While French springtime brings familiar rituals like Easter bells and poissons d’avril, the south coast of France offers property professionals their own familiar spring ritual. Every year, in the second week of March, tens of thousands of people from more than100 countries travel to a small town to celebrate the spring. The successful formula is simple – to capture the season’s spirit of optimism and rejuvenation. After a winter’s hibernation, pale property professionals emerge in Cannes blinking at the warm sun. The ritual is called le MIPIM or le marché international des professionnels de l’immobilier.

The confinements and curfews do just feel like a hibernation. As one of the first major French public events cancelled as a result of the rising pandemic, MIPIM 2020 was a significant lockdown milestone. MIPIM 2021 was meant to begin on Tuesday evening – meaning our long hibernation has now lasted exactly 12 months. Initially postponed to June, the event has just been rescheduled to September and in a reduced format. Many are now asking how this curious ritual will survive in a post-mask future.

Any sense of nostalgia about last week’s missing event is naturally about bigger things than a trade fair. MIPIM is a symbol of experience that cannot be replicated on a screen at home. In a single day in Cannes, attendees stimulate all five senses: seeing the bay in the soft morning light, smelling seafood stewing on the beach, touching dozens of cheeks and hundreds of hands, hearing the energetic chatter of a crowd and tasting the chill of a first glass of rosé.

Even pre-covid, the exact professional purpose of all this sensory overload was getting lost. The Paris property pioneers of the 1970s and 1980s (like Europa Capital co-founder Chris Curtis) clearly recall the first MIPIM events of the early 1990s as gamechangers for the entire property industry. In one stroke, a local business became international, improving work practices and transparency. Le MIPIM was French property’s Big Bang moment.

All property salons position themselves between the two poles of thought leadership and networking. MIPIM gravitates towards the latter, as the highlights are outdoors – unlike the bigger Munich Exporeal event. Also unlike the mainly domestic Exporeal, MIPIM is deliberately an international event – herding together property tribes across borders; the tall Dutch tribe standing on the pavement with Heineken bottles, the stylish Italians with ties and leather rucksacks and the noisy British tribe playing hard. The home tribe, the French, do lunch there. Properly.

Cannes’ current confinement cuts off the town’s essential tourist lifeblood. The grand five-star hotels are mostly closed, the Palais des Festivals (aka ‘the bunker’) is now a vaccine centre and some stores on rue d’Antibes, one of France’s top shopping streets, are boarded up for liquidation. For me, this curious but familiar place has vivid memories. After attending some 50 Cannes trade fairs (MIPIM in springtime and retail MAPIC in the autumn), I have spent no less than eight months of my life there. The intensity is such that it feels more like eight years.

For property professionals and locals alike, the prospects for trade fairs are as uncertain as the frequently asked question of: “What’s the future of office work?” The prospects for le MIPIM arouse strong emotions on both sides. In the future Museum of Pre-covid Behaviours, anthropologists may highlight the excesses of MIPIM as a very male dinosaur of an exhibit. The organisers have big challenges. Twelve months ago, they were perceived to be in coronavirus denial as their customers started withdrawing and already pre-covid, some banks had declined to attend for ethical reasons. Some critics whisper that MIPIM costs much and achieves little and that, as in the famous Danish parable, “the emperor is wearing no clothes”.

The powerful counter-argument is about meeting a basic human need to feel alive by stimulating all five senses. This is arguably true of all trade fairs, but the gregarious property tribe just thrives on social interaction and life beyond the tunnel vision of Zoom calls. Whatever the prospects, le MIPIM represents an amplified version of what most of us are badly missing this springtime.