Place Yorkshire
Place Yorkshire is a business-to-business publisher and website for property and regeneration professionals in Yorkshire, publishing at placeyorkshire.co.uk and listed in Leeds. It publishes news, comment, in-depth special reports, video and podcasts on a broad range of subjects but with a strict regional focus, and it brings the same audience together for conferences, socials, receptions, dinners and roundtables. It is part of the Place North media group, now Place Media Group, and was launched at MIPIM in 2023 alongside Place North East.
Its proposition is summed up in its own contact line — Yorkshire property news and analysis, sent to news@placeyorkshire.co.uk — and in its self-description as a voice of property in the North. For developers, investors, planners, housebuilders, agents, lawyers, councils and combined authorities working between the Humber, the Dales, the Pennines and the Tees fringe, it offers a single daily place to see what is being proposed, approved, funded, let and built.
Launch at MIPIM 2023
Place Yorkshire's parent began in 2007 as Place North West, a single regional trade title founded by Paul Unger, formerly business editor of the Daily Post and a North West features writer for Property Week for six years. In 2023 that title developed into the Place North Media Group with two new regional publications. Place Yorkshire and Place North East were launched on the Tuesday at MIPIM in 2023, the global property convention in Cannes, and celebrated their first anniversary at MIPIM in 2024, at a drinks event where leaders of Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle underlined the case for Northern collaboration.
Launching a Yorkshire title at a French property fair sounds paradoxical only until the audience is understood. MIPIM is where local authorities and their private-sector partners pitch for international investment. Place North was launched there with the ethos of supporting the Northern property market, and Yorkshire's presence in that delegation — later formalised in a strategic partnership with MIPIM organiser RX Global — is part of the service the title sells to its region.
Employee ownership and the group
In April 2023, the month after the Yorkshire launch, Place North West moved into employee ownership. The team acquired the business from founder Paul Unger, who remained a full-time director and publisher while exiting as a shareholder. Dino Moutsopoulos and Kirsty Butcher became joint managing partners, retaining stakes alongside a majority-controlling employee ownership trust.
Place Media Group now describes itself as an independent, employee-owned publisher and event organiser for the UK property industry, headquartered in Manchester, with 11 to 50 employees, delivering regional news brands and conferences across the North West, Yorkshire, the North East and — since 2025 — the Midlands. The expanded group has reported 400,000 monthly readers across its four titles. That shared infrastructure matters to Place Yorkshire: its journalism sits on a group platform for events, video, marketing and major-show delegations, while its news remains strictly Yorkshire.
The Yorkshire patch
Yorkshire is the largest historic county in England, and Place Yorkshire's coverage follows its modern economic geography: Leeds and West Yorkshire, Sheffield and South Yorkshire, York and North Yorkshire, Hull and the East Riding, and the towns between. Its stories are filed by location and sector, so a reader in Leeds can follow the city, while a housebuilder working across the county can follow residential coverage alone.
Recent Yorkshire reporting sampled on its sister titles and contributor profiles shows the texture: a Leeds build-to-rent scheme of 111 homes on Kirkstall Road brought to market; plans for 110 homes at Shepley; the £1.5 billion YORBuild Major Works 2 construction framework jointly managed by Leeds, East Riding, Sheffield and North Yorkshire councils; a hotel on George Street in Leeds, near Kirkgate Market, moving into pre-construction; the Hull and East Yorkshire Combined Authority taking space at Two Humber Quays on Hull Marina; and planning permission for 106 homes at Sherburn-in-Elmet. The mixture of a £1.5 billion framework and a 106-home permission is characteristic — both change who works, and where, in Yorkshire.
Editor and newsroom
Place Yorkshire shares an editor with Place North East. Sally Gibson, based in Wetherby, joined as editor of both titles in September 2024, and Place's announcement described both Gibson and commercial director Sean O'Connor as senior hires with established careers in business-to-business publishing and events, made as the group strengthened its position in Yorkshire and the North East eighteen months after launching there.
