The government needs to stop property developers using opaque sales tactics and stockpiling flats to push up prices amid skyrocketing housing costs in space-starved Hong Kong, experts said on Thursday.

Chan said the government would need to manage the property market in a “holistic” way, in the face of criticism for launching few initiatives to ease the housing shortage. He said the hoarding strategy was “undesirable”.

In 2013 the government founded the Sales of First-hand Residential Properties Authority to regulate developers’ sales tactics, but critics say it has done little.

Lee Wing-tat, chairman of policy think tank Land Watch, said the authority needed to take action to stop flats being offered to the highest bidder in tendering processes. Under that arrangement, sellers put small numbers of flats on the market, without an asking price, and let bidders make their offers without any knowledge of other bids.

Lee said the opaque bidding process is problematic because it leaves “room for manipulation” to push up property prices. He said developers commonly work with agents, offering them big commissions to sell flats for a certain price, and that the process “creates a market distortion”.

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“Property agents can just tell the buyers that the flat is worth such-and-such a price, and that the value is bound to increase in a number of years. But buyers have no way of knowing if this is true,” he said.