Since the opening of Germany’s first shopping centre — in Sulzbach, near Frankfurt am Main, in 1964 — retail has played a central role in shaping the country’s urban landscape.

The COVID-19 crisis and the consequent structural transformation of retail, however, have hit shopping centres especially hard. And the growth in online retail has been putting brick-and-mortar retail under particular pressure for many years. Despite these challenges, the retail property market is showing the first signs of recovery, and the future is looking more promising.

The Global Retail Attractiveness Index (GRAI), which tracks the appeal of retail markets in 20 countries around the world and is produced by German market research institute GfK, shows a significant recovery in Europe. At the beginning of 2024, nine of the 15 European retail markets examined by GRAI had grown, in comparison with the same time in 2023. Poland, the United Kingdom, Denmark and Sweden recorded the strong