Ask the street a question while the unit stands empty.
Every VacatAd site runs free public WiFi behind a sign-in portal. With your brief, that portal can also carry three or four short, optional questions. The answers come back as a clean report on local demand, catchment and what the parade is missing, from people who were standing next to your building when they answered it.
For landlords, asset managers and agents who would rather a void produced something than nothing.
- Never gated on WiFi access
- Questions you approve
- Aggregate reporting
- No political questions
- Runs on sites you instruct
A void tells you nothing.
You know the unit is empty. You do not know who is passing it, what the parade is short of, or whether the interest your agent is reporting reflects anything happening on the street. Meanwhile the building is already hosting a piece of live infrastructure that people choose to connect to every week.
Footfall is modelled, not asked
Counts on a high street are usually modelled or bought in, and they describe movement rather than intent. Somebody walking past is not somebody who would take the unit, or shop in it once it is let.
Research is a separate project
Commissioning street interviews for a single void is slow and rarely worth the fee, and the fieldwork stops the day the researcher goes home. Nothing carries on listening after the invoice.
The asset itself is silent
The one thing standing on that spot all year is your own building. For most of a void it gathers dust, an accumulation of post, and no information whatsoever about the street it sits on.
Every occupied unit becomes a listening post.
Guests connect to the free WiFi. Before they browse, they are offered a short optional survey, written to your brief and approved by you before it goes anywhere near the portal.
Written to your brief
You tell us the decision you are trying to make. We draft three to five questions, you approve the wording, and they go live at the next portal refresh. Under forty-five seconds to complete, or the completion rate collapses and the data is worthless.
Answered next to the asset
Everyone answering is within range of your unit, on that day, in that weather, on that parade. It is a narrower and more current sample than a panel study, and a great deal closer to the street than a desk report.
Reported for a letting meeting
Findings arrive as something an agent can put in front of a landlord: requested uses, catchment split, when the street is actually alive, and cleaned verbatim themes. No academic apparatus and no fifty-page appendix.
What you can ask
Pick a brief, or bring your own question. We write the wording, you approve it.
Letting and demand
What would bring you into this unit? Workshop, showroom, dark kitchen, storage, treatment rooms, community use, something nobody on the parade offers yet.
Catchment
How far did you come, do you work nearby or pass through, and how did you get here. The difference between a destination parade and a corridor one.
Amenity gaps
What is missing here. Food, services, last-mile and parcel, EV charging, childcare, a gym, somewhere to sit down that is not a chain.
Use-class and tenant tests
A soft read on a proposed use or tenant type before you commit a marketing budget to it, and before an agent takes a position they cannot easily walk back.
Estate pulse
The same three questions running on every site you instruct, so an industrial estate in Leeds and a parade in Bristol are finally answering an identical question and can be read side by side.
Your own question
Anything that fits inside the rules below. If a question would not survive being read out to the person answering it, we will tell you before it goes on the portal.
No political questions. No special category data. No survey standing between anybody and the WiFi.
How it works
Ten minutes of your time at the start, then it runs alongside everything else on the site.
You instruct a unit
A single void or a batch, exactly as you would for any VacatAd occupation. Insights runs on sites we are already on.
We agree the brief
One short call. You tell us the decision you are trying to make, we draft the questions, you approve the wording. That is the whole of your involvement unless you want more.
The portal goes live
WiFi, window display, local listings and the optional survey, usually within a week of install. Nothing about the guest experience changes except one extra screen people can skip.
Answers aggregate
Responses are counted and themed as they arrive. Nothing that identifies an individual respondent appears in anything we send you.
You get the report
Weekly flash, monthly, or a single pack at the end of the occupation. On Plus we will also walk your agent through the findings before viewings week.
One page an agent can hand over.
With a fuller pack behind it if you want one, and the method stated plainly enough that a sceptical asset manager can weigh it.
In the one-pager
Requested uses ranked for that parade, catchment split between local and passing, response timing as a proxy for when the street is actually alive, and the three themes that came up most in free text.
In the appendix
Exact question wording, field dates, response counts, completion rate, and a short method and privacy note. Everything a landlord or a lender would ask before quoting a number back at somebody.
Across the estate
Where you have instructed more than one site, the same questions are compared between them and tracked month to month, which is usually more useful than any single site's numbers on their own.
What this is, and what it is not.
The people who answer are people who chose to connect to free public WiFi near your unit, and then chose to answer a question. That is a self-selecting sample, and it will over-represent anyone who wanted WiFi: people without a generous data allowance, people waiting for somebody, people working nearby. We would rather say that on the page than have a research buyer discover it in the first meeting.
Good for
- Direction and ranking: which uses come up repeatedly on this parade and which never do.
- Comparison between your own sites answering an identical question.
- Movement over time on a site we are on for months rather than weeks.
- Cheap early evidence before you commit a marketing budget or a letting position.
- Free-text themes, which are frequently the most useful part and the hardest to get any other way.
