CBD Employee Estimate

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Introduction
Do you open stores in the CBD’s around Australia and ask yourself where do people work? We have now developed a dataset at Mesh Block level to give you this information. Our new employee estimate data is available that details the number of employees in a very small CBD area.

If you have Telcos, QSR’s, convenience stores or any other business servicing employees in the CBD, this data should be essential for your decision making process.

Coverage
This new dataset covers Melbourne and immediate surrounding postcodes, Sydney and North Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Canberra.

Disaggregation Method
For most purposes, SA2s are either too large or the wrong ‘shape’ (that is, they do not align with common use boundaries such as postcodes). In the CBD’s we have disaggregated the data into the much smaller mesh block geographic units.

Using an unrelated business address database (Spectrum’s Business Hit List, containing approximately 700,000 records across Australia), the business counts were distributed into the mesh blocks based on the relative proportion of business locations in a given mesh block compared with the source SA2. That is, if an SA2 contained 1,000 business locations according to the Hit List, and a given mesh block contained 100 of those, then 10% of each value from the ABS counts would be attributed to that mesh block.

Using this estimated business data by size and division, we are able to estimate the number of employees also at mesh block geographic units.

While any single count for a single mesh block will be approximate, the errors average down towards zero as large numbers of mesh blocks are grouped together (for example, to assess the business population of an area such as Docklands, or how many people work in a 300 m radius of a potential store). Small values and values from specific cells (that is, specifying both type and size) should always be interpreted with caution.

Employment numbers are worked off a series of averages for each ABS grouping such that the Total employment Australia wide adds up to the current levels of employment according to the ABS. When computed last this was 11,918,000 persons in employment in this country.

Data Availability
The information can be provided in Pitney Bowes MapInfo formats, or as Google Earth files, depending on how you wish to use it.