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Mission Bay’s New Chase Center: Cui Bono?

The new Mission Bay Chase Center is an indoor arena in San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood and now serves as the home venue for the Golden State Warriors.

The Warriors have played their home games at Oakland Arena from 1971 to 2019, but the Chase Center’s September 6 opening with Metallica and San Francisco Symphony indicates a new set of winners and losers for the closest 11 acres of retail, offices, and public spaces.

We used Orbital Insight GO to geofence neighboring commercial districts to monitor the real-time change in traffic visitation to the area as the Chase Center and its 18,064 person venue capacity impacts Mission Bay.

Chase Center traffic
Orbital Insight GO geofences the Chase Center and nearby areas of interest to monitor traffic levels.

Chase Center

Orbital Insight GO leveraged its normalized daily foot traffic algorithm to measure traffic at a hand-drawn geofence encompassing the Chase Center. With years of historical data, we focused on 2019 to monitor the construction trends showing a clear day of week pattern, culminating in the center’s opening on September 6 as the venue reached capacity to see Metallica perform with the San Francisco Symphony.

Mission Bay Chase Center Opening Traffic Uptick

Winners and Losers

While the city of Oakland lost a beloved sports franchise, the Mission bay retailers, restaurants, offices, and landlords stand to gain.

We monitored foot traffic trends at various Mission Bay subdistricts and areas of interest using the same methodology as the Chase Center monitoring project, to quantify the impact from the opening performance.

Left: The area south of the Chase Center experienced a slight traffic gain. Right: The area north of the Chase Center saw no impact.
Left: The area south of the Chase Center experienced a slight traffic gain. Right: The area north of the Chase Center saw no impact.

While the new Chase Center has only been open one month, it appears the neighboring bars and restaurants south of the Chase Center are poised to benefit from an influx of traffic.

We understand that the Metallica performance and a pre-season Warriors-Lakers game may not be indicative of the future impact on San Francisco real estate owners and investors as well as their commercial tenants. As a result, we’ve set our monitoring criteria to monitor Mission Bay in perpetuity and alert us for meaningful traffic changes.


To explore your own creative algorithm combinations using the GO Platform, contact Orbital Insight: sales@orbitalinsight.com