In the bustling streets of Soweto, home to about 1.8-million people, the hooting of taxi drivers echoes as they drop off patrons outside Dobsonville Mall — a thriving hub where families and individuals converge daily to shop for essentials. Like spaza shops that offer quick convenience, the mall absorbs the flow of millions of footsteps every month.
What seems like a convenience hub actually conceals an unseen layer of quiet intelligence that observes it all, converting every smartphone ping into a high-definition map of human-tracking patterns, measuring movement. Those patterns are the currency that the landlord, Vukile Properties, mines to challenge the old assumptions about anchor tenants, tenant mix and the very architecture of mall success.
“We used to think of [some] department store categories as anchor tenants — stores that drive foot traffic and benefit others in the mall,” said Vukile Property Fund Southern Africa MD Itumeleng Mothibeli.
But with a tech tool that enables the anonymised, legally compliant tracking of visitor journeys throughout a physical area, which uses fibre and Wi-Fi, Vukile can see which tenants actually draw people through their doors, where they linger and which stores they pass by.
“We’re realising that some traditional department stores, such as Edgars, may not actually function as true anchors in the way we previously assumed,” said Mothibeli, referring to one of SA’s iconic department store chains and the prototypical anchor tenant in malls.
Deep data
Vukile is not alone. Across the property industry, landlords such as Growthpoint, Redefine and Hyprop have installed captive portal Wi-Fi and dark fibre backbones to capture every anonymised shopper’s heartbeat.
Still, the increasing use of mobility data raises important questions about privacy, ownership, and personal consent in public spaces. SA’s Protection of Personal Information Act (Popia) sets clear standards on the processing of personal information, and upholding people’s right to privacy.
Between the landlord and the tenant an intermediary is at work — turning foot traffic into data. On the surface, it’s just another mall, with the usual shop fronts and flow of customers. But underneath the tiled corridors and security cameras, a third-party tech platform is watching — not with eyes, but with data.
Phone signals of shoppers at Dobsonville Mall are picked up by access points installed across the shopping centre. The signals are routed through network switches, and Fortinet systems log their movement from one zone to another — creating a digital map of how people move through the space.
The access points can’t identify the owner of the device; only that there is a device moving in the mall. However, while the technology preserves the privacy of consumers, there is still immense power in mobility data, as it assists landlords and property owners in identifying “hot” and “cold” spots in the centre.
Built on open-access fibre and native Wi-Fi, the platform captures the pulse of foot traffic in high definition: who walks in, where they pause, how long they linger, and how often they return.
“In the past, mall developments followed a cookie-cutter approach. To secure financing from banks, you needed certain big-name tenants on your list. Without them, funding was still possible — but at a higher cost. You’d sign five anchor tenants and have 90% of your mix sorted. The unintended consequence? Most malls ended up looking the same,” Mothibeli said.
Mothibeli, also president of the SA Property Owners Association (Sapoa), said customer research used to be less refined. “Market potential assessments would be commissioned, analysing census data — if an area had 80,000 households and two malls, they’d say there’s room for another 26,000m2. Then the decision to build was made,” he said.
“We now use footfall and mobility data to track shopper behaviour. If an anchor’s turnover is lower than nearby anchors ... we can see that people are in the mall but not shopping at a given anchor. We then engage the anchor to say, the foot traffic is there, but you’re not winning in your category.”
The catchment population in Soweto, according to information from the City of Johannesburg, comprises 346,777 households, a population density of 6,685 and a labour force of 72.2% — most of whom are government employees — though 41.4% of the population remains unemployed.
Yet, this population continues to support the mall and others such as Jabulani Mall, Westgate Shopping Centre and Dobson Point Shopping Centre. The informal economy — from back room rentals to street vendors and township food kitchens — plays an important role in sustaining consumer activity.
Former Capitec CEO Gerrie Fourie has pointed to the informal market as a significant and often underestimated driver of economic resilience, even as many people in that category rely on remittances and social grants.
“What we’ve done at Vukile is set up a dedicated desk that focuses purely on understanding our customers so we can curate the tenant mix more intentionally,” said Mothibeli, who has been with the real estate investment trust for 13 years.
Kalasipa Moenyane, Vukile’s manager of data and customer analytics, said another data set — sourced from outside the mall — from a different service provider helped track competitor activity.
“We did an analysis to assess whether we should add a restaurant in the middle of the centre. We started by using out-of-mall data to see where people come from and where they go when they leave our centres,” Moenyane said.
“We look at turnover to see if tenants are doing well. Is foot traffic high? Do the numbers justify adding more restaurants? Are rent-to-sales ratios low? Then we throw up a geofence for three or four days and study what kind of people go there, and what the tenant mix looks like so we can compare it with our own,” he said.
Spillover effect
At Dobsonville Mall, Pedros has become more than a fast-food outlet — it’s a drawcard. Paired with Mr Price and Shoprite, the three account for about 102,000 shared visits, pulling in steady foot traffic that spills across the centre, Moenyane said.
“When we look at Pedros, it’s not just about the turnover they bring in. It’s about the spillover effect; when someone visits Pedros, they often go to Mr Price, Power, or OK Furniture as well. It’s one of the strongest tenants in terms of driving foot traffic across the mall,” Mothibeli said.
According to the latest Sapoa retail trends report, compiled by MSCI, smaller malls are outpacing their larger counterparts, driven by shifting consumer preferences and stronger trading performance, due to proximity and convenience.
“Food has remained the steady anchor in this market, with consumers continuing to prioritise essentials, a trend that has consistently supported trading densities across grocery and fresh produce categories,” said MSCI Real Estate vice-president Eileen Andrew.
In its results for the year to end-March, Vukile reported strong growth across its township retail portfolio, which is valued at R16.7bn. The portfolio’s value rose 8.5%, while like-for-like net operating income increased 6.4%. Vacancies remained low at 1.7%, supported by active leasing and tenant retention strategies.
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