Data & Reporting

Downtown Halifax Business Commission (DHBC) works daily to identify the challenges and the opportunities for our 1,600 members, priding ourselves on being known as "the go-to resource" for all things Downtown Halifax.

DHBC acknowledges the hyperdynamic nature of the current business environment and as such is data driven, assuring our opinions and actions are based on research and evidence.

Annual Reports

State of the Downtown Report

In June 2023, DHBC released the first 'State of Downtown' report. Now with our 2nd edition hot-off-the-presses, we now have an annual reference point when reporting this type of data.
2024 State of the Downtown Report (released June 26, 2024)
2023 State of the Downtown Report
DHBC's Annual Report

2023-2024 Annual Report (Released June 26, 2024)
2022-2023 Annual Report

Visitation & Sales Data

Pedestrian Activity ("footfall")

Pedestrian activity (or “footfall”) used to be measured by students with clipboards. Then it became more sophisticated, with electronic pedestrian counters, or occasional satellite images. Today the wide availability of cell phone data provides detailed information about who is in the Downtown Halifax area.
DHBC started purchasing data from a company called Environics, who now provide us with quarterly visitation data.
Our latest data shows a very strong increase in visititation to Downtown from April - June of this year, compared to the same timeframe in 2023.
A total of 846,648 more people visited Downtown Halifax over the Spring of 2024.
April - June 2023 = 3,633,311
April - June 2024 = 4,479,959

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Year Over Year Comparison

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April 2019-March 2020: 18,636,244
April 2022-March 2023: 14,456,721
April 2023-March 2024: 16,233,475
Ground Floor Sales

Historically, sales data has been notoriously difficult and expensive to obtain for Downtown Halifax, but DHBC now has a partnership with Dalhousie's Transportation Collaboratory (DalTRAC) that allows us to obtain anonymous sales data, tracked by geographic location and sector. To date, only three data sets are available, January 2017 - December 2017, September 2021 - August 2022 and September 2022-August 2023.

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September 2022-August 2023 saw total revenue of $8.3 Billion for all Downtown Halifax businesses, representing 21.1% of all Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) sales.