The number of private-home completions in Hong Kong this year will reach its highest since 2004, said the government yesterday, further pressuring developers after a series of cooling measures forced them to cut prices. The number of flats forecast for completion this year is around 17,610 — a 113 per cent increase from a year earlier, said the Rating and Valuation Department. The government said...
Hong Kong Property Market
Ms Chu Kin Lan has already closed six out of 11 offices of her Hong Kong real estate agency, whose Chinese name translates as Precious Prosperity, and let go of half of her 70 employees amid the city’s toughest curbs on home buying in its history. But the worst pain may be still to come. As many as 10,000 real estate agents are forecast to lose their jobs, according to Centaline Property Agency, as...
Hutchison Whampoa, the conglomerate controlled by Mr Li Ka-shing, Asia’s richest man, has sold a house in Hong Kong’s Victoria Peak for HK$740 million (S$119 million). The 6,863 sq-ft house at the seven-home, 28 Barker Road project was sold to an unidentified buyer, according to the developer’s website. The price is the second-highest paid in the city after a house on Pollock’s Path in The Peak...
Thousands took to the streets earlier in Hong Kong this month to protest against the government's recent property tax hikes. Made up mainly of property agents and disgruntled home-buyers, they are angry at the government for doubling the stamp duty on property transactions since February to around 5.5 per cent. Protest organiser Raymond Ho argued the cooling measures are hitting the innocent. Ho...
Hong Kong home prices fell the most in four-and-a-half years in the week ended July 7, on concerns that interest rates will begin to rise if the US Federal Reserve phases out its monetary easing program later this year, the Bloomberg news agency reported. Prices fell 1.8 per cent during the week, the most since November 2008, according to an index compiled by Centaline Property Agency, the city’s...
Developers are expected to put the brakes on home sales for the rest of the year after government curbs to rein in prices sapped demand, according to BOCOM International Holdings and Centaline Property Agency. “The pace of sales will remain slow unless there’s something encouraging developers to turn over assets faster,” said Mr Alfred Lau, a Hong Kong-based analyst at BOCOM. He added that they...
The territory’s government yesterday announced comprehensive curbs in an attempt to arrest the exuberance in the property market that it warned could destabilise its economy. The measures come a month after Singapore unveiled wide-ranging measures to cool property prices. Beginning today, Hong Kong will double the stamp duty to as high as 8.5 per cent of the property value for certain transactions,...
The overheating property market remains the biggest risk factor to the stability of the Hong Kong economy, Mr Norman Chan, head of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, said yesterday, adding that household debt was now at 59 per cent, close to the record high of 60 per cent in 2002. Only three months after Hong Kong rolled out a tough new round of cooling measures, home prices have again climbed to record...
Hong Kong monetary chief Norman Chan said more measures might be necessary to cool the city’s housing market as elevated household debt added to risks from property price gains over the past four years, Bloomberg news agency reported on Monday. Debt is “near historic high levels,” Mr Chan, the chief executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), told lawmakers, citing ratios of 58 to 59 per...
Hong Kong is at risk of an abrupt decline in property prices after gains fuelled by low interest rates and a limited supply of new housing, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said. "The property sector is the main source of domestic economic risk," the IMF said in a report on the city released today. The odds of a slump that has major economic and financial consequences is "fairly low in the near...