Fifth Avenue in New York remains comfortably the world's most expensive retail location but property services firms are split on how rival shopping destinations stack up behind it, data showed this week.

Cushman & Wakefield said on Thursday annual rents in the golden corridor between 49th and 59th Street had risen by 11 percent in the year to $1,500 per square foot, echoing a similar report from CB Richard Ellis (CBRE) on Wednesday.

However, in contrast to CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield said Causeway Bay in Hong Kong and Avenue Champs Elysees in Paris were in second and third place, as in 2006.

We are seeing the emergence of a line-up of global shopping destinations, John Strachan, Cushman & Wakefield's Global Head of Retail, said in a note.

These locations are not just attracting local shoppers, but shoppers from around the world, whose very reason to travel is quite often to shop, while the driving force in many of the Asia Pacific locations is also the emergence of a middle class with money in their pockets, he said.

Cushman & Wakefield named London's New Bond Street in fourth place.

CBRE on Wednesday said Moscow had become the second-most expensive retail location in the world, after leapfrogging London.

(See www.reutersrealestate.com for the global service for real estate professionals from Reuters).

(Reporting by William Kemble-Diaz, Editing by Erica Billingham)

Retail