felt like the disruption Placer can bring is massive, but the market demand has far exceeded our initial expectations," said Josh Buckley. “We see a powerful opportunity to continue partnering with Placer to improve the way decisions are made in the physical world, fundamentally improving the way these businesses and organizations operate."
Try Placer.ai for free here.
About Placer.ai:
Placer.ai is the most advanced foot traffic analytics platform allowing anyone with a stake in the physical world to instantly generate insights into any property for a deeper understanding of the factors that drive success. Placer.ai is the first platform that fully empowers professionals in retail, commercial real estate, hospitality, economic development, and more to truly understand and maximize their offline activities. Find more information here: https://placer.ai/
LOS ALTOS, CA (April 27, 2021) --Placer.ai, the leader in location analytics and foot traffic data, announced today the close of a $50M Series B funding round. The round was led by Josh Buckley, Todd Goldberg and Rahul Vohra, with participation from Fifth Wall, JBV Capital and Aleph VC. The funding will be used to grow the company’s R&D, expand sales and marketing teams, introduce additional reports and data sets, and grow the recently announced marketplace.
Since launching in November 2019, Placer.ai has been adopted by over 500 customers including industry leaders in Commercial Real Estate and Retail like JLL, Brixmor, Taubman, Planet Fitness, and Dollar General. Yet, the recent upheaval caused by COVID led to widespread adoption among a series of new categories including Hedge Funds and CPG leaders.
“As a business deeply rooted in offline retail, we expected COVID to present a unique challenge. Yet, adoption actually increased as a result of our ability to introduce certainty into such an uncertain environment. The result has been a clearer and deeper understanding by the market of the absolute imperative of location data to improve the decision-making process,” said Placer.ai CEO and Co-Founder Noam Ben-Zvi.
“But our current offering is just the beginning, and we are fully focused on expanding the capabilities both through the development of a range of new features and tools, and the integration of a wide range of data sets through our marketplace. Placer.ai is rapidly becoming the market intelligence platform for anyone with a stake in the physical world.”
In the last year, Placer.ai continued to expand its presence in core markets like Commercial Real Estate, Retail, Municipal governments, and Hospitality while advancing into new segments like CPG and Hedge Funds. The result has been growing market adoption and an increasingly large and diverse reach.
"Fifth Wall has some of the largest owners and operators of real estate as our limited partners and several were customers of Placer.ai, giving us a unique perspective on the company’s growth and potential. We saw firsthand the impact that the data is already having in reimagining the way business is done in retail and real estate broadly,” said Kevin Campos, Partner on the Retail & Consumer Investment team at Fifth Wall. “Yet, what’s even more exciting is that we’re still only seeing a piece of the puzzle and know that there are so many other sectors where the data can be applied. We’re thrilled to help grow and execute this vision alongside this exceptional team.”
"Placer allows businesses that operate offline to make data-driven decisions, fundamentally improving the way they operate. This is the same type of tooling that online businesses have used to grow, moving from hunches to definitive answers," said Josh Buckley. “I'm excited to be partnering with the company's next phase of growth and product development."
“Our journey with Placer.ai started at the very beginning as one of the company's first beta customers. Seeing the disruptive power of the product up close, the speed at which the company developed new features, and the tremendous traction they achieved in the marketplace led us to invest less than a year later and in every round since," said Sandy Sigal, CEO of NewMark Merrill Companies, an owner and developer of over 80 shopping centers and Chairman of BrightStreet Ventures, their venture capital arm. "Several years later, the customer growth, their ongoing product development, and the continuing value they have brought to our organization has only deepened our conviction and makes continued support a no-brainer for us."
Learn more about Placer.ai.
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It’s been decades since the U.S. last hosted the World Cup, and anticipation continues to build. While the matches themselves will deliver thrilling moments for fans inside the stadium, a far broader audience is expected to engage from beyond the gates – gathering at bars, watch parties, and living rooms across the country.
Drawing on insights from recent sporting and cultural events, this analysis examines how the World Cup may impact consumer behavior and audiences across stadiums, host cities, and nationwide.
In 2025, MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, NJ hosted a wide range of concerts and sporting events. And an examination of three – Kendrick Lamar & SZA’s tour stop, the FIFA Club World Cup Final, and a Week 17 New York Jets matchup against division rivals and the Super Bowl-bound New England Patriots – reveals clear differences in audience composition across event types.
