Jake's View | Let's cut plot sizes to a minimum
The big problem is with government reliance on auctions and lease conversion for land revenues

With half of the city's new flats supplied by a few major developers, small to medium-sized property companies want more small plots auctioned off to help them compete against their bigger rivals.
The difficulty with the plots offered for sale is not their sizes but their prices. Our government demands all the development value of the land it sells up front and only developers with seriously big pockets can meet this demand. We need a change in our land use policies.
In fact, even small plots can pose a serious financial danger to small developers. Most of these small plots are for the luxury end of the residential market, which is a tiny segment of the whole and increasingly dominated by speculative interests from the mainland.
Let something go wrong in the mainland economy and prices in this segment would crash. There is very thin trading in it even when times are good. A small developer can bankrupt himself as easily on one of these small plots as on a large one.
But the big reason that he doesn't get a chance at the big plots is that he cannot easily raise the financing for one on terms anywhere near what bankers are comfortable in offering to big developers. All developers require financing. Even the biggest doesn't carry billions in ready cash to pay the auctioneer. If he did, he would sorely need advice on treasury management.