Later this month, the bigwigs of Russian real estate are going to close up their offices, pack up their clothes and go home.

And as their friends and loved ones place this year's lacquer boxes and matryoshki lovingly on the mantle next to all the others, those same bigwigs are going to cruise the streets of major Western cities and - in a tragic spasm of professionalism - take note of the truly important things in life, like vacancy rates and median rents.

It's coming to that time of year again, time to compare our beloved Moscow to the rest of the world. Yes, Virginia, there is a rest of the world.

So how does Moscow compare? As conventional wisdom has it, the crisis has burst the rent bubble, so it should fit somewhere more realistically on the scale. Of course, conventional wisdom would be wrong.

According to a variety of surveys by CB Richard Ellis, Healey & Baker and Jones Lang LaSalle, Moscow is still among the most expensive cities in Europe. For office rents, only London is more expensive - much, much more expensive. For retail space, only Paris and London are more expensive - also much, much more expensive.

In fact, Moscow rents are a long way off the leaders, but consider this: Moscow is still more expensive rent-wise than cities such as Amsterdam, Dublin, Milan and Stockholm. NATO, for one example, pays about half the average Moscow rent for its offices in Brussels. No wonder they've got so much money to spend on threatening Russia's interests around the world.

But let's be fair. The rest of the world is cheaper because the rest of the world has more space. If you took all the office space in Paris, a city half Moscow's size, and dumped it here, we wouldn't know what to do with it. So let's compare Moscow with other "emerging market" capitals.

There, the picture is a bit more even. According to a JLL report, Moscow's vacancy rate stands at about 17 percent, compared to 16 percent in Prague and 18 percent in Budapest. Bucharest and Warsaw do considerably better, but especially in Warsaw, developers are still rushing to catch up with the business boom. Rents everywhere are stable or falling. In Kiev, in its ninth year of recession, rents are falling even faster than here.

But that picture isn't so rosy either. In Budapest, a city of 2 million people, 100,000 square meters of office space are about to hit the market. That's almost half the amount of space available in Moscow total, according to Healey & Baker. And people are building skyscrapers in Warsaw. No one's going to do that here for a very long time, despite Mayor Yury Luzhkov's best efforts.

Retail is a different story. In the midst of crisis, it seems hard to believe that Moscow could sustain even a mini retail boom, but it is without a doubt. Since 1997, the amount of retail space in Moscow has nearly tripled, according to JLL, and rents still remain sky high. While office buildings languish, malls are being built. JLL rightly points out that Muscovites earn four times what their compatriots elsewhere do and, since they're not putting it in banks, they're spending it hand over fist. Developer Cameron Sawyer likes to point to Pushkinskaya square. The McDonald's there is the highest grossing in the world, and the movie theater makes more than any other single screen worldwide.

Whether they're spending enough for Westerners to make money from them isn't clear. The British House, for example, closed. McDonald's reported recently that it lost money on Russia, largely because of currency fluctuations. But Domino's Pizza is here, and Pizza Hut is back. Malls like Ramstore do a booming business. And they're all paying world-class prices for access to Russian customers.

Questions? Comments? Criticisms?

E-mail Building Blocks at sam@russiajournal.com