Shaine Beveridge, Centre General Manager – Pacific Fair Shopping Centre, The GPT Group

s require a major capital investment. Shopping Centre News (SCN): How did you get started in retail property, and how has your career evolved? Shaine Beveridge (SB): My background was in IT, managing a small business on behalf of others – which gave me a grounding in commercial fundamentals: financial management, client relationships, understanding what makes a business work day-to-day. From there, I moved into marketing and business development, which is where I started to understand what drives customer behaviour and how you build something people connect with. That combination of commercial discipline, customer insight, branding and experience turned out to be great preparation for centre management with my first role being a retail manager. Our industry has a way of holding onto people. The variety and the pace get under your skin quickly, and I’ve never regretted the switch. SCN: Can you tell us about your current role and what you are focused on? SB: I’m Centre General Manager at Pacific Fair on the Gold Coast – a centre with an enviable mix of luxury retail and strong domestic and international tourism. Plus a local discerning customer who knows exactly what a quality experience looks like. What I value most is the ownership culture. Our owners are invested in Pacific Fair’s long-term direction, not just the next quarter, and that changes how you operate. It lets decisions be made for the long-term benefit of the asset and enables the team and I to be part of the future growth and set up of the asset. Not every management team gets that, and I don’t take it for granted. SCN: What stands out as the highlight of your career? SB: Prior to joining GPT, being part of the Grand Central Toowoomba development, a $600 million project, was the most formative experience of my career. Being involved end-to-end was demanding in ways I hadn’t anticipated: the complexity, the stakeholder management, the sheer number of moving parts that all need to align at once. That’s also what made it so valuable. The perspective you gain from taking a project from concept to delivery isn’t something you can replicate any other way. Every project is different and gives you a chance to shape the future of that asset for customers and retailers. Beyond that, it comes back to the people. The teams I’ve worked with – including the current group at Pacific Fair – are what make the role worthwhile. Results don’t happen in isolation. Pacfic Fair SCN: What do you enjoy most about what you do? SB: No two days are the same. You can be in a planning meeting in the morning and managing something completely unexpected by the afternoon. Commercial, operational, people, community stakeholders, customer experience – the range means you’re constantly adapting. The team culture makes the difference. When the people around you keep pushing for better outcomes, you feed off that, and it lifts the whole team. I’m fortunate to work with a team at Pacific Fair that cares and is passionate about what we’re trying to achieve and consistently delivers at a very high level. SCN: How has the role changed over the past five years? SB: Experience has moved from a nice-to-have to a genuine strategic priority. Physical retail destinations are being asked to justify their existence in a way they haven’t before, and the better centres are leaning into what physical retail offers that digital simply cannot. That is an interesting challenge to be working through right now. The relationship with retail partners has shifted, too – less transactional, more genuine partnership. When retailers succeed, the centre succeeds, so that alignment matters more than ever. SCN: What do you measure beyond the financial metrics? SB: Net Promoter Score (NPS). It tells you how customers feel about what you’re doing, something sales figures alone won’t always show. We take customer sentiment and NPS very seriously and work to understand patterns before they become a problem. If that number moves in the wrong direction, something needs attention. For a centre with an ambition to be the most loved in Australia, that feedback can’t be secondary. It shapes where we focus and genuinely helps shape our direction. SCN: Where do you see the biggest opportunities in the sector? SB: Creating places people genuinely want to spend time in, not just visit out of necessity. The town centre model has been talked about for years, but there’s still real room to push it further. Shopping centres that become part of people’s lives – rather than part of their to-do list – will be the hardest to compete with. SCN: Tell us about something that worked better than expected. SB: Our marketing team built a concept called “Offline”, anchored in bringing some of Australia’s most on-trend online-only retailers into a physical space at Pacific Fair. The location itself was a former cleaning storage area off a car park entry, which tells you this was not a major capital project. What made it work was the concept: Customers were curious about brands they’d experienced only online and giving them a physical interaction with those brands gave people something to talk about. The response on social media was extraordinary, and the commercial results followed. It is a good reminder that creativity does not always require a large budget. Sometimes it just requires the right idea and ambition to test. SCN: What do you think makes a strong asset manager? SB: Trusting good people, giving them room to make decisions, and backing them when things don’t go perfectly. Strong asset managers know they’re only as effective as the people around them. Curiosity matters, too – some of the best customer experience ideas come from outside retail entirely. Hospitality, tourism and entertainment are all worth watching closely. SCN: How do you think the role evolves from here? SB: The pressure to keep the experience fresh will only grow. Customers have more options than ever, and proximity alone no longer guarantees loyalty. They’re also more informed about their choices than they’ve ever been. AI will play a bigger role – particularly around convenience and personalisation – but the underlying challenge stays the same: Give people a reason to choose you. That takes creativity, and a willingness to keep questioning what you’re doing. This Q&A with Shaine Beveridge forms part of the Inside Asset Management feature published in the latest issue of SCN magazine