Not good for
- A representative survey of a catchment. It is not one, and we will not present it as one.
- A statutory consultation or a planning submission that requires a defensible sample.
- Any decision that needs a margin of error attached to it.
- Anything where a small number of responses would be quoted as though it were a census.
Every report states its response count and its dates so you can judge the weight yourself. Where a count is too small to support a conclusion, we say so rather than filling the page.
The non-negotiables.
A captive portal that asks for anything at all sits under UK GDPR and PECR, and the ICO has fined companies for getting exactly this wrong. These rules are not preferences, and they are not negotiable per brief.
- The WiFi works whether or not anyone answers. Access is never gated on a response, and there is no degraded connection for people who skip.
- Research consent and marketing consent are separate, and both start unticked. Agreeing to answer a question is not agreeing to be emailed. Why that distinction matters →
- No special category data. No political opinions, health, religion, ethnicity, sexuality or anything else in that class, whoever is asking and whatever the brief is worth.
- The portal is a public space. Surveys are written for a general adult audience, and we do not target, profile or build reporting around children.
- Reporting is aggregate by default. Personal data does not form part of an Insights report, and free text is cleaned before anything reaches you.
- Retention you can defend. A stated period, agreed in the brief, and actually applied rather than described.
- No sale of personal data. Not to advertisers on the portal, not to anyone, not as a side product of anything else we run on the site.
If a brief genuinely needs to contact the people who responded, that is a different product with its own consent path, its own wording and its own agreement. It never gets bolted onto a WiFi login.
The fieldwork is already standing there.
We are on site because the unit is empty and we are running a service in it. The router is live, the portal is live, and the audience is whoever is next to your building this week.
- No crew to mobilise. There is no separate fieldwork exercise to fund, which is why a question that would be uneconomic to ask for a single void is affordable here.
- It runs for as long as we do. Not a single afternoon of street interviews, but a slow reading taken over weeks or months on the same spot.
- The unit keeps doing everything else. The window still carries advertising, local independents still get free listings, the building is still monitored and still fully lettable.
- One relationship. Same agreement, same install, same team. Insights is a layer on the operation you already have, not another supplier on the schedule.
How it is priced
Exact fees sit in your proposal. What follows is the shape of it, so nothing arrives as a surprise halfway through an occupation.
Core pulse
- A three-question pulse on every site you instruct
- An end-of-occupation summary for each unit
- Question wording agreed with you before it goes live
- No additional fee and no mid-occupation upsell
Insights Plus
- A custom brief written around a specific decision
- Branded or white-labelled reporting for your own clients
- Multi-site comparison across an estate or portfolio
- Reporting cadence you choose, weekly through to one final pack
- A walkthrough call with your agent before viewings week
Who it is for
Landlords and asset managers
Anyone who would rather a void produced intelligence about its own location than produce nothing at all while it waits for a tenant.
Agents
Sharper local evidence for a landlord report or a tenant conversation, gathered on the actual parade rather than pulled from a regional dataset.
Multi-site owners
The same pulse across an industrial estate, a shopping parade or a national portfolio, which is where the comparison starts being worth more than any single answer.
Not for political campaigns, opinion harvesting, or anyone hoping to buy a list of guest email addresses.
Questions we get asked
It is short, optional and skippable, and access to the WiFi is never gated on answering. If completion drops we shorten the survey or take it off that site. A portal that irritates the street is bad for the businesses advertising on the window too, so the incentives here point the same way as yours.
It depends on the unit, the footfall past it, how long we are there and how far the signal reaches onto the pavement. We will not quote you a number before running one on your site, because any number we gave you would be made up. The first report tells you the real rate on that specific parade, and you decide from there whether it is worth continuing.
Yes, on Insights Plus. Agents routinely want the findings in their own document for a landlord report, and that is a normal part of the brief rather than an extra negotiation.
Yes, under a normal paid scope like any other client, with the questions agreed in advance and the method stated in the report. What we do not do is run vague unpaid surveys on a council's behalf as decoration, which helps nobody and muddies what the service actually is.
No. We do not collect political opinions on the portal, and we do not collect special category data of any kind. This is a fixed rule rather than a per-brief judgement, which makes it much easier to hold.
The aggregate findings are delivered to you under the services terms. Personal data is handled under our privacy notice, with each party's role set out in the agreement, and it is not handed over as a marketing list. If your brief needs something different from that, it needs a different agreement, not a different setting on the portal.
No. It is a client research product with its own brief, its own scope and its own fee, commissioned because owners and agents want local signal from stock that is otherwise sitting idle. Occupation, advertising and research are separate commercial layers of the same operation on the site, and each one is judged on what it delivers. If the research is not useful to you, do not buy it.
Empty units still have a street outside them.
Free public WiFi, live advertising in the window, and a short question you actually want the answer to. Tell us the decision you are trying to make and we will tell you whether the portal can help with it.