Trade area analysis showed that the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup Final drew the largest share of single visitors and the highest median household income (HHI) of the three events – a pattern that could reflect the premium tickets and travel typically associated with a quadrennial championship match.
With the 2026 World Cup elevating the level of global competition, stadiums set to host matches this summer – including MetLife – may see even more dramatic shifts in their audience relative to other events.
While spectators attending World Cup matches are likely to differ from those drawn to other events throughout the year, audience shifts are likely to occur also within the tournament itself. As the competition progresses and the stakes rise, the visitor profile at host stadiums may trend progressively higher-income, as suggested by an analysis of Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, CA during the recent NFL season and Super Bowl.
During the Super Bowl, the stadium’s captured market median HHI surpassed that of every 49ers home game during the 2025-26 season – a pattern consistent with the event’s premium ticket pricing, national draw, and high levels of out-of-market travel.
And since the World Cup only takes place every four years, and necessitates international travel for die-hard fans, attendees are likely to be even more affluent than Super Bowl go-ers. Moreover, as the tournament reaches its later stages, each match becomes more significant and carries the potential to drive an even more affluent in-person audience.
Diving deeper into last year’s FIFA Club World Cup Final and Semifinal matches at MetLife Stadium provides further insight into the significance of the in-person audience that doesn’t make it into the stands. While FIFA generally places restrictions on tailgating, the behavior was still observed at MetLife and several other tournament venues in 2025. To put the phenomenon into perspective, location intelligence indicates that on the day of the Club World Cup final, combined visits to MetLife and its parking lots were 24.8% higher than visits to the stadium alone.
AI-powered trade area analysis further contextualizes the economic significance of this audience. During the semifinal matches, MetLife Stadium’s captured market median HHI remained nearly identical – just over $100K – with and without parking lot visitors. A similar pattern held for the Final, where median HHI for both the stadium-only and combined stadium-plus-parking visitors both rose above $115K, with the stadium-only figure only marginally higher.
This suggests that tailgaters represent a significant cohort with discretionary income to spend on the broader match-day experience, even if they opt out of spending big money on tickets.
With tailgating during the 2026 World Cup likely to remain limited due to FIFA regulations, the spending power of fans just outside the stadiums could create opportunities for alternative forms of engagement. Fan zones and other nearby hospitality events may offer effective ways to capture demand.
Nearby dining and entertainment venues are among the most accessible experiences for fans in the stadium area, and these stand to benefit significantly from elevated game-day foot traffic.
Analysis of recent FIFA Club World Cup matches reveals the impact of match-day activity on local businesses. Visitor journey data from the June 25th, 2025 matchup between Inter Milan and River Plate at Seattle’s Lumen Field, and the June 28th, 2025 meeting between Palmeiras and Botafogo at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia reveals that a significant share of stadium visitors also stopped at nearby dining and recreation venues on the day. Location intelligence also shows that, on the day of the match, each stadium-adjacent venue received a significant visit boost compared to its 2025 daily average.
This pattern underscores the potential impact of the World Cup on the surrounding commercial ecosystem. The stadium may anchor the experience, but fan engagement will likely spill into adjacent areas – creating opportunities for both organizers and local businesses. To take full advantage, restaurants and bars can position themselves as fan-friendly destinations through watch parties, extended hours, and even mobile or outdoor offerings in stadium corridors.
Previous major sporting events – including the Super Bowl – demonstrate that the impact of large-scale sporting moments often extends beyond the immediate stadium vicinity into the broader regional economy.
In the weeks leading up to the latest Super Bowl in Santa Clara, CA on February 8th, 2026, both the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkley and San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara CBSAs saw a notable uptick in year-over-year dining traffic – outperforming the nationwide average. The timing suggests that early-arriving travellers combined with locals enjoying pre-event concerts and events helped fuel demand. In contrast, nationwide dining traffic saw a more pronounced lift the following week – likely tied to Valentine’s Day on February 14.
This pattern indicates that regions hosting – or located near – World Cup 2026 matches could experience similar pre-event dining tailwinds. As out-of-town visitors arrive and local engagement builds in the days and weeks leading up to key matches, restaurants and hospitality may benefit from elevated demand – particularly when supported by ancillary events and fan experiences.
