Brookfield's January rebrand of its retail division to GGP was such a well-kept internal secret that it completely upended a new employee's first day.

GGP CEO Kevin McCrain said the company's leadership decided to rebrand last August but held off on telling the broader team until 30 minutes before revealing the news to the market. All the signage in the office changed over the weekend before the announcement.

When the new employee walked in for work on Jan. 5, the day of the rebrand, he was confused.

"He thought the company had moved," McCrain said at Bisnow's Chicago Sports, Entertainment and Retail Summit on Wednesday.

Brookfield acquired the Chicago-based mall owner GGP, which owned 122M SF of retail at the time, in 2018. The rebrand of its retail division to the company's former name was part of a decision to give GGP an independent public face, McCrain said.

He also said, in internal communications and in discussions with tenants and landlords, nobody ever really stopped calling the company GGP. McCrain said the market has a more favorable view of the retail sector now than it did a few years ago, allowing GGP to be more aggressive.

"We're on offense now," McCrain said. "We are out in the market. We are looking to grow, and we are facing the market as GGP."

McCrain pointed to GGP's Oakbrook Center in the Chicago suburbs as a model for how the company thinks about investing in retail assets nationwide. The location does "well over $1,500 a foot in sales," he said, and GGP is in discussions to expand its footprint there.

Oakbrook Center has differentiated uses, ongoing upgrades and a microstrategy for every space, he said, which inform how the company curates the tenant mix and aesthetics more broadly at its national locations. The Oakbrook case study evolves daily at the location, but GGP applies lessons from it across all its assets.

"We've got a billion-dollar pipeline, and we're placing bets everywhere," McCrain said.

GGP has 99 retail properties across the U.S., according to the portfolio listed on its website.

The company has been in touch with many digitally native brands that are evolving their brick-and-mortar store strategies, McCrain said. He said many of those brands started online, because it's cheaper to open a storefront on a website, but have added a physical presence as they look to develop a stickier customer base.

"It's really competitive to shop in an infinite universe," he said. "How do you compete, if you're a digitally native brand, against 20 other digitally native brands, plus Amazon, plus all the other existing brands that have online presence?"