FOR RETAIL PROPERTY AGENTS

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.

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.

We really feel that GRO is one of the key events of the of the year in terms of bringing everyone together. Having a meeting space within the conference is super important to us because it gives us a space that is just ours where we can enjoy meeting with our brand partners and our agents. Actually having the space to to sit down with them and see them face-to-face rather than on the phone or on Teams. It's a real, good way to connect with them.

There's a really high calibre of people attending and what I really love is that it's fluid, so you can just be walking across the room from one place to another and you're bumping into new contacts all the time, as well as that there's the chance to meet with everybody we already know and to reconnect.

Hammerson are the owner, operator and investor in a number of UK and international retail destinations. Hammerson has attended GRO Retail for a number of years.

GRO provides a great opportunity to meet with both new and existing tenants - between myself and my colleagues, we've held between about 60-70 meetings today with a variety of companies.

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.

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.

Very busy, lots of meetings and it's a really great place to get everyone under the same roof and meet loads of new people. Cushman & Wakefield has their own stand - it allows us to have direct meetings with retailers and landlords. It's a great way to speak to people face-to-face and have those kind of opportunities.

What sets GRO apart is that everything's done in one day. So you can have all those back-to-back meetings, do a year's worth of work in a day, and just get everything done. At other events it's over spread out, but this is straight to the point, quick and quite fast-paced, which is what our industry is about.