The headline numbers look good. Indoor malls were up 6.3% year over year in May 2025 (Placer.ai, September 2025 Mall Index). CF Toronto Eaton Centre hit $1,642 per square foot in 2025, up from $1,457 in 2023 (ICSC Canadian Mall Performance Study, 2026). Institutional investors are back: Canada recorded 17 retail property transactions over $100 million in H1 2025, more than double the 8 recorded in H1 2024 (MSCI Real Assets, 2025).
Read those numbers, and you could conclude that traffic is recovering and the work is largely done.
It isn't. The aggregate numbers are hiding a split that matters enormously for how you approach this.
The Split Nobody Talks About
Class A malls grew 1.7% year over year from 2023 to 2024. Super-regional malls, which describe most of Canada's major enclosed shopping centres, dropped 1.2% year over year in the same period (PassBy, 2025-2026 Mall Foot Traffic Analysis). Class A malls are still 2.5% below 2019 visit levels. Class B and lower-tier properties are 13.2% below (Newmark, May 2025).
The properties posting strong numbers have made deliberate choices. The ones struggling are largely waiting for the market to bring shoppers back.
Add the Hudson's Bay collapse to that picture. All 96 Canadian stores closed on June 1, 2025. In properties where HBC was the anchor, foot traffic didn't just lose a tenant. It lost the pedestrian engine, and the entire leasing strategy was built. That's not a problem that solves itself.
So what actually moves the needle?
Food and Beverage: The Most Underrated Driver
The data on F&B's impact on mall visits is more compelling than most operators realize.
Shoppers who visit a food and beverage retailer during a mall trip complete 167% more transactions than those who don't (Coniq loyalty data analysis). Dwell time with an F&B visit runs 106 minutes versus 85.4 minutes without one, a 24% increase in time on property (Coniq). And F&B visitors return 19% faster: 71.7 days between visits compared to 85 days for non-F&B visitors.
40% of visitors choose their shopping centre based primarily on available F&B options (ECE "Destination Food" study, cited by ICSC). Yorkdale's decision years ago to bring in Jamie Oliver and Canada's first Cheesecake Factory didn't just fill space. It changed the property's competitive position. The sales per square foot data tells the rest of that story.
F&B space allocation has grown from 5% of gross leasable area a decade ago to 10-15% in leading North American properties today (ICSC). For most Canadian malls, this is still an underdeveloped lever.
Digital Discovery Is a Foot Traffic Channel
88% of mobile local searches lead to a store visit within 24 hours (Google). 76% of "near me" searches result in a business visit within a day (Google). These aren't e-commerce statistics. They're in-store traffic statistics.
If your property doesn't own the local search results for the categories your tenants operate in, you're invisible at the moment a shopper is deciding where to go. That's not a marketing problem. It's a traffic problem.
AI-driven traffic to retail websites jumped 805% during the 2025 holiday season as consumers used AI tools to research before visiting (Adobe Analytics, November 2025). We covered what this means for property-level content strategy in [link to B3: How Does Your Mall Get Found in an AI Search World?]. The short version: if AI search engines can't find a clear, current answer about what your property offers, they'll send that shopper somewhere else.
Experiential Anchors and the HBC Opportunity
41% of shoppers say they would visit malls more often for experiences (ICSC, 2024). Experiential tenants, fitness concepts, entertainment venues, and immersive activations are generating visits of 2 to 4 hours compared to the 30 to 60-minute average for traditional retail shopping (SuperPark United, October 2025). That difference compounds across a full week of traffic.
The HBC vacancy, as painful as it is in the short term, is the largest repositioning opportunity most affected properties will ever have. A 100,000 to 200,000 square foot former anchor space redeveloped around an entertainment or fitness concept, a food hall, a mixed-use residential component, or a rotating experiential program changes the traffic profile of the entire property.
The properties treating that vacancy as a real estate problem are thinking too narrowly. It's a marketing strategy problem. What you put there determines what kind of shopper comes, how often, and how long they stay.
Events Drive Visits, But Not the Way You Think
Events absolutely generate traffic lifts. A concert-timed SMS campaign targeting nearby shoppers drove a 30% foot traffic increase for one electronics retailer, with surrounding stores seeing lifts of 11 to 69% depending on category alignment (Ariadne Analytics, 2025).
But Placer.ai's July 2025 data flags something worth noting: major promotional events may pull demand forward rather than generate sustained incremental traffic. A sale weekend that's busy because next weekend is now quiet isn't a net gain.
The events that build traffic over time are the ones that create a reason to come back. Seasonal programming, recurring activations, and community-rooted events develop visit habits, not just spikes. Year-round event calendars consistently outperform properties that concentrate activity in Q4.
Loyalty: The Infrastructure Underneath All of It
Traffic tactics work better when you have a loyalty infrastructure to capture and reinforce the visits they generate. 72% of consumers are more likely to spend with a brand because of a loyalty program. Repeat customers spend 3x more per visit than first-time shoppers (Rivo, 2026).
The goal of a loyalty program at the property level isn't points. It's first-party data and return visits. Every tactic in this article, F&B draws, events, experiential activations, and digital discovery, gets more efficient when there's a system underneath it capturing who came, why, and whether they came back.
Traffic doesn't happen to a well-run property. It's built, deliberately, across every channel that touches a shopper before and during their visit.
Interested in what a traffic-focused marketing strategy looks like at your property? [Link to contact/book a meeting]
