Foot Traffic Is the New Rent Roll

Rent comps tell you what a landlord got paid last year. Foot traffic tells you whether that rent is still there next year. If you are underwriting a shopping center in 2026 off comps alone, you are buying the past.

I have been leasing supermarket-anchored centers on Long Island since the early 1990s. For most of that time, the underwriting exercise was simple: pull the comps, apply a market rent, haircut the vacancy, pick a cap rate. That worked because tenants were interchangeable. A 2,000-square-foot inline space was worth roughly what the last 2,000-square-foot inline space was worth.

That is no longer true. The same box in the same center can be worth wildly different rent depending on one thing: how many people actually walk past it, and when.

And we can now measure that. Precisely. Monthly.

Open-Air Is Eating Everyone’s Lunch

Placer.ai’s June 2026 Mall Index tracks 100 top-tier indoor malls, 100 open-air shopping centers, and 100 outlet malls. All three formats posted year-over-year visit growth in the first half of 2026. But the spread is what matters.

Open-air centers have led every month this year. That is not a blip; it is a structural preference. Convenience-driven, park-at-the-door, in-and-out retail is where the American consumer has landed — and open-air neighborhood centers are exactly the product we lease and own on Long Island.

Here is the part most landlords miss. Placer’s audience data shows the median household income of the captured market at malls actually declined modestly between June 2025 and June 2026, while visits went up. Translation: these centers are not growing by squeezing more trips out of affluent shoppers. They are growing by attracting a wider, more value-conscious base. That is a broader, more durable rent roll, not a narrower one.

The New York Number Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud

Now let’s get local, because national averages are useless when you own on Hempstead Turnpike.

Placer.ai’s Industry Trends tool breaks year-over-year visits down by state. For June 2026, New York grocery visits were down 2.0% year over year. New Jersey was down 1.3%. Connecticut was up 0.7%.

So grocery traffic in New York is soft. Does that mean grocery-anchored centers are in trouble? No — and this is exactly why you cannot underwrite off a single headline number. Look at what else is happening in the same state in the same month:

• Fitness: +2.8% YoY in New York
• Discount & dollar stores: +1.0% YoY
• Restaurants: −0.7% YoY
• Superstores: −0.5% YoY

The anchor is not the only thing generating trips anymore. In a lot of my centers, the gym is pulling more bodies through the parking field on a Tuesday night than the supermarket is. The urgent care generates a different trip at a different hour than the pizza place. Those trips have economic value to every other tenant in the center — and almost none of it shows up in a rent comp.

Dayparts Are the Whole Ballgame

Placer’s Q2 2026 retail corridor data makes the point better than I can. Corridor visits are still 12.5% below 2019 levels overall — but that deficit is almost entirely a weekday-daytime problem. Monday-through-Friday visits between 8 AM and 4 PM are running 20% to 30% below pre-pandemic levels, tracking office attendance.

Meanwhile, Friday nights between 8 PM and midnight are running 2.0% above Q2 2019. Saturday evenings are 0.7% above. Average dwell time went from 118 minutes in Q2 2025 to 123 minutes in Q2 2026. Fewer visits, longer visits.

If you are a landlord and you only know your center’s annual traffic count, you know almost nothing. If you know that your center is dead from 9 to 4 and packed from 6 to 10, you know exactly which tenants to chase, which to renew, and which use is worth a percentage-rent clause.

What Underwriting Off Traffic Actually Looks Like

I am not telling anyone to throw out the rent comps. I am telling you to stop treating them as the primary input. Here is the order of operations I use now:

1. Pull the center’s trailing 24 months of visits. Is the trend up, flat, or bleeding? A center with declining visits and rising rents is a center where somebody is about to hand you back the keys.

2. Break out the anchor’s contribution. Placer’s chain-level data on New York Stop & Shop, for example, shows 88 locations generating 76.8 million visits between June 2025 and May 2026 — roughly 873,000 visits per store per year, at 25.4 minutes of average dwell. That is a real, measurable traffic engine you can put a number on.

3. Check the daypart curve. Where are the holes? A hole is a leasing opportunity, not a defect.

4. Then set the rent. Tenants who benefit from the traffic you actually have should pay for it. Tenants who do not benefit should not be underwritten at anchor-adjacent rents.

5. Then pick the cap rate. A center with growing visits and a diversified daypart curve deserves a tighter cap than a center with the same rent roll and flat traffic. Those two assets are not the same asset, and pretending they are is how people lose money.

Sources

• Placer.ai — “Placer.ai June 2026 Mall Index: Momentum Heading Into H2 2026”, July 8, 2026
• Placer.ai — “Retail Corridors Emerge as Evening Destinations in 2026”, July 9, 2026
• Placer.ai — Industry Trends: Year-Over-Year Visits by State, June 2026 data (Grocery, Fitness, Discount & Dollar Stores, Restaurants, Superstores)
• Placer.ai Analytics — Chain report, Stop & Shop (New York), June 1, 2025 – May 31, 2026
• CBRE — “Q1 2026 U.S. Retail Figures: Retail Rent Growth Supported by Drop in New Supply”, April 29, 2026

© 2026 Schuckman Realty Inc. · Hicksville, NY · All rights reserved.