How do I run a demographic analysis?
A demographic analysis answers who lives and spends time around a point. This page goes through the full round on one address, Lørenvangen 22 in Oslo, and shows which map layer and which report answers each question.
The question
Chains that run shops, gyms or food service ask the same question from two directions:
- Where should the next location be? You have a couple of candidate addresses and need to know who can reach them, not who lives in the municipality.
- Which of my locations has the right catchment area? You already have the site, and you need the numbers for a rent negotiation or a decision to terminate the lease.
Both require that the demographics are tied to actual travel time to and from the point, and that income and wealth are read at grunnkrets level (the smallest SSB statistical area). A municipality average for Oslo covers 700,000 people and says nothing about who walks through the door.
The round below is the same whichever of the two directions you come from.
Step 1: set the catchment area with Travel distance
Coming soon!
Travel distance sits in the right-hand tool rail and draws an isochrone: the area you can reach within a time budget from the point you click. The area follows the road network and the timetables, not a circle, and that difference decides whether the numbers are usable.
- Click Travel distance in the right-hand tool rail, and click the candidate address on the map.
- Select the travel mode. For a gym or a grocery shop, Walking and Cycling are the two that matter; Car and Public transport belong to larger catchment areas.
- Set the time budget. Ten minutes on foot and ten minutes by bike give two areas of very different extent, and both are worth putting on the same map in their own colour.
- Set departure or arrival with a time of day. The choice matters most for public transport, where departures are fixed in the timetable.
The duration is set once and applies to every travel mode you add, so you compare equal time budgets against each other. Here both are set to ten minutes from Lørenvangen 22: walking in green and cycling in yellow.
The difference is the whole point of calculating in travel time. The walking area covers Løren, Sinsenengen and Økern; the cycling area stretches from Sandaker in the west to Alna in the east, and holds a customer base many times larger. A municipality figure does not separate the two.
Catchment area and travel distance - methodology explains the speed assumptions per travel mode and what makes an isochrone smaller than expected. Until Travel distance is available to everyone, you read the same map layers on the grunnkretser around the address instead.
Step 2: add the demographic map layers
The layers under Demographics show the figures from Statistisk sentralbyrå (SSB) per grunnkrets. Open Map layer at the top right, select Browse layers, and click the Demographics tile. Add one layer at a time: several choropleth layers on top of each other become unreadable.
Open Legend at the bottom left of the map before you read the colours. Without it, the map is colours without a scale.
Population is the starting point: the number of residents per grunnkrets by registered home address. At Løren the grunnkretser lie close together and the figures per area range from a few hundred to well over 3,000 people, so you see at once which direction from the address carries weight.
If the isochrones from step 1 are still on the map, you read the population straight off the areas they cover. The grunnkrets around the address itself has 2,712 residents, and the one to the south-west of it, towards Hasle, has 3,570.
Daytime population answers the other half of the question: where people actually are during working hours. For a gym this is the difference between a morning and evening profile and a lunchtime profile.
The difference between the two layers is the point. A block with a low resident population and a high daytime population is an office location; a district with the opposite pattern is somewhere people come home to.
Age distribution shows the average age per grunnkrets. The colour scale runs from under 20 to over 75 years, and in an area like Løren the grunnkretser sit close together within a narrow range, so it is the figure on each area you read, not the colour. Even so, the average age varies by more than ten years between neighbouring areas.
Households shows the number of families and which composition dominates the area. Each grunnkrets gets its dominant type and the count written on the map, and the legend lists the types that actually occur in the view you are looking at. The full category list is on Demographics. The filter narrows on Enslige (prosent), Par (prosent), Flerfamilier (prosent) and Antall personer, so you can ask for the areas where one type dominates.
Step 3: read income and wealth at grunnkrets level
This is the point where a municipality average stops helping. Income and Wealth are separate map layers under Demographics and show the average per grunnkrets, not per municipality.
The figures have the annual tax settlement from the Norwegian Tax Administration (Skatteetaten) as their underlying basis, but they are aggregated per grunnkrets by Statistisk sentralbyrå (SSB) before they reach Placepoint. The level of aggregation and the current statistical year are given on Income and Wealth.
