When a Street Stops Getting More Expensive, Watch Who Buys It
Via Montenapoleone stopped getting more expensive. It also became the most contested piece of ground in the industry. Both things are true, and only the second one matters.
What the rent stopped saying
In the 2025 edition of Cushman & Wakefield's Main Streets Across the World, London's New Bond Street took first place for the first time, on 22% rental growth to $2,231 per square foot a year. Via Montenapoleone fell to second at $2,179, with rental growth of zero. Upper Fifth Avenue held third at $2,000, also flat. The Champs-Élysées stayed fifth at $1,364, flat as well.
Three of the five most expensive retail addresses on earth did not move at all. Read the rent alone and you would conclude that prime luxury retail had stalled.
What the ownership said instead
It had not. In April 2024, Kering bought Via Monte Napoleone 8 from a Blackstone subsidiary for around €1.3 billion, the largest single-asset property transaction in Italian history and the largest in Europe since March 2022. Five floors, 11,800 square metres, more than 5,000 of them retail, the biggest building on the street.
Note who was already inside it. Cova, the café owned by LVMH. Prada. Saint Laurent, which Kering owns. In one transaction, a luxury group became the landlord of its two largest competitors on the most valuable retail corner in Italy.
That is the number that carries the information. The lease did not reprice. The freehold did.
Why the addresses are being bought rather than rented
A lease is a right to be somewhere for a while. It is renewable, and therefore contestable, and its price is set by whoever wants the space most this cycle. A freehold is a decision about permanence, and permanence is the one thing a luxury house cannot buy from a landlord.
The behaviour is now consistent across the industry. Chanel bought the six-floor building at 28 Place Vendôme through the Charvet acquisition in July 2026, in a year its capital expenditure had already been lifted by more than 40% with real estate explicitly prioritised. Hermès opened its sixth Maison at 166 New Bond Street on 16 June 2026, across six buildings and more than 2,000 square metres, on the street that had just risen 22%. Kering, at the same time as it was closing 84 stores, was holding the largest building on Montenapoleone.
None of that is a retail strategy. It is a scarcity strategy executed on land.
The Champs-Élysées problem
The Champs-Élysées carries more people than any street in this ranking and prices fifth, flat. Montenapoleone runs roughly 350 metres and prices second.
Footfall is not what makes an address expensive. Who walks it is. A street that anyone can reach sells presence, and presence is available to any brand with a budget. A street that is short, dense and difficult sells the opposite, and the opposite cannot be bought at scale, which is precisely why it now has to be bought outright.
The strategic read
If the objective is to hold a house's price over decades rather than seasons, the move is to own the address instead of renting it, because a landlord can reprice a lease and cannot reprice a deed.
The trade-off is severe and rarely stated in the announcements. Capital locked in a building is capital not spent on product, people or creation, and the return on it is invisible in any quarter you care to measure. Kering committed €1.3 billion to a Milanese corner in the same period it was cutting inventory, closing 84 doors and taking net debt down. That building will never appear in a revenue line.
Rent on Montenapoleone grew zero and the street still commanded the largest property transaction Italy has ever recorded. Desire had stopped bidding for the lease because it had already moved on to buying the ground underneath it.
Rafael Carlesso reads where desire is built or lost, and writes the strategy that builds it. Writing from Milan. Quoted twice by Reuters on LVMH.
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