In line with its strategy to continuously provide unrivalled experiential offerings at its shopping centres, Liberty Two Degrees (L2D) has purposefully invested in protecting the health and safety of its shoppers, tenants and service providers.
A first of many initiatives by L2D for the African continent, L2Ds’ co-owned super-regional shopping centres Sandton City Precinct and Eastgate Shopping Centre, have been certified as safe retail destinations in accordance to the SHORE-certification by international body, SAFE Asset Group. SAFE Asset Group offers the only internationally acknowledged resilience certification and has awarded the two super-regional centres Gold Level Excellence for their ability to prevent, adapt, respond to, recover and learn from operational disruptions. This follows the certification of the L2D portfolio of assets as fully COVID-19 Compliant by the certification body.
Jonathan Sinden, L2D Chief Operations Officer says “We continuously strive to benchmark our retail assets against global standards. In doing so, we aim to show duty of care by providing our tenants and service providers with quality spaces that are safe, attractive and support them in their operations, while offering our shoppers and communities the best of breed experiential environments that are underpinned by safe and hygienic spaces in line with our Safe Spaces building block”.
Using the international SHORE-certification standard, the Sandton City Precinct and Eastgate Shopping Centre were measured against the 180-international shopping centres and assessed for their operational risk and resilience levels based on the six core variables of; crisis and business continuity management, safety and security management, tenant management, property protection, management system and risk management, and visitor management.
The Sandton City Precinct, which is made up of Sandton City and Nelson Mandela Square, ranked the highest in safety and security standards in the world out of the 180 shopping centres assessed by SAFE Asset Group, outperforming all other top international shopping centers.
Commenting on this achievement, Erik Engstrand CEO of SAFE Asset Group says “Sandton City Precinct and Eastgate Shopping Centre have accomplished great results. Not only do they have the paperwork to prove their efficiencies, but they have the operational procedures in place to match. These two shopping centres are well prepared to respond to any risk and security incident and bounce back swiftly from them because they and their teams are well trained, well versed and operationally excellent and resilient.”
L2D already had safety and security measures in place across its portfolio of assets prior to the emergence of the pandemic. In a post COVID-19 world and as part of the response to the pandemic, L2D has intensified all protocol at the centres in the best interest of all its stakeholders.
“We are pleased that our efforts have been recognised and certified on a global scale. This is an important outcome in our health and safety journey and of paramount importance to enabling us to continue to successfully operate in this environment. This is why we seek to continuously benchmark our safety and security against the highest standards in line with Safe Spaces which seeks to achieve health and safety excellence and the wellbeing of our shoppers, tenants and service providers. This outcome is one we as co-owners of these centres can be very proud”.
L2D aims to carry out this assessment in the rest of its shopping environments in 2021.
“All the hard work and effort put into these centres in terms of setting efficient procedures, having effective plans in place and working closely with tenants and shopping centre management are to provide peace of mind to our stakeholders, ensuring that our centres are well prepared and provide the necessary due diligence” Sinden concludes.
