Just leasing more land won't open up the property market

The city's property market, which is dominated by a few large developers, is expected to be opened to more competition under the administration of chief executive-elect Leung Chun-ying, assumptionists say.

SCMP, March 28

Well, it wasn't actually assumptionists who said it. That's just my made-up word for them. The actual word in the text was 'analysts'.

But as it seems anyone can call himself an analyst these days, making it impossible to define the term, and as this particular analysis was just a mass of assumptions and conjectures, why not call them assumptionists?

Here, for instance, we have an estate agent who has now become our next chief executive through the ineptitude of the natural front runner and whose political career to date has consisted of little more than keeping to the agenda of a rubber stamp called the Executive Council.

We are now to assume, however, that he has only to intone the pronouncement 'Abracadabra' and our property market will be opened to more competition.

We are also to assume that the reason four developers dominate the property market is that we do not have enough land supply - although we have 250,000 vacant flats at the moment. Just create more land and the problem will go away. It's so simple. All you need is a bumped-up estate agent.