The Hong Kong Homebuyer’s Guide
Fantastic news! Hong Kong is, for the sixth year in a row, the most expensive place in the world to buy an apartment. That’s just great for all you homeowners out there, who are sitting on goldmines if you want to sell up and move to a hellhole like Detroit.
For those of you not rich enough to own your own place, we’ve got some great tips that will take you from renter to owner in no time at all.
Go into Retail.
It’s true: Selling goods is a tough industry to make money in. But if you do it right, the rewards are enormous. Here’s a case study. A man, L.B., made money by selling the printed word bound into volumes. These words were a combination of gossip and criticism of certain powerful people. This created a ready market of people who wanted to read this kind of material, and were therefore happy to spend money to purchase these volumes. This angered some mid-level functionaries of the powerful people, who abducted L.B. from his city of residence and held him over the border while everyone else wondered what the hell just happened. And L.B. didn’t have to worry about buying a house ever again, because he was a guest of state security apparatus instead. See? Retail is super rewarding.
Crash at CY’s Place.
You know that movie “The Terminal,” where Tom Hanks gets away with living inside JFK Airport for months on end? Simply pack a bag and move into the vast mansion that is Government House. If CY Leung gets curious and asks what you’re doing there, look imperious and claim to be from the Liaison Office. He’ll avert his eyes and scuttle backwards, muttering vague apologies in atrocious Putonghua.
The Classic Time Machine Gambit.
Struggling to save the 40 percent down payment you’ll need to come up with before you can buy an apartment? No problem. Obviously, this is the perfect time for the ol’ time machine wheeze. Simply invent and construct a time machine. Go back in time to the earliest days of Hong Kong and deposit $500 with a bank, then let compound interest do the work. Zip forward to the modern day and collect your down payment in one handy lump sum. Although given our cratering interest rates you’ll make about $20.
Smash the System.
Let’s be real: The government’s cooling measures aren’t working. The only way we’ll be able to afford a place is by engineering the downfall of the entire Hong Kong economy. Thankfully, this appears to be well in progress: Rampant rents, soaring prices, inadequate welfare, useless public housing and a yawning rich-poor gap are all signs of a fundamentally broken society. In sociopolitics, “accelerationism” is the act of encouraging capitalism to fulfil its self-destructive tendencies until it disintegrates. This is all too obviously the hidden agenda of Financial Secretary John Tsang who, far from being a mustachioed buffoon, is evidently a fifth columnist bent on bringing down the prevailing system in order to set up an anarcho-syndicalist utopia. You’re doing a killer job, Comrade John!
Diversify.
An international survey has found that the median Hong Kong home costs 19 times the median annual household income. Don’t want to slave away at a desk for 19 years of your life just to scrape together enough for a crappy studio walkup? Simple. Remember that time machine you built? Simply go back in time and impregnate yourself 18 times, creating 18 clones. Eighteen clones plus you working for a single year will rack up that cash no problem. Yeah: Same as the government, we just told you to go screw yourself.
