GRO RETAIL - SPRING EVENT

This was my fourth time attending GRO Retail, and every year it proves to be an invaluable experience. It’s a fantastic opportunity to reconnect with familiar faces, meet new people, and uncover opportunities that might not come up over email or phone calls.

The atmosphere is always buzzing, with plenty of meaningful conversations happening throughout the day. For McDonald’s, having that face-to-face engagement is so important - it helps us build stronger relationships and explore collaborations in a way that virtual meetings simply can’t.

What’s so valuable is the face-to-face interaction - work that might take three or four months to achieve elsewhere, you can often do here in a single afternoon here.

In fact, at least half of our 20 UK sites have been influenced in some way by opportunities we’ve found through GRO Retail. It’s the perfect platform to launch new concepts to the market through the Soapbox Sessions, and we’ve already seen international interest which we’d never have expected.

GRO Retail is such a valuable forum for us at Places for London. Looking after around 1,500 retail businesses across 5,500 acres, this event gives us the chance to reconnect with our existing retailers, hear about their plans and expansions, and meet new retailers who want to understand more about our estate.

As a people-focused industry, retail is all about connections - so events like GRO Retail are essential. It’s a leasing showcase, an insight platform, and a networking forum all in one. For us, it’s not just about the immediate pipeline for next year; conversations here are already shaping transactions for 2027 and beyond.

The event brings together retailers, landlords, and agencies in a way that’s broad and inclusive, covering everything from new market entrants to the big London talking points.

GRO Retail is the meeting place for the property industry because it's quite a rare opportunity that brings everybody together. So much of this industry is about relationships and trust and people, so  having somewhere where everybody is together, to be able to share resources and insights and really feel part of the community, is key.

It's amazing because these are the connections, the relationships and the conversations that are so key to building our business going forward.

GRO Retail has been an excellent opportunity for Dundee to showcase what we have to offer. For us, it was about putting Dundee on the map - meeting retailers, developers, and agents who might not have previously considered the city and highlighting the significant investment and regeneration opportunities available.