Heart-warming real-estate news

There’s nothing we like more than seeing a property speculator having to cut his asking price, preferably by a lot…

Known colloquially as the “Ten Billion Shop King” for compiling one of the city’s largest caches of street shop and retail properties over the last three decades, Lai Wing-to has agreed to sell 9-11 Staunton Street for HK$105 million ($13.4 million), according to records filed with the city’s Land Registry last month.

…Lai, who had listed the property at HK$200 million in a sale effort in January 2024, is offloading the asset at a 47.5 percent markdown.

It’s a crumbling six-floor walk-up. OK – so he still made a profit…

…Lai bought the property in 2009 for HK$71.8 million, according to Land Registry records.

But that isn’t always the case…

…Lai sold [a] six-storey 1967-vintage property at 132 Sai Yeung Choi Street South [Mongkok] for HK$62 million ($8 million), parting with the asset for nearly 40 percent less than what he paid in 2009.

(Back in the old days, before there was a Mid-Levels Escalator or a ‘Soho’, I was once strolling to the office in Central past that Staunton St building one morning when a black kite swooped down onto a window ledge and instantly soared away with a pigeon, leaving only an explosion of feathers. The adjoining building has a nunnery – half a dozen shaven-headed devotees apparently oblivious to their area’s 30-year cycle from inner-city semi-slum to mega-gentrification to an overpriced, hollowed-out mass of ‘For Rent’ signage. I pretty much ignored it myself, though I do miss the annual Worst Restaurant in Soho Awards.)

Jimmy Lai’s former right-hand man Mark Simon has some advice for the US President (or for that matter any world leader, CEO, university head or Pope who thinks China will answer all their economic or corporate problems)…

We need someone in the Trump administration to walk into the Oval Office and give it to the President straight: China doesn’t have what the U.S. needs.

Yes, the Chinese economy “pitch deck” makes mouths water. The sales narrative jumps of the page; “Global manufacturing hub,” — “1.4 billion customers,” are what the Chinese government wants President Trump to focus on. But if you actually looked at the books—the real ones, —you’d see a series of dark alleys, that while not transparent to the outside world, look suspiciously like a tailspin. Beijing just set its 2026 growth target at a humble 4.5%–5%. 

…the country is filled with “ghost cities” and millions of middle-class families paying mortgages on unfinished “apartments.” When your primary asset is a hole in the ground that won’t be finished until 2029, you aren’t exactly in the mood to go out and buy U.S. beef. 

…If we are waiting for a Chinese middle-class spending spree to save American agriculture, manufacturing, or even services, we are waiting for a ship that has already hit the reef.