Other recent examples suggest that cities hosting major events like the World Cup stand to benefit from an influx of out-of-town visitors – particularly those with higher spending power.
Since the beginning of 2025, New Orleans has hosted a series of popular events that drove significant non-local traffic. AI-powered trade area data indicates that during these periods, out-of-market visitors consistently exhibited a higher median HHI than both local residents and typical commuters into the city.
As expected, the 2025 Super Bowl generated the most pronounced spike in out-of-market visitor median HHI among the events analyzed, but the pattern extends beyond one-time spectacles. Recurring events like Mardi Gras and major music festivals also attracted high-income visitors to the city – likely benefitting the local hospitality, dining, and retail industries.
Looking ahead to the 2026 World Cup, host cities are likely to experience a similar dynamic. The tournament’s global draw will likely bring affluent travelers with discretionary dollars to the host regions – visitors that will spend not only on match tickets, but also on accommodation, dining, and shopping. By sponsoring tournament-related festivals, concerts, and experiences in or near retail corridors, cities can amplify the economic impact of the World Cup beyond the stadium.
The impact of the 2026 World Cup is unlikely to be confined to the select cities hosting matches. Major sporting events drive large-scale at-home viewership, generating ripple effects nationwide.
The Super Bowl offers a useful benchmark. In the days leading up to February 8th, 2026, visits to grocery stores and pizza chains rose above day-of-week averages for 2025, ultimately peaking on the day of the big game day as households appeared to pick up last-minute fixings and takeout for their watch parties.
This pattern indicates that the World Cup – with its extended schedule and multiple high-stakes matchups – could drive repeated waves of elevated grocery and take-out demand as fans gather together throughout the tournament.
Of course, at-home viewing is just one piece of the match-day equation. Many fans opt for a more communal experience – gathering at sports bars across the country to watch the game alongside fellow supporters.
Recent highly-anticipated soccer matches offer a clear signal of this behavior. During the recent Allstate Continental Clásico, MLS Cup Final, and SheBelieves Cup Final, top sports bars in key markets like Los Angeles and Miami recorded visit spikes above day-of-week averages.
Not every World Cup fan will be able to attend in-person or travel to a host city, but previous match-day lifts in sports bar traffic demonstrate that fans nationwide will participate in the tournament experience.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup is set to engage a wide spectrum of fans – from casual viewers at home to dedicated supporters traveling to stadiums – shaping how and where demand emerges.
As a result, the tournament’s impact will be felt across multiple layers of retail, dining, and tourism. Stadium-centered spending, activity in surrounding corridors, host-city consumer demand, and gatherings of spectators nationwide all point to a broad and interconnected World Cup effect that is likely to shape both audience composition and behavior at scale.
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Indoor malls and open-air centers have posted consistent YoY visit growth, outlet declines have been modest, and early 2026 data shows renewed momentum across all three formats.
Growth in short visits and extended stays – alongside declines in mid-length trips – shows that consumers are gravitating toward trips with a clear purpose, favoring either efficiency or immersion.
Rising dwell times and strong engagement from younger, contemporary households position indoor malls as leading destinations for longer, experience-driven trips.
A higher share of short, weekday visits – along with strong appeal among affluent families – underscores their role as convenient, essential retail hubs.
As off-price and online alternatives erode their treasure-hunt advantage and long-distance visitation softens, outlets face a strategic choice between deepening local relevance and reinvesting in destination appeal.
The malls that thrive will be those that intentionally optimize for convenience, experience, or a disciplined integration of both.
Despite economic headwinds, intensifying e-commerce competition, and fragile consumer confidence, shopping centers continue to defy the “dead mall” narrative – reinventing themselves and, in many cases, thriving.
What can location analytics tell us about the state of the mall in 2026? Which trends and audiences are driving their performance – and how can operators and retailers best capitalize on the opportunities within the category?
Over the past two years, both indoor malls and open-air shopping centers have posted consistent year-over-year (YoY) traffic growth. And while outlet malls experienced slight declines, the pullback was modest – signaling a period of stability rather than erosion.
Early 2026 data also points to continued momentum, with all three mall formats recording mid-single-digit YoY traffic gains in the first two months of the year. Although it’s still early days – and YoY comparisons in 2026 were boosted by an additional Saturday – the positive start suggests that the industry is entering the year on a solid footing.
