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.

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

Annual Reports

Other Documents

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.  

    The total visitation for calendar year 2024 was 18.5M, which was up 23.4% over the previous year. 

    We dug in to the data and wanted to compare the same 27-week window during peak visitation time (end of June-end of December) and discoverd we are essentially back to pre-pandemic levels, for the first time.  

    2019  = 10,268,260                            

    2022  = 7,502,559      2023 = 8,639,774

    2024 = 10,221,735

  • 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. 

    Downtown ground floor business sales chart
    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. 

Development Tracking