About 500 real estate agents protested outside the Central Government Offices yesterday against a new licensing fee they said would force many struggling agents out of business.
The agents said the fees - $2,300 a year for a salesman's licence and $5,000 for a company licence - were too high.
They asked the Government to reduce the salesman's fee to $800 and the company fee to $1,600 to avoid more closures.
'Many agents are only earning a basic salary of about $3,000 to $5,000 a month. If you throw this hefty fee on them, a lot will not be able to stay in the business,' protest spokesman Chau Chi-ming said.
Agents said that since the height of the property market in mid-1997, the number of property agents had dropped from 30,000 to 13,000.
The number of second-hand flats sold had dropped 60 per cent and sale prices had halved, leading to a 70 per cent reduction in earnings for the industry, agents said.