Retail Insider will now be regularly including online tours of retail real estate, including shopping centres, urban streets and neighbourhoods. The first mall property to be profiled will be Toronto’s Bayview Village Shopping Centre next week, to be followed by a major retail street in Vancouver.

*(toronto bus tour. photo: darryl Julot)*

Tours will include insight from local players including brokers, landlords, retailers and BIA heads (where applicable), and will discuss components that make the locations unique, as well as what’s on the way.

To kick off the online tours, Retail Insider’s founder and Editor-in-Chief, Craig Patterson, physically toured a group of retail professionals though Toronto last week, ahead of and in partnership with Retail Council of Canada’s STORE Conference. The tour began with a retail technology presentation at Microsoft Canada’s downtown Toronto offices, where retail innovations from Microsoft and Architech were featured. Attendees then boarded a bus that went up Yonge Street past exciting recent developments around CF Toronto Eaton Centre (including new Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, and Jordan Brand stores), and then up to the Yorkville area, which will be seeing a multi-billion dollar overhaul over the next decade. The tour then took attendees down to trendy West Queen West, where patrons debarked to check out unique local retailers such as Bite Beauty, Warby Parker, Anthropologie, John Fluevog, and several other terrific retailers that make the area unique. The tour concluded with cocktails at the trendy Drake Hotel.

More of these tours are expected to follow — thank you to sponsors Interac (presenting sponsor), Microsoft and Architech (contributing sponsors) and supporting sponsor, Canada Post.

On the Retail Insider website, various properties will be featured in articles throughout the year, including shopping centres as well as various shopping streets and neighbourhoods. Toronto’s Bayview Village will be the first mall to be featured in our online tour, and a number of important streets and malls will also be featured in regular segments. Retail Insider will be traveling to different locations throughout Canada to see what’s new, as well as to learn what makes various retail locations worth visiting.

Stay tuned for more announcements around Retail Insider’s online tours and as well, there may be partnership and sponsorship opportunities available for a series of physical tours in different Canadian cities.

Canadian Retail News From Around The Web: June 9, 2017