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Before China hosted the Olympics, and the resulting construction boom produced two other high-end shopping malls nearby, the gleaming modern landmark in the foreigner-heavy eastern Beijing neighbourhood of Sanlitun was Pacific Century Place.

This blog warrants a caveat: the shiny glass and steel façade of this department store, luxury apartments and offices, is the main view from my living room window.

When my husband and I inherited our apartment from The Globe's outgoing correspondent three years ago, he told us life had become infinitely more convenient in the neighbourhood since the department store had opened. A Japanese-style supermarket in the basement provided fresh Western-style cuts of meat and all the imported groceries a homesick expat could want. Upstairs, foreign brands including Nine West and Calvin Klein catered to both foreign tastes and foreign sizes. The main floor houses a Starbucks, a Dairy Queen and a French patisserie.

But now, Pacific Century Place is plagued by the same ills shared by so many of Beijing's new retail and commercial developments: climbing rent, and not enough shoppers to fill all the new shopping malls. Local media reported its department store will close later this fall after a decade in business -- an eternity in fast-changing Beijing.

Its pool of customers has largely been poached by another new, more trendy shopping complex a couple of blocks away, which has extremely popular flagship stores for Apple and Adidas, and dozens of other foreign brands. Counting the staff to customer ratio in upscale Beijing shops is usually an amusing game even in busier stores, since sales staff nearly always outnumber customers by a ratio of at least 3 to 1; in the Pacific department store, it became embarrassing to watch sales staff idly gossiping with not a single customer in sight.

But the closing of this modern landmark is a warning shot in a city where rental prices are growing faster than ever among commercial and retail properties -- even though the number of customers able to afford the luxury brands housed in those properties has not expanded at such a pace.

A report from Cushman & Wakefield earlier this month named Beijing's Wangfujing district as having the most expensive asking price for rents in malls in all of Asia, higher than properties in Tokyo or Singapore. Beijing's Central Business District, just south of Sanlitun, rounds out the top 10.

"Really, the market is, as we've been saying, oversaturated. There are just too many high-end department stores, high-end malls and so on," said Matthew Crabbe, a retail analyst with Access Asia, who said as brands expand to the regions, wealthy Chinese no longer have to travel to Beijing or Shanghai to get their name-brand fix. "The real market for luxury goods has moved out of Beijing and what is left is oversupply."

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