ECE adds leisure and sport to G3 Vienna shopping centre

ECE is adding more leisure, sport and wellness to the shopping experience. The full-service real estate group is expanding the offer and tenant mix of its G3 Shopping Resort Gerasdorf near Vienna with new retail product testing and experience areas.

The goal is to create a unique sports and outdoor focus – on a 5,000 sq m indoor sports retail area and a 3,000 sq m outdoor sports area – as an additional attraction for the shopping centre, which has over 130 stores.

The new outdoor attractions, which invite visitors to try out and experience products, will include a pump track for bikes, skates, boards and scooters, a climbing wall, a shoe trail, bike test tracks and motor skills and play areas for children.

Construction work on the project will start in early February, with completion and opening scheduled for June this year.

The centre owner, the ECE Progressive Income Growth Fund, is investing around €12 million in the further development of the asset, while ECE Marketplaces, which also operates and leases the shopping resort, is responsible for planning and implementation. 

In parallel, ECE is further developing the centre’s retail offering: retailers such as Snipes, Moreboards, and Intersport with their “Home of Bikes” concept have already been secured as tenants.

An exclusive G3 Multibrand Store on the topic of sports & outdoor will also offer retailers and manufacturers the opportunity to present their brands and products without personnel and furnishing expenses.

Last year also saw the opening of a 4,600 sq m Dehner garden centre in the G3 as well as Austria’s first Otto showroom. In December, another new opening was celebrated with the “Treffpunkt Baumhaus” children’s land.

With the further diversification of the tenant mix and the additional experience offers, the centre’s appeal as a shopping destination is to be further strengthened and will appeal to more customer groups in the catchment area, especially from Vienna, the group said.

ECE Marketplaces is a service provider for the management of shopping centres and, as part of the internationally active real estate and investment company ECE Group, manages about 200 shopping centres across Europe with 20,000 shops on a total sales area of 7 million sq m.