Henderson Land Development's marketing gimmick of selectively numbering the floors on a 46-storey luxury residential project so it could sell units on the auspiciously numbered 66th, 68th and 88th floors did not involve any 'deception', chairman Lee Shau-kee said yesterday.
'There was no deception at all,' he said.
'The more floors we jump, the more interesting it becomes. And it sounds better, mainly because our customers love these numbers.
'This [practice] is not misleading at all.'
Lee spoke yesterday for the first time since the South China Morning Post revealed its residential building at 39 Conduit Road used a floor numbering system that dispenses with 48 floors and labels the top three floors 66, 68 and 88. These are lucky numbers in Chinese numerology.
Lee said the buyer paid a record HK$439 million or HK$88,000 per square foot of saleable area for a duplex on the second-highest level of the development. This was labelled the 68th floor by Henderson but in reality is the 43rd and 44th floors.