Gibson said on joining that, while the built environment was a new sector for her, she had received an incredibly warm welcome and looked forward to knowing the people who make up the Yorkshire and North East property industry. She works alongside Neil Tague, Charlie Valentine and Dan Whelan in the newsroom, with Julia Hatmaker as North West editor. Publisher Paul Unger remains founder and publisher. On the commercial side, Dino Moutsopoulos is managing partner and head of commercial, Sean O'Connor covers Yorkshire and the North East, and Sara Thomas later joined from Property Week, after fourteen years there, as commercial partnerships director across all regions.
What it covers, sector by sector
Place Yorkshire's subject range follows the life of development: planning and policy, construction, transport, architecture and design, finance and investment, sales and lettings. Its event and news categories give the clearest index — residential, offices and workspace, industrial and logistics, education property and student accommodation, regeneration, and public-sector frameworks.
Its Place RESI conference, for example, brought together housing authorities, developers and homebuilders to discuss build-to-rent, senior living, large housing developments and affordable housing against a government ambition to build 300,000 homes a year. Its industrial and logistics and offices conferences asked, respectively, where record demand for sheds would go next and whether the North's office market was thriving or flailing after the shift to home working. News coverage asks the same questions in daily form, scheme by scheme.
Events: from Place Party to MIPIM
Place Yorkshire's first signature social event, Place Party Yorkshire, was held at Leeds' Royal Armouries on 1 February 2024, with more than 300 people confirmed, live music, dining and a late bar — deliberately, its organisers said, without contentious awards, stuffy dress codes or long speeches. The list of firms attending, from Arup, BDP and Colliers to Savills, Turley and Mills & Reeve, reads as a cross-section of the Yorkshire property professions.
Beyond Yorkshire, the title's readers are sold access to two big stages. At MIPIM, Place led a Northern delegation of 58 organisations in 2025, partnered with RX Global for 2026, and added an investor breakfast, an industrial and logistics breakfast and a North of England Suite. At UKREiiF in Leeds — on Place Yorkshire's home ground — Place hosts panels, video interviews and an invitation-only drinks reception. The events are not an add-on; they are how a trade title converts readership into relationships, and relationships into news.
Audience and commercial model
Place Yorkshire is free to read and free to subscribe to by email. Its marketing page has cited 14,000 unique website visitors a month, 21,000 page reads a month and 11,500 newsletter subscribers, with 77 percent of its audience at senior level or above. Those figures explain its commercial model: advertising, sponsored content, video and events sold to firms that want to reach senior Yorkshire property decision-makers, rather than subscriptions sold to readers.
The group makes the same pitch in stronger language in its media materials — a senior network, extensive reach in the North, and a track record as an introducer of people and businesses built over more than sixteen years. For a Yorkshire firm, the practical offers are profile in the news, a platform at a conference, a video interview at a major show, or a room full of the right counterparts at a dinner or roundtable.
Analysis, video and podcasts
Alongside daily news, Place Yorkshire publishes comment, special reports, video and podcasts. Event coverage is frequently published as video and gallery packages — panel sessions from MIPIM on industrial and logistics, on how small and medium businesses are transforming the North, on leisure as a regenerator and on how to build a new town — extending the life of a conference session to readers who were not in the room. Analysis pieces from UKREiiF have examined the future of Yorkshire real estate, including the effects of the Building Safety Act and planning reform on construction disputes.
That multimedia layer distinguishes it from a simple listings or press-release site. Its journalists chair, film and summarise the debates its industry is having, and its commercial partners pay in part for that convening power.
Place in Yorkshire business media
Yorkshire is served by general business publications, city newspapers and national property titles. Place Yorkshire occupies the specialist ground between them: only property, only Yorkshire, every working day, produced by a Northern, employee-owned group whose founder and editors work in the market they cover. Listed in Leeds — the county's principal professional and financial centre — it aims to be the trade title a Yorkshire property professional checks first, and the platform through which the region presents itself, at UKREiiF, at MIPIM and in its inbox, to the wider investment world.
