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Property News Weekly Digest
2018/7/14
〈China Daily, July 14, 2018〉The government will not rule out imposing further restrictions on non-residents buying property in Hong Kong, Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor told legislators on Thursday.

Lam discussed the housing issue in her 11th and final question and answer session in the Legislative Council for the 2017-18 legislative year. LegCo’s summer recess starts on Friday.

The government will keep monitoring the property market and consider other policies to deal with the city’s housing shortage if current measures are not effective, Lam said.

She pledged that the government will not rule out any effective measures and will carefully monitor the market’s reaction.

However, she said it’s not suitable for the government to elaborate on its property market policies on this occasion. This is in order to avoid uncertainty and speculation creating unnecessary market fluctuations.

Currently buyers who are not permanent residents of Hong Kong must pay a 30 percent stamp duty when purchasing a residential property in the city.

For second-time local buyers, the stamp duty is 15 percent. Despite increasingly tight measures, the price index of Hong Kong’s private residential property hit a record high for the 19th consecutive month in May, according to the latest government data.

Responding to a lawmaker’s request to restrict the number of non-local residents in Hong Kong to cool off the housing market, Lam said the population policy and housing shortage were separate issues, which should not be mixed up.


〈China Daily, July 13, 2018〉Property market speculators should take Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor’s latest warning seriously if they don’t like being caught off-guard while enjoying a free ride on the city’s current housing boom.

Lam told lawmakers on Thursday, at the last question and answer session of the Legislative Council’s year, that the government would consider taking further action if the property-cooling measures implemented so far do not work.

Few would have doubted that all those special stamp duties implemented by the government over the past several years to curb investment-speculative demand have failed.

This is evidenced by the fact that the city’s residential property prices have continued to soar for 19 straight months as of the end of April, and the home purchase affordability index, a gauge measuring the homebuyer’s monthly mortgage payment over household income, rose to 71 percent in the first quarter, shockingly far above the 20-year average of 44 percent. After all, who would believe the current property curbs are working and the market is operating normally when an average Hong Kong household could afford to buy a small apartment only if they save their all their earnings without eating and drinking for 19 years?

Investment-speculative demand, particularly from deep-pocketed investors from outside Hong Kong, has fuelled the persistent escalation of prices, squeezing many true homebuyers out of the market. Conceivably, the idea of imposing restrictions on the sale of residential properties to non-locals has been floated recently. It seems that the chief executive is receptive to the idea. She told legislators on Thursday that the government would review the policy on selling private apartments to non-locals and would not exclude the possibility of taking further steps to curb non-locals from buying residential property.

〈The Standard, July 13, 2018〉Property is the key to romance - 63 percent of women expect their man to own a home, says a survey by HK Romance Dating.

About 60 percent of men and more than 65 percent of women say owning property is a necessity.

If they have savings exceeding HK$1 million, 35 percent of males and more than half of the females say they will make a down payment to buy a house.

Among men, more than 70 percent believe that owning a property can make it easier to get to know a woman. And more than half agreed that the larger the property, the more likely they are to have a girlfriend.

As home prices surge continuously in Hong Kong, home ownership is a major problem encountered by many people, and may even be one of the conditions for mate selection, said Anita Cheung, founder and matching consultant of HK Romance Dating.

However, 80 percent of the males and 65 percent of the females disagreed that buying a home is an essential condition of marriage.

Although owning a property will be a bonus to the men, the personality, life planning and upward mobility are more important for females to consider when selecting the other half, Cheung added.

Eighty percent of female and male respondents agreed that couples should make the down payment together. And 70 percent expect to choose a flat costing no more than HK$6 million.

A flat of 401 square feet to 500 sq ft will be the first choice for 29 percent of male and 27 percent of female respondents. Forty-six percent of females prefer buying a house in Kowloon, while 33 percent and 21 percent prefer Hong Kong Island and New Territories.

〈The Standard, July 12, 2018〉Singapore's renewed clampdown on speculative property demand sent real estate stocks reeling, as analysts predicted the end of a price rebound and the deflation of a buoyant market for collective sales.

The tightened rules, rolled out a day after the central bank noted there was "euphoria" in the property market, sharply increase buyers' stamp duties for entities such as developers.

As major property markets from New York to Sydney show signs of cooling, Singapore and Hong Kong prices are on a tear, causing unease among local policymakers. In Singapore, a sudden rebound in speculative demand, stoked by record land bids and redevelopment deals, threatened to undo years of carefully implemented curbs that had given the city-state an edge over Hong Kong in quality of living.

"This is a preemptive move by the government to cool down the market before it gets too hot," said Irvin Seah, an economist at DBS Group Holdings.

The en-bloc market, where a group of owners band together to sell a collection of apartments, surged in recent months thanks to demand from developers.

Officials had repeatedly warned that such exuberance was unsustainable, and Ravi Menon, managing director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, sounded a cautious note on en-bloc developments last week.

〈The Standard, July 11, 2018〉K Wah International (0173) said yesterday the government's proposed vacancy tax is a market distortion, adding that the vacant apartments in Hong Kong are mainly luxury flats.

General manager Tony Wan Wai-ming said the amendment that requires developers to offer for sale no less than 20 percent of the total number of residential units would not impact the company much.

Its latest residential project in Tai Po's Pak Shek Kok only has a vacancy rate of 2 percent, he said.

Despite the government's recent interventions in the property market, a luxury apartment in One LaSalle in Kowloon Tong changed hands at HK$70.8 million, or HK$32,000 per square foot.

The vendor acquired the property for HK$54.28 million in 2010.

However, a luxury house in Stanley sold at a HK$30 million loss. Meanwhile, a 3,382-sq-ft house in Regalia Bay only fetched HK$90 million, 25 percent less than the HK$112 million the vendor paid in 2011.

In the primary market, a house in Chinachem Group's Serenity Peak House in Sai Kung sold for HK$130 million, or HK$55,607 per sq ft. The 2,342-sq-ft home also includes a 2,851 sq-ft garden, 691-sq-ft platform, 437-sq-ft rooftop deck, and a 452-sq-ft parking space.

On Hong Kong Island, a luxury home in Sun Hung Kai Properties' (0016) Victoria Harbour project fetched more than HK$100 million yesterday. The 1,599-sq-ft apartment was sold by tender for HK$62,000 per sq ft, and was the third deal transacted at more than HK$100 million.