São Paulo’s most expensive streets are islands of residential real estate

Six of the ten streets of buildings that have the most expensive square meter in the city of São Paulo have more than 90% of residential apartments among the properties.

A survey carried out by Loft Analytics, the core of the real estate platform that disseminates market analysis, points out that the higher the price per square meter of a street, the greater the chance that it will be almost exclusively residential, without commerce and services.

The most valued road in the survey is Seridó, in Jardim Europa, west of the city of São Paulo, which presented an average of R$ 35,098 per square meter in real estate transactions. There, there is only one property registered as commercial, an exclusive spa for the residents of one of the buildings.

“Different factors influence the value of the property, and one of them is how uniform a street is. The domain of apartments on the street is very important, especially in the highly valued”, says Fábio Takahashi, data manager of the communication area at Loft.

Within the sample used —836 streets that had at least five real estate transactions with apartments between January 2018 and February this year—, the platform also looked for the role of properties on the streets with the lowest square meter.

The street with the cheapest square meter in the sample (R$ 3,268) is Salvador Caruso, in Vila Romana, also on the west side, where 56.85% of the properties are residential.

Marco Tulio, executive director of Esquema Imóveis, a real estate company specializing in high standard, points out that the same dynamics of these more valued streets is observed in the vertical part of Jardins, closer to Av. Paulista, where the blocks are mostly residential, but intersected by commercial avenues, such as Oscar Freire, Pamplona and Augusta.

As much as the high-end customer prefers a street for residential use, being close to streets full of shops, restaurants, markets and services, in addition to being close to business centers, is essential, according to Tulio.

“It’s like a street fair, it’s something great for people of any standard, but not on your doorstep”, he says.

For him, the main advantage of more residential streets is tranquility. “The high standard wants a beautiful, pleasant, tree-lined, quiet street, and a street with a lot of commerce and flow of people loses that charm”, he says.

The region around Parque do Povo, close to Avenida Faria Lima, where several of the capital’s most popular streets are located, saw its profile change about 20 years ago with the arrival of large residential developments, recalls Tulio.

“Seridó street was once shared with restaurants, and I frequented clubs at Franz Schubert. The developers bought everything and began to transform into what it is today, because Faria Lima replaced Paulista as the main financial center of São Paulo”, he says.

It is a different situation from other high-end neighborhoods, almost strictly residential in the city, but formed by houses, such as Jardins América, Europa and Guedala and Alto de Pinheiros. In them, the capital’s zoning rules limit occupation by commercial properties and even by houses that deviate from the current standard.

“The zoning guarantees this exclusivity. Historically, in our urban planning, the elites were segregated”, says the architect and urban planner Lucas Chiconi.

He points to the existence of a symbiotic relationship between the high-end neighborhoods formed by apartments and houses: the constructive limitation in the neighborhoods of houses, or mansions, which in itself already makes real estate more expensive, guarantees an eternal view of the neighborhoods of buildings in the surroundings, with no chance of new towers blocking the horizon, an important factor for their appreciation.

This proximity also acts as a social filter, making these communities more homogeneous.
For Chiconi, strictly residential streets are not ideal for the city, because, by forming neighborhoods, they interfere with the movement of residents from other regions, since large avenues, subway lines and bus lanes tend to deviate from these environments.

“Morumbi has blind streets, full of walls, it is a great barrier to Campo Limpo and Taboão da Serra, for example. The same will happen with the region of Chácara Flora and Alto da Boa Vista, in Santo Amaro, which is a wall between Cidade Ademar, Grajaú, Pedreira and the direction of the center”, he says.

The current São Paulo Master Plan encourages the adoption of ground floor retail and non-residential units, such as offices and hotel rooms, in buildings located in transport hub regions — around subway lines and bus lanes. This can have an effect on the concentration of households.

However, the very high standard customer still has reservations about investing and living in a building with stores and lofts, says Tulio.

To get around the problem, what developers have been doing is creating two separate entrances to the same development, segregating those who live in larger properties from those who frequent or work in the shops, as well as from the other residents or guests of the building. ​