Melody Chen Tenants in prime retail spaces are on an expansion path, and Mong Kok, Tsim Sha Tsui and Causeway Bay are the most appealing to them due to leasing costs that are still recovering from that Covid-19 retail chokehold. One instance of this saw a 1,000-square-foot, ground-floor shop at 501 Lockhart Road in Causeway Bay leased out for HK$150,000 a month to Wu Zhi Jian Beef Noodles, with the rent being 40 percent lower than prepandemic levels four years ago. For the shop's owner, that's a pretty seamless transition from the last tenant, a Japanese restaurant that had operated for four years since February 2020 at a monthly rental of HK$250,000, agreed upon prepandemic.
Preceding the Japanese restaurant was a fashion store that sold branded handbags that paid an even handsomer rent of HK$380,000. Of course, that was at the height of the rental market in 2015, when people up north were coming down in droves for luxury products and helping drive rents to historical highs. So this latest rent deal shows a precipitous 60 percent drop from that lofty peak.
Dennis Cheng Tak-ming, senior sales director at Ricacorp Properties, said that with rents seeing significant drops, the retail scene in core areas has been transformed into one dominated by the catering sector to meet demand for daily needs. That has resulted in the food sector becoming prominent along Lockhart Road, with its collection of restaurants, bakeries, fish maw shops and dried seafood stores flourishing sometimes.