If you need income, wealth and age in the same layer, use Income and wealth statistics instead. That layer carries the number of people within each segment of income, wealth and age, and the filter narrows on Average age, Average wealth and Average income.
Step 4: open the Demographics report
Coming soon!
Report: Demographics takes the same SSB figures and sets them against a comparison area you choose yourself. Select Demographics from the report list on a selected property, and the report opens as a panel with five tabs.
| Tab | What you get from it |
|---|---|
| Demographics | Gender and age distribution and life stage profile, with the percentage difference against the comparison area |
| Demographics Over Time | Whether the area is growing or shrinking, from around 2010 |
| Overview | Residents, in- and out-commuters, daytime population, average age, dwellings, average income and average wealth on one screen |
| Statistics | Income and wealth in bands, not just as averages, plus marital status, family and education |
| Housing statistics | Living conditions, form of ownership, dwelling area and property prices in the area |
The Statistics tab is the one that answers the question an average cannot: it shows income and wealth split into bands, from under NOK 100,000 to over NOK 1.5 million for income, and from under NOK 50,000 to over NOK 4 million for wealth. Two grunnkretser with the same average income can have completely different distributions, and it is the distribution that decides whether the customer base exists.
The population figure in the report is net registered residence, not daytime population. For daytime figures, go back to the map layer.
Step 5: keep the candidates and export
A demographic analysis of one address is rarely the answer. You compare three or five, and then the round has to be kept:
- Tags hold the candidate list across projects. Tag every address you have assessed, and put the assessment in the name of the tag.
- Projects gather the addresses in one case, with activities as notes on each.
- Show table in an analysis has Export, which downloads the table as Excel.
With Placepoint AI
Placepoint AI is the same registers the map layers build on, but available in Claude. There you describe the whole task in a single request instead of adding one map layer at a time, and you get back a report you can pass on.
The prompt below is the whole task this page goes through manually, put in one go:
Vi vurderer et nytt treningssenter i Lørenvangen 22 i Oslo.
Lag en demografirapport for nedslagsfeltet rundt adressen:
- 10 minutter til fots og 10 minutter på sykkel som to separate nedslagsfelt
- befolkning, aldersfordeling og husholdningstyper i hvert nedslagsfelt
- inntekt og formue per grunnkrets, ikke bare kommunetall
- dagbefolkning i tillegg til bosatte
- eksisterende treningssentre innenfor nedslagsfeltene, med avstand
Avslutt med en anbefaling om lokasjonen holder, og hvilke tall som taler imot.
Lever som PDF med kart for hvert nedslagsfelt.
The prompt is written as a task, not as a search: it says which geography applies, which variables to include, at what level of detail income and wealth should be read, and what the deliverable should be. Those are the four things that decide whether the answer is usable.
The answer was a 14 page report, which can be downloaded: Lørenvangen 22 - demographics and catchment area (PDF, 14 pages).
The report calculates both isochrones, aggregates the SSB figures per grunnkrets for each of them and sets the result against the Oslo average. Within ten minutes on foot there are 22,652 people spread across 12 grunnkretser, within ten minutes by bike 106,192. The daytime population is higher than the resident population in both areas. The average income in the cycling area is NOK 428,600 against NOK 517,700 for Oslo, that is 83%, while the walking area sits at 94% of the Oslo average. There are 17 gyms within the cycling area, and one of them 385 metres from the address.
Just as useful is what the report says it does not cover: ethnicity and immigrant background are not in the data, the distance to each competitor is a straight line and not an actual route, and a grunnkrets is counted in full when the isochrone touches it, not weighted by area. The last point means the figure for the small walking area is probably a little high, and the report says so itself.
More finished reports and shorter prompts are on Examples of using Placepoint AI.
See also
- Map layer: Demographics - all eleven layers in the category, with filtering per layer.
- Report: Demographics - the five tabs in detail.
- Catchment area - methodology - definitions, travel modes and speed assumptions.
- Analysis - the market analyses and Travel distance.
- How do I do it? - short recipes for the other common tasks.