Vincent Mousseigne

Immo Mousquetaires, a retail real estate company and developer of mixed-use projects

Vincent Mousseigne, Managing Director of Immo Mousquetaires


Vincent Mousseigne is Managing Director of Immo Mousquetaires, the real estate company of Groupement des Mousquetaires and its six retail brands, including Intermarché, Bricomarché and Poivre Rouge (restaurants). To boost its presence in urban areas, the company is developing its expertise in creating mixed-use projects.

What is the business and mission of Immo Mousquetaires?

Immo Mousquetaires owns nearly 2500 assets: stores, shopping arcades and retail parks, and manages over 3300 leases in Europe (France, Portugal, Belgium and Poland). In 2016, we opened an additional 200,000 square metres of retail space. Our mission is to improve the attraction of our sites, to promote our properties and to help our retailer members to develop new projects. In doing so, we partner local development. All of our projects, whether restructuring operations or new sites, are driven by a commitment to adapting to the local territory. This is all the easier since our members have in-depth knowledge of their environment.   

Do you target specific types of environments?

We go anywhere our retailers can provide a local service, for a customer base within five or 10 minutes maximum. We already propose several store formats, but we are also working on new micro-formats, combined with digital services such as click & collect lockers, to serve customers as close to destination as possible. We are working with Société du Grand Paris [in charge of extensions to the Paris public transport lines] on a specific concept for stations. As a general rule, we want to boost our presence in urban areas, in cities with strong demographic growth. There is a lot to be done in the peripheral districts of metropolitan areas, in particular. We are expanding our teams to drive our development in that segment.

Immo Mousquetaires spurred the creation of a mixed-use district in Marseille: do you see this as a new line of business?

We had an aging store in the Saint-Loup district, a place on the decline. Rather than closing or selling it, we suggested to the Marseille authorities a revision of the land-use plan so that housing could also be built on the site. This approach helped create value that allowed us to finance a mixed-use project where we were able to create a marketplace, with a supermarket and shops at the foot of the building. We designed the entire project and chose Kaufman & Broad to market the residential portion.

Marseille Saint-Loup perfectly illustrates our positioning as a partner for local authorities, meeting the need for neighbourhood retail. We intend to pursue similar projects in many other places around France where urban renewal can be achieved through densification, mixed usage, and modernised retail.

How will you go about it?

 We are bolstering our skills, though we stick to the idea that our vocation is the promotion and development of our retailers. We have understood that one way of doing this consists of bringing together partners, local authorities, developers and other retail brands to create the best environment possible, in the interest of all. The projects are designed case-by-case, depending on the economics of the operation. The point is not to do everything ourselves, but to control the backbone of the project, to ensure optimal conditions for the success of the retail business.