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Dublin's Grafton Street has slipped to 8th place from a top 5 position last year, in the latest ranking of the world's most expensive retail streets in terms of rents. New York's Fifth Avenue remains No. 1 and more than half of what are termed the world’s most prestigious shopping streets have been affected by the global economic downturn with 54% of the 274 streets monitored by real estate adviser Cushman & Wakefield, seeing their prime rents fall.
The findings in the annual Main Streets Across the World (register for free access) report, published this week, are the biggest global fall in retail rents in its 24 year history. In only 18 per cent of locations did prime rents rise.
Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue is ranked as the world’s most expensive retail address for the eighth straight year, as annual rents dropped 8.1 percent in the 12 months through June, to $1,700 a square foot. Rents in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay declined 15 percent to $1,525. On the Avenue des Champs Elysées in Paris, they were little changed at $1,009.
Germany’s Kaufingerstrasse in Munich was the biggest riser into the top ten moving to ninth from 12th with a 7.1% increase in rents. Ireland’s Grafton Street in Dublin was the biggest faller in the top ten moving from fifth to eighth with prime rents falling 22.5%. Last year it entered the top five for the first time.
The average rent in the 274 shopping streets monitored across 60 countries by Cushman & Wakefield fell 23 percent to $213 a square foot from $276 a square foot a year earlier.
Rents declined in 147 locations, the most since Cushman & Wakefield first published its survey in 1986. They were little changed on 76 streets and rose on 51.
Globally, the biggest increase in rents was in São Paulo, Brazil, with rents at Alameda Lorena and Iguatemi Shopping rising 111% and 79.3% respectively. In Asia Pacific, Ho Chi Minh City’s CBD, Vietnam had the biggest increase at 50% whilst in Europe, Rue St Catherine in Bordeaux, France had the biggest increase at 17.6%.
Rents on Grafton Street were estimated at $568 per square foot compared with the Avenue des Champs Elysées at $1,009; Amsterdam's Kalverstraat at $300; Oslo's Karl Johan Gate at $217 and Stockholm's Biblioteksgatan at $168.
Grafton Street, a small street which links St. Stephens Green, the public park that was the former front garden for the Guinness brewing family's town house, Iveagh House, with the Elizabethan era Trinity College, is not Dublin's main street.
O'Connell Street, the main street, which was recently rejuvenated, lost its allure in the early decades of the last century when the adjacent residential streets became slum areas and in recent decades, the street had become dominated by fast food joints, tourist trinket outlets and gaming arcades.
During the property bubble, the entry of Grafton Street to the ranks of the world's most expensive along with wealth reports ranking the Irish as the world's second richest behind the financially struggling Japanese, seemed incongruous with morning radio reports of hospital trolley indexes of queues at public hospitals and so much else.
