Jake's View | Hong Kong boasts world's most expensive homes … and cheapest

Hong Kong has topped London and New York to become the world's most expensive city to buy a home despite a softening sentiment towards the market, according to an inaugural global survey on prices in leading cities by CBRE.

It seems everyone who sets up shop as a property agency these days feels obligated to do a survey on housing prices and they all tell us that we have priced ourselves out of our market.

Let's consider some alternative facts. For starters, the Housing Authority at present owns 778,000 rental flats, comprising 35 per cent of our total housing stock and the raw numbers in the latest HA accounts indicate that the average rent level of these flats was only HK$1,350 a month.

This right away says that although we have some of the most expensive housing on earth, we also have some of the very cheapest and we have more of that cheapest than we do of the expensive.

These public housing tenants also need not worry that their rents will go up. What with rebates and other concessions they are on average paying no more than they did 20 years ago and there is no movement afoot anywhere to make them pay more. For legislators to suggest it would be political suicide.

Then you get public sale housing, homes provided by the government until 2003 at about half the cost in the market. There are 325,000 of these, or about another 15 per cent of the total stock. The owners face restrictions in reselling them but their profits, either realised or unrealised, are still huge. These people also get no tears from me.