With e-commerce always within reach, hybrid work anchoring more consumers at home, and ongoing economic uncertainty influencing spending decisions, trips to physical stores are becoming more intentional. Shopping center visit data reflects this shift as well, with growth in both quick convenience visits and extended experiential outings – alongside a decline in mid-length trips.
In 2025, quick trips (under 30 minutes) increased across all formats, underscoring malls’ growing role as convenient, high-utility destinations for picking up an online order, grabbing a quick bite, or making a targeted purchase. At the same time, extended visits of more than 75 minutes increased at indoor malls and open-air centers, reflecting sustained appetite for immersive, experiential outings.
Meanwhile, mid-length visits (between 30 and 75 minutes) lagged across formats – falling indoor malls and outlet malls and remaining flat at open-air centers – suggesting shoppers are losing patience with undifferentiated trips that lack a clear purpose.
Still, although short visits increased year over year across all mall types, and long visits increased for both indoor malls and open-air centers, the distribution of dwell time varies by format. Short visits make up a larger share of traffic at open-air shopping centers, for example, while longer visits account for a greater share at indoor malls. This divergence underscores the need for format-specific strategies, with operators clearly defining the core shoppers and missions they are best suited to serve and aligning tenant mix, amenities, and marketing accordingly.
Indoor malls, for instance, have increasingly positioned themselves as experiential hubs – particularly for younger consumers. Recent survey data shows that 57% of shoppers aged 18 to 34 report visiting a mall frequently or often, and they are more likely than older cohorts to arrive without a specific purchase in mind.
Foot traffic patterns reinforce this experiential appeal. In 2025, 37.6% of indoor mall visits lasted more than 75 minutes, compared to 33.4% for open-air centers and 34.6% for outlets. Indoor malls also captured the largest share of visits from the young-skewing “contemporary households” segment – singles, non-family households, and young couples without children – indicating strong resonance with younger audiences.
As indoor malls expand their experiential offerings, visit durations are rising even further – even as they hold steady or even slightly decline at other formats. For operators, this shift highlights a significant opportunity for indoor malls to deepen their role as climate-controlled third places. And for brands, it means high-impact access to Gen Z consumers in discovery mode – top-of-funnel engagement that is increasingly difficult and expensive to replicate through digital channels alone.
If indoor malls excel at capturing extended, social visits, open-air centers are finding success through convenience. In 2025, open-air centers had the highest shares of both weekday visits (64.0%) and short, sub-30 minutes (36.8%) among the three formats. Grocery anchors, superstores, and essential-service tenants like gyms – more common at open-air centers than at other formats – help drive steady, non-discretionary traffic.
Demographically, open-air centers drew the highest share of affluent families, a key demographic for daily errands. This alignment with higher-income households, combined with weekday consistency, positions open-air centers as reliable errand hubs embedded in community life.
Outlet malls, for their part, have historically differentiated themselves by offering something shoppers couldn’t find elsewhere: an experiential treasure hunt featuring brand-name merchandise at compelling prices. But the decline in long visits shown above suggests that this positioning may be coming under pressure – likely from the rise of off-price and discount chains as well as other low-cost, convenient treasure-hunt alternatives like thrift stores. When shoppers can score attractive deals online or browse for bargains at a nearby T.J. Maxx or Ollie’s Bargain Outlet, the incentive to dedicate time and travel to an outlet trip may no longer feel as compelling – especially for outlet malls’ core audience, which includes meaningful contingents of middle and lower-income consumers with families.
And data points to a subtle but steady erosion in the share of visitors willing to go the extra mile to visit outlet malls. Since 2023, the share of outlet visits from consumers traveling more than 30 miles has slipped from 33.1% to 31.8%, even as long-distance visits to other mall formats have remained relatively stable. This softening of destination demand may be contributing to outlets’ recent traffic lags.
Still, despite these lags in foot traffic, major outlet companies continue to see YoY increases in same-center tenant sales per square foot. The format’s strong visit start to 2026 also suggests that outlets still have significant draw – and that with the right strategy, they could reinvigorate their traffic trends.
One option is for outlet malls to lean further into their immediate trade areas: Nearly 20% of visits to outlets already originate within five miles – a share that edged up from 19.4% in 2023 to 19.9% in 2025. These closer shoppers may be largely responsible for the segment’s rise in short visits, pointing to an opportunity to further augment BOPIS offerings and select essential-use tenants.
