Brexit reverberations roll on, knocking London off its perch as most expensive city in which to live and work.
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NY has surpassed London as the world’s expensive city in which to employ workers, despite recent indications that office and residential rent growth is slowing, according to a new study by worldwide brokerage firm Savills.
London had been at the top of the rating for the last two-and-a-half years, but slipped in July shortly after the Brexit vote.
The study, which examines the cost for an employee to live in rented housing and work in an office for a year was conducted by Savills, UK.
Annual accommodation costs in these cities are among the lowest in the Savills live-work index and comparable to Mumbai and Lagos.
That puts it behind NY and Hong Kong. The decrease was due to the drop of sterling and the United Kingdom real estate market. Savills says the drop in the sterling relative to the dollar soon after Britain’s vote to leave the European Union “made London very much more competitive on the world stage”.
This is an increase of 2% from December a year ago.
Total accommodation costs in NY for one employee over a year were $114,010 in July, up 2% from December last year, the data show. The cost in Hong Kong meanwhile was up 1% at $100,984.
Tokyo climbed to fourth on the list.
Rents for New York City office properties have begun to flatten but the overall costs of living and working in New York were still 2 percent higher in the first half of the year, compared with the same period in 2015, Savills data show. In Japan’s capital, a significant strengthening of the yen increased the effect of already rising rents, Savills writes.
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This is despite recent signs of slowing office rents and elevated use of incentives and concessions to both office and residential tenants in the Big Apple.
