NEW YORK CITY- At an inaugural CBRE retail-focused market report for Q3 2011 Monday, the company’s retail experts detailed the drivers behind Manhattan’s thriving retail sector. These include the continued strength of the city’s tourism industry and a lack of available spaces in the several key areas—including the Meatpacking District, Fifth Avenue and Times Square.

“The key right now is that there’s still a lot of demand and what’s happening is as Fifth is getting bigger it’s creating this vacuum effect, where competitors of other brands have to be there now,” said Andrew Goldberg, EVP with CBRE’s New York Tri-State Region Retail Brokerage Services Group. “If you’re trying to build a business, especially if you’re not in the US or you want to be in the US, you have to be there.” Goldberg said that there doesn’t seem to be a ceiling at the moment on rents in that area.

Notable transactions in the Fifth Avenue area for Q3 2011 included Apple Inc.’s 23,000-square-foot lease in Grand Central Terminal and the 18,400 square feet that luxury retailer Dolce & Gabbana took at 717 Fifth Ave. While luxury brands like Dolce & Gabbana remain on Fifth, Goldberg said that mass market retailers were infiltrating the area now, including some international brands, like Uniqlo, that hadn’t been there before.

Susan Kurland, an EVP with the New York Tri-State Region Retail Brokerage Services Group, spoke about the landscape for the Meatpacking District in Q3 2011, where, she said, rents were gradually moving up, with availabilities, though not in prime locations.

The Highline and the Whitney Museum, which is slated to open some time in 2015, make the area a global market, Kurland said, though one that’s placed slightly behind Fifth Avenue and Times Square.

Over in Times Square, David LaPierre, EVP with the Global Retail Services Team, said that the area has been attracting continued interest from global brands looking to take advantage of the mega-sized signage the area affords. “You’ll continue to see a desire from global brands wanting to have a presence,” he said. “Its going to be a different brand than the one that necessarily wants to be on Fifth Avenue but you’re going to find brands that want access to a much more global customer base.” Those, he theorized, could include powerhouses like Amazon and Google, that don’t currently have a retail presence there.

A lot of the strength seen in the retail sector, at least in the specific parts of Manhattan that the three spoke about, was a result of tourist shoppers. The city’s tourism industry continues to keep retailers busy.

Another phenomenon driving it, Goldberg said, has been not an availability of space—there isn’t one—but rather the power of the dollar to move one tenant in and another out. “Everything else that we’re going to read about is going to happen in a space that nobody thought was even on the market,” he said. “Like Dolce & Gabbana announcing that they’re coming in to Escada and Escada’s lease wasn’t expiring—it was just time for a deal to happen. And that’s what you’re going to see. There’s going to be a certain amount on money that will make a tenant leave a space.