Rents on Fifth Avenue rose 12 percent to about $950 per square foot per year. That's about 34 percent higher than the going rate of $710 per square foot in the second-most expensive market, Paris's Avenue des Champs-Élysées. Rents in Hong Kong's Causeway Bay area rocketed up 54 percent to $569 a square foot to keep it in third place. And those numbers don't include costs like taxes, service charges and building out the space.
The survey, by Cushman & Wakefield Inc., a New York-based commercial real-estate services firm, compared rents in the top district in each of 45 countries.
Fifth Avenue has about 55 stores, and the limited supply is helping drive the soaring rents, many of which are well over $1,000 per square foot now. With rents that high, many retailers located on Fifth Avenue lose money on their stores. But they consider any losses as marketing costs for gaining the cachet of being in the most famous and elite shopping district in the world.
In Europe, Ireland's bustling economy has led to increasing wealth and has helped stop the drain of its talented young people, who now are more likely to stay home. These factors have helped Dublin's Grafton Street become one of the hottest retail markets in the world, with rents at $381 per square foot, up 46 percent from last year. That pushed Dublin to fifth place this year, up from 10th last year and 18th a decade ago.
Japan has seen a turnaround in its economic fortunes, and that's reflected in its Ginza district, which made the biggest jump this year, to ninth place, at $311 per square foot, from 15th last year. Buenos Aires, which had been battered in recent surveys by the collapse of the Argentine economy, is showing signs of life. Its Florida shopping district jumped to 38th place, at $72 per square foot, from 43rd last year.
London's Oxford Street maintained fourth place this year, with rents remaining flat at about $517 a square foot. Despite the Olympics, Athens' Ermou area slipped to 11th place from seventh last year as rents remained flat at about $298 a square foot.
Most Central and Eastern European markets, which had been seeing large rent increases, cooled off this year as developers built more storefronts. Still, rents in the elite districts went up 4 percent. But Moscow's Tverskaya continued to cook, with rents soaring 40 percent to $325 per square foot, to put it in seventh place.
