What do you see as the main challenges for the placemaking industry in 2025?
The same challenges as in 2024, 2023, 2022 and for many years before that, which is a fundamental lack of inspiration in our sector. We need to think more outwards, we need to embrace new concepts, especially hospitality, and above all, think of our guests.
What opportunities, developments, and trends do you see?
The introduction of different types of uses into centers is a key to success. It’s vital to create motivation for people to visit our centers. We started at Puerto Venecia with leisure. It could be a hospital, as we’ve done at UBBO in Lisbon, which brings in over 1 million additional guests into our shopping center every year. It could be coworking. Furthermore, it could be education in the future. The shops are just the temptation we put in front of people, the leisure, the hospitals, etc. and what draws people in, and the food and beverage, is the way we get our guests to stay.
In your opinion, are there any fundamental and lasting changes that the placemaking industry will have to face?
So many centers have been run just for the cash. So management has been focused on financial returns rather than thinking about the guest experience. I believe if you lead with the guest experience, and you get that right, the money will take care of itself.
Recommendation for the industry and market participants
I have just read a book by David Ogilvy called The Eternal Pursuit of Unhappiness. It’s a book that he wrote as a sort of bible for future generations working at his company. In it, he says, “Our industry does not have a shortage of brains, it has has a lack of spine.” I think that’s also true of the property and the shopping center industry in particular. We’ve got a lot of brains out there, but we’ve got a lack of backbone to do things differently.
People are always saying to me “You can’t do that because, because you know, no one has ever done that”. Well, I don’t want to hear that and my team knows that. Are we at Eurofund going to do it a different way? Yes! Someone’s got to do things differently in the industry now. Let’s have the spine to do it.
Ian Sandford
Ian Sandford is President at Eurofund Group, and Member of the ACROSS Advisory Board.
