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Enoch Yiu

As Hong Kong's luxury property market goes crazy with sky-high prices for Mid-Levels  flats, we can only speculate what the original Skyhigh would have fetched today.
The appropriately named 20,000 square foot colonial-style mansion used to sit at the very top of the Peak and housed HSBC's taipans before being sold for HK$85 million in 1991. 
That works out  to HK$4,250 per square foot,  roughly what people are paying for a second-tier  flat at the massive Tseung Kwan O residential developments these days. 
It is also almost 17 times cheaper than the world record HK$71,280 per square foot that Henderson Land Development claims a mainlander paid for a five-bedroom luxury duplex at 39 Conduit Road in  Mid-Levels West this week. 
Skyhigh, with its 360-degree panoramic views of the city, was the taipan house built on the instructions of former Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corp chairman Michael Sandberg in the 1980s.
William Purves, who took over as chairman in 1986, sold it to Japanese department store tycoon and Yaohan International  founder Kazuo Wada five years later for HK$85 million, a huge transaction that many believed was a windfall for the bank at the time.
Another five years later and the property was sold for 4.4 times that amount - HK$375 million, or HK$18,750 per square foot - when Wada was forced to  sell Skyhigh to Pearl Oriental Holdings (now named Sun's Group) when his business empire ran into financial problems in late 1996.
Pearl Oriental chairman Wong Kwan had the mansion demolished shortly after buying it to make way for the building of five villas worth HK$120 million each. 
However, the project never got off the ground, as the property market crashed in late 1997 amid the Asian financial crisis. 
The creditor bank of Sun's Group  took over the land when the property developer ran into financial trouble and the site of the once grand mansion was left empty and  overgrown with weeds for the next seven years.  Actor  Stephen Chow Sing-chi and Ryoden Development bought the 43,924 square foot plot from the creditor bank for HK$320 million in 2004 with plans to turn it into a four-house development. 
Two of the villas went up for sale in late 2007 for about HK$350 million each, or HK$60,000 per square foot.
The saleable area of each three-storey house, which includes ancillary spaces such as storage rooms and balconies, is between 7,300 and 8,300 square feet. 
Each  house comes with a swimming pool and gardens.
Bel Global Resources Holdings chairman Stephen Sy Chin-mong bought one of the villas for HK$380 million or HK$52,566 per square foot on September 11 last year, just before the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings sent the world economy into a tailspin. 
It took 10 more months before the second villa was sold, to a mainlander for HK$300 million, or HK$41,500 per square foot, as the luxury homes market embarked on its latest recession-defying climb. 
After this week's events, it is anybody's guess how much the other two would fetch.
Earthly price
Skyhigh sold for price of Tseung Kwan O flat per square foot now 
Then HSBC chairman William Purves sold Skyhigh in 1991 for, in HK$: $85m
This compares with luxury duplex at 39 Conduit Road sold this week for, in HK$: $439m



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HSBC

Ex-HSBC Peak house a bargain compared with Mid-Levels flat