How it started
History
Scentre Group has origins in the western suburbs of Sydney. The first development was named "Westfield Place", and opened in July 1959 in Blacktown. The name Westfield is derived from "west" related to the West-Sydney location, and "field" due to having located on subdivided farmland. John Saunders and Frank Lowy opened the centre.
The company was floated on the Australian Stock Exchange in 1960 and built another five centres in New South Wales before expanding into Victoria and Queensland in 1966–67.
The expansion into the United States began with the purchase of Trumbull Shopping Park in Connecticut in 1977, and was followed by three centres in California, Michigan, and Connecticut in 1980 and three centres in California, New Jersey and Long Island, New York in 1986. In 1994, Westfield joined together with General Growth and Whitehall Real Estate to purchase 19 centres for US$1 billion. The company built considerable holdings on the east coast and in California before expanding in the Mid-West. By 2005, the company owned centres in 15 US states.
In the 1990s, Westfield began a major expansion to New Zealand, where it mostly bought existing shopping centres of the Fletchers Company, and progressively rebranded them. Only in 2007, with Westfield Albany, did the company open a fully new centre in the country.
On 9 May 2006, Westfield announced the sale of eight United States shopping centres which it deemed to fit outside its strategic plan, to Centro Properties Group.
From Wikipedia’s article on Scentre Group, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2