Concrete box ‘possibly not worth HK$23mn’ shock horror

The news media sometimes deliver grievous and heartbreaking stories that shake us. It might be an elderly and infirm woman beaten senseless by thugs, or the plight of a starving orphaned infant refugee. Or, in the case of Hong Kong’s Standard, the man who has to cut the asking price of his property to sell it. A Tai Koo Shing apartment, the paper painfully reports, went for 24% less than a similar unit the week before.

Stan-Jittery

Stan-ButVictLest we get overly depressed, the story ends on a cheery note. A senior manager at Sun Hung Kai Properties assures everyone that silly little stock-market swings (like the trifling one you probably missed yesterday) mean nothing. He adds that ‘more people’ have had the tremendous foresight to move their money out of stocks and, in the blink of an eye, put it into real estate, because home prices are bound to carry on zooming up and up, forever.

Could this be the same Sung Hung Kai Properties that is offering special discounts and waivers on repayments – of the sort that suggest desperation to shift inventory – on a new development at Tung Chung?

SCMP-SHK-offer

Yes it could!

According to a little bite-size morsel tucked away in the South China Morning Post, Chief SCMP-GovtMustActExecutive CY Leung ‘hits back at critics of his call for proactive government involvement in the market’. Since no-one has a clue what his ‘proactive’ measures would be, it seems a pointless debate. But some commentators suspect he wants some sort of 1970s Korean-style industrial policy of picking winners, and even some of his own officials have distanced themselves from his remarks.

He now justifies the ‘proactive’ whatever-it-is as a response to market failure, such as moves to ‘curb property speculation’. The problem here is that these measures – extra stamp duties – have themselves failed.

If he had been serious about minimizing the real-estate bubble, he would have barred non-residents from buying Hong Kong residential property and introduced punitive taxes on empty homes. (We know this would work because of the deafening squeals from those who insist it wouldn’t.) But of course this would have cut developers’ profit margins, or ‘damaged our reputation as a free market’, as opponents like to phrase it. Now, his administration is reduced to sitting helplessly, wondering what Xi Jinping or Janet Yellen might do next, and waiting – fearing property prices rising further, fearing property prices staying where they are as the least affordable in the world, and fearing property prices falling.

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7 Responses to Concrete box ‘possibly not worth HK$23mn’ shock horror

  1. PCC says:

    As there is no free market in property in Hong Kong anyway, reserving residential property ownership to residents only, despite the bureaucratic hurdles of such a policy and treading on the toes of the Heritage Foundation, or something like it must be considered seriously as part of the mix of solving Hong Kong’s housing affordability crisis.

    In the meantime, I’m raising rents.

  2. Joe Blow says:

    No jumpers in Central yet ?

  3. Big Al says:

    From yesterday’s comments, I just discovered the wonderful world of Shaun Rein, and have spent the last 30 minutes reading through some of his words of wisdom. What a total nob. Can’t wait for more!

  4. reductio says:

    I think Hemlock missed a chance to have a soundtrack to match today’s stock market fall. “When the levee breaks” (Led Zep version) springs to mind.

  5. Cassowary says:

    Hong Kong housing policy in 8 words:
    “Gasp! Won’t somebody think of the house prices?!?”

    Preferably said whilst clutching one’s pearls and fanning oneself.

  6. Scotty Dotty says:

    Some hopeful signs appearing of Hong Kong jitters at China’s August 2015 correction downward. But 2008 redux? Doubtful.

    China is still in a bull market window and will be for several years more. The max Hong Kong haircut will be a 10-20% correction in property

    So the SHKP guy is correct to say the tycoons will hardly notice what’s happening in China (what he meant, in a roundabout way). I agree. Face it: retail property margins are so huge in Hong Kong that marketing fiddles mean basically nothing. By the time of the quarterly results cost-of-sales in the summer will just be a rounding error and the same old Hong Kong property con will still exist.

  7. I have no problem in principle with the idea that “governments must act when markets fail” – just no confidence whatever in the wisdom of the current Hong Kong government.

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