By Megan Kelley

Review Writer

Lake Orion’s Downtown Development Authority board met for their regularly scheduled meeting last week where the board received a presentation from Erick Phillips from Main Street of Oakland County on current market data.

According to Phillips, the data, called Placer.ai, is available at the county level.

Using apps downloaded on a person’s phoen, Placer.ai, a third-party company, tracks a person’s phone and compiles and reports that data to clients, such as Oakland County.

“While I’m not the technical geek on how they capture this data, basically, every one of us has a cell phone and this company actually tracks the visitors into your downtown,” Phillips said. “Basically, the way the company has explained it to me is they have relationships with over 500 different application providers.

“So, whenever you download an app on your android or cell phone or iPhone, it will ask you, you’ve probably seen it, ‘Do you want to share your location always, only while using the app or never?’ If you select ‘always’, you’re in here.”

According to the data, over the past three years (Jan. 1, 2019 – Feb. 28, 2022) downtown Lake Orion has been visited 7.5 million times.

Data also shows that the majority of visits to downtown Lake Orion occur on Friday and Saturday, between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. and the highest average length of stay is 15-29 minutes. The second highest length of stay being more than two -and-a-half hours.

Village Council President Ken Van Portfliet stated that the length-of-stay statistic validated the downtown’s 15-minute parking zones which business owners have been vocal about wanting more of.

Board Treasurer Matt Shell questioned if the people who live within the DDA district are being tracked all the time, which would in turn then skew some of that data. Phillips did not know the answer to that question but said he intends to find out more.

Other featured data includes demographic information like median household income, age, employment status, etc. as well as other places that downtown Lake Orion visitors also visit.

Main Street of Oakland County is expected to provide this data and more to Lake Orion’s DDA and aid them in understanding and utilizing it effectively.

“It’s almost data by a firehose a lot of the time but that’s our job, to decipher this and pick out what’s important to the downtown,” Phillips said.

“As you know, there are four pillars to Main Street: design, promotion, organization and economic vitality,” Phillips said. “With Oakland County, I’ve done a lot of business consulting with small businesses. We use a lot of this tapestry data with small business consulting.

“So, as you’re working with a small business owner, it’s imperative that they know who their ideal client is, depending on where they’re placing the business, cash flow, things like that. I did a lot of business consulting, and this is by far the coolest data,” he said.

The Lake Orion Downtown Development Authority Board of Directors meets at 6:30 p.m. on the second Tuesday of the month at Village Hall, 21 E. Church St.

Online: downtownlakeorion.org