Does Hong Kong have a housing crisis? The answer depends on whether you own a flat
For aspiring homeowners, the city’s red-hot property market invokes both fear and frustration. The Post explains why.
Hong Kong has the dubious distinction of being the world’s most expensive real estate market, a title it has retained for the past seven years.
In 2017, there was no shortage of warnings of a property bubble, complaints of how homes were seriously unaffordable for the grass roots and worries that demand for rental flats would continue to outstrip supply.
The Post looks back at developments in the past year to explain why housing was – and is likely to remain – a dispiriting topic for many aspiring home seekers in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong’s home prices are the world’s highest. Can the city fix it?
So how much have prices gone up this year?
The latest available government statistics from October showed Hong Kong’s private residential property prices had not dropped since March last year.
Between this January and October, prices spiked by 11 per cent, according to the government’s private domestic price indices, which track overall trends in the property market.
The rental index, which had been consecutively increasing from November last year, had also gone up by 7 per cent since the start of this year.
In fact, the city’s private home prices increased by 430 per cent since 2003, making it the world’s most expensive urban centre among 406 cities to buy a home in, according to the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey.