Seeing a vacant niche in the serviced apartment market, two young entrepreneurs decided to develop their own brand of boutique serviced apartments to meet the needs of foreign executives.
Dinesh Nihalchand and Alexander Bent, who previously worked for ABN Amro and Swire Pacific, respectively, decided to become property developers in 2006 after teaming up with a local family to set up Kush, which is also the brand of their serviced apartment properties.
Over the past two years, they have bought three residential buildings in High Street, Des Voeux Road West and Hollywood Road and converted them into serviced apartment blocks with a combined 82 units.
222 Hollywood Road was the latest project to open, in November last year. The project offers 48 one-bedroom apartments of 650 sq ft each. Monthly rents start at HK$38,000.
Kush is one of a number of small developers aggressively developing serviced apartment properties around Hong Kong Island, particularly around the competitive Soho area.
'We both are quite young. We know the lifestyle young executives are searching for,' said managing partner Mr Bent.
He added: 'We want our project to have a connection with Hong Kong. We don't want to be a serviced apartment that you could transport to New York.'