The Chinese mainland's tallest building is setting an altitude record for pre-completion rents.

Shanghai World Financial Center managers are asking future tenants to pay between US$1.70 and 1.96 per square meter per day for space in the tower.

The high end of the range is 40 percent more than Shanghai's previous record, which was set months ago by Park Place, an upscale development in downtown Jing'an Temple area. Rents there averaged US$1.40 per square meter per day.

The 101-story, 492-meter-high Shanghai World Financial Center, located in Pudong's Lujiazui finance and trade zone, is scheduled for completion in 2008.

Mori Building Co Ltd, Japan's biggest private real estate developer and the builder of the HSBC Tower in Pudong, has already signed its first tenants for SWFC, according to earlier media reports.

Subsidiaries of Mizuho Financial Group Inc and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc will lease space at the center, the second-tallest office building in the world after Taipei 101 in Taiwan, according to Bloomberg News.

The steel-framed, reinforced-concrete composite SWFC, covers a site area of 30,000 square meters and 377,300 square meters of floor space, including 226,900 square meters of offices, a five-star hotel and commercial space. Its observatory will be the world's highest at 472 meters, the company said.

"The building will be a market maker because of its huge volume," said Remy Chan of Jones Lang LaSalle, Asia Pacific, a commercial real estate broker. "We expect it to push the vacancy rate up to five percent for Pudong at the end of next year from 1.9 percent in June."

(Shanghai Daily September 14, 2007)