Revealed: Texwinca’s executive holds the record as owner of the world’s priciest parking space with US$1.53 million outlay

Poon Ho-tak, executive director of Hong Kong’s Texwinca Holdings, paid HK$11.9 million (US$1.53 million) for a parking bay at Mount Nicholson
Poon bought three parking spots for a total of HK$35.7 million

Hong Kong property

Sandy Li

Published: 3:30pm, 8 Jun, 2021

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A top executive of a Hong Kong-listed apparel company has been revealed as the buyer of a parking spot at the exclusive Mount Nicholson development on The Peak, which set a world record last month at HK$11.9 million (US$1.53 million) each.

Poon Ho-tak, executive director of Texwinca Holdings, bought three parking bays for HK$11.9 million each, paying a total of HK$35.7 million, according to Land Registry documents. He owns two adjoining flats with a combined area of 8,812 square feet (818 square metres) on the 12th floor of the ultra-luxury project, for which he paid HK$749 million, or HK$84,997 per square foot, in 2016.

With a standard parking space measuring around 134.5 sq ft (12.5 square metres), the transacted price works out to HK$88,475 per square foot, 4 per cent higher than the price paid for the flats.

As parking space available to each owner at such super deluxe projects is very limited, owners have to pay “crazy high prices”, said Leo Cheung, corporate development director of valuation and property management at Pruden Holdings.

Hong Kong has been consistently setting records for the most expensive car-parking space over the past few years due to intense speculative activity in this asset class. The previous record was HK$7.6 million set in October 2019 at The Center, a 73-storey office tower in Central. At the height of the speculative fervour, 8,968 slots worth HK$16.64 billion were recorded in 2018, the most since records began in 1996, according to Centaline.

Poon, 43, is executive director of Texwinca, and the son of the company’s founder and chairman Poon Bun-chak, according to the company’s annual report. He joined the group as a management trainee in 2003 after completing his studies at The University of New South Wales in Australia. In October 2017, Poon was promoted to oversee the overall general management of the textile business.

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The executive, who was paid HK$6.44 million in 2020 salary and bonus according to Bloomberg’s data, could not be reached to comment.

Texwinca, founded in 1975, is principally engaged in knitted fabric and apparel businesses. The firm’s 2020 profit fell 48 per cent to HK$169 million, partly due to an increase in cancellation of orders and delays in shipment of products following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Last month, the developers Wharf (Holdings) and Nan Fung Group offered 29 parking spaces in phases two and three of Mount Nicholson through a closed tender to homeowners at an indicative price of HK$8.8 million to HK$9.5 million. The parking bays were sold to the highest bidders.

Lack of parking is not limited to Hong Kong’s ultra rich, as many middle-class families also tend to own more than one vehicle, exceeding the typical allocation of parking bays in most housing development projects, thus requiring them to pay above market prices for space, said Cheung.

As long as there is a shortage in the supply of parking spaces, it will help to fuel prices, he said.