Photo: A. Balet/Wikimedia Commons
My, how the mighty have… gotten even more expensive since 1988.
Cushman & Wakefield analyzed the 15 most expensive global retail locales from 1988 to see how far they’ve progressed in a quarter-century.
One of the biggest spikes occurred in Paris’s Rue Champs-Élysées, where rents increased 825 percent from $173 per square foot in 1988 to $1,601 per square foot in 2013.
New York’s Fifth Avenue remains a shopping juggernaut; twenty-five years ago, it was the priciest retail location in the world, commanding average rents of $387 per square foot. Now, Fifth Avenue occupies the No. 2 slot, with average rents of $2,500 per square foot.
However, the most pronounced increases came from cities that weren’t on the retail radar in the 1980s; the priciest shopping hotspot in the world today, Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay ($3,017 per square foot), wasn’t even in the Cushman & Wakefield survey in 1988. Two other Hong Kong locations, Central and Tsim Sha Tsui, had sky-high average rents of $2,290 and $2,042 per square foot, respectively, in 2013.
Check out the top global destinations from 1988:
Now compare with the most expensive locations in 2013:
You can see the full Cushman & Wakefield report here.