Another option is to strengthen outlets’ destination appeal with distinctive retail, dining, and experiential offerings that resonate with value-oriented, larger-household shoppers. But whether they focus on convenience or on justifying the journey – or attempt to balance both – success will depend on identifying who their shoppers are and which missions they are best positioned to own.
As in other areas of retail, shopping center success increasingly depends on strategic clarity. The malls that thrive will be those that clearly define their role in their customers’ lives and execute against it with intention – whether by decisively optimizing for efficiency, fully investing in experience, or thoughtfully integrating both.
Commercial real estate in 2026 is characterized by differentiated performance across markets and asset types. Office recovery trajectories vary meaningfully by metro, retail performance reflects format-specific resilience, and domestic migration patterns continue to influence long-term demand fundamentals.
Many higher-income metros continue to trail 2019 benchmarks but drive the strongest Year-over-year gains, signaling a potential inflection in office utilization trends.
• Sunbelt markets along with New York, NY are closest to pre-pandemic office visit levels, while many coastal gateway and tech-heavy markets trail 2019 benchmarks.
• Many of the metros still furthest below pre-pandemic levels are now posting the strongest year-over-year gains.
• Leasing velocity may accelerate in coastal markets – particularly in high-quality assets – even if full recovery remains distant. The expansion of AI-driven firms and innovation-focused employers could support incremental demand in these ecosystems, reinforcing a bifurcation between top-tier buildings and the broader office inventory.
• Higher-income metros such as San Francisco show deeper structural gaps vs 2019, perhaps due to their higher concentration of hybrid-eligible workers – yet those same metros are driving the strongest YoY recovery in 2025.
• Accelerating growth in 2025 suggests that shifting employer policies, workplace enhancements, or broader labor dynamics may be beginning to drive increased in-office activity.
• Office performance in higher-income markets will increasingly depend on workplace quality and policy alignment. Assets that support premium amenities, modern design, and tenants implementing clear in-office expectations are likely to influence sustained office visits and leasing velocity in these metros.
Retail traffic is broadly improving across states, though performance varies by region and format.
• Retail traffic growth is broad-based, with the majority of states showing year-over-year gains in shopping center traffic in 2025.
• Still, even as many states are posting gains, pockets of softer performance remain – specifically in parts of the Southeast and Midwest.
• Broad-based traffic gains indicate consumer demand is more durable than anticipated. In growth states, operators can shift from defensive stabilization to capturing upside – pushing rents, upgrading tenant quality, and accelerating leasing while momentum holds. In softer markets, the focus should remain on protecting traffic through strong anchors and necessity-driven tenancy.
• Convenience-oriented formats are leading traffic growth, with strip/convenience centers materially outperforming all other shopping center types, and neighborhood and community centers also posting gains. This reinforces the strength of proximity-driven, daily-needs retail.
• Destination retail formats, including regional malls and factory outlets, continue to lag, while super-regional malls were essentially flat. Larger-format, discretionary-driven centers are not capturing the same momentum as convenience-based formats.
• The data suggests that consumer behavior continues to favor convenience, frequency, and necessity over destination-based shopping. Operators should lean into service-oriented and daily-needs tenancy in strip and neighborhood formats, while mall operators may need to further reposition assets toward experiential, mixed-use, or non-retail uses to stabilize traffic.
Domestic migration continues to reshape state-level demand, with gains clustering in select growth corridors.
• Domestic migration drove population gains in parts of the Southeast and Northern Plains, while several Western and Northeastern states show flat or negative migration.
• Some previously strong in-migration states in the South and West, including Texas and Utah, are showing softer movement, while other established migration leaders such as Florida and the Carolinas continue to attract net inbound residents.
• Migration flows are shifting relative to prior years. Operators should temper growth assumptions in states where inflows are slowing and prioritize markets where inbound demand remains strong.
• Florida dominates metro-level migration growth, with eight of the top ten U.S. metros for net domestic migration are in Florida.
• The markets with the strongest domestic migration-driven population gains are not major gateway cities but smaller, often retirement- or lifestyle-oriented metros, suggesting that migration-driven demand is increasingly flowing to secondary markets.
• CRE operators should prioritize expansion, leasing, and site selection in high-growth secondary metros where population inflows can directly translate into retail spending, housing absorption, and service demand.
