The Opening
Having been effectively closed for 4 years what do you expect on your first day of trading? We purposely tried not to have a huge opening other than a Civic Opening by the Mayor. There is always a risk if you market too much you will end up embarrassing yourselves. But the press interest took over and the people flooded in. This was great for Liverpool One and the whole area. I used to get quite annoyed in the initial consultation exercises to hear people say you will attract all the spending power to Liverpool One and our shops will not survive. I always said, “You may be absolutely right but the pie will grown bigger and your share will get bigger as well.” We have kept in touch with many small retailers elsewhere in the city and they have seen, especially in the homeware sector, their trade go through the roof.
enquiry outcome. Consequently Grosvenor was already at huge risk before it went on the road to attract potential funders.
The identity of the signed up funders is shown above, a mixture of equity investors and banks. This means that not only do I have my Board of Directors to deal with but also those of four other equity investors and four banks. This is one of the biggest challenges I have had to face added to which is the City Council making sure that we are building in compliance with what they want as they ended up being the landlord of the whole scheme.
You can piggy back of a good scheme like Liverpool One. Before the Albert Dock was struggling and on its knees. Now it is a fantastic place, footfall is up 48% due mainly to the critical link across Strand Street mentioned earlier.
Grosvenor actively monitors trading in Liverpool One. We are linked in with every single retailer (except John Lewis) so we know at 8 o’clock, when the tills close, how each shop has traded. This has produced some amazing stories, for example Gregg the bakers, was, for a long time, taking the more trade per square foot than any other shop in the scheme.
Management Regime
This is taken incredibly seriously. Chris Bliss runs Liverpool One on a day-to-day basis. Chris Bliss and I worked close together on Basingstoke; he was our Shopping Centre Manager there. He then changed his career to become an engineer involved in building Liverpool One so knew the scheme inside out and has now has reverted back to managing one of the biggest city centre schemes in the UK. He understands the technical side of things, which is important, and also understands how important communications and security are too. 200 directly employed people work in Liverpool One ensuring that it is immaculate and that security is good. And on security we do not have people standing about in flak jackets guarding the streets. We have people in red coats providing guidance and directions and just trying to be helpful by picking up litter and so on. We also have a close interaction with the police just to ensure that we have a safe environment.
Grosvenor did want to invest £1.2 billion in a single scheme. For the first few years we alone funded the project in the expectation that we would eventually resolve the funding issue. Grosvenor eventually invested £45 million of its own cash before scheme funding was resolved. And most of this initial investment was made before we had secured both detailed planning consent and a compulsory purchase
ASSET - Liverpool-10 Customer Feedback
We also regard customer feedback as very important and we do our best to find out what people think of us through telephone surveys, focus groups and the like.
Guy Butler 59
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