Hongkongers left flat by ever-rising apartment prices, survey says
Survey says residents fear prices will keep rising despite cooling measures
Nine in 10 Hongkongers believe apartment prices are too high and more than a third fear they will go even higher.
While it comes as little surprise, the numbers were confirmed in a university poll where barely one in 10 of the 738 people polled expected prices to fall.
Surveyor Charles Chan Chiu-kwok said flats were already too expensive and he saw little room for further increases. He also said he saw little likelihood of government market-cooling measures being withdrawn soon.
The study - conducted by Chinese University's Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies last week - found 90.4 per cent of the people polled felt current apartment prices were too high, compared to 6.6 per cent who saw the level as right and 0.4 per cent who said property was cheap.
Of the 37.3 per cent, or 275 people, who believed flat prices would soar in the coming year, a majority of 54.2 per cent forecast a rise of between 5 and 10 per cent. A fifth expected a rise of as much as 10 to 20 per cent, while 2.2 per cent predicted that the rise could be 30 per cent or even higher.
For those who believed property prices would fall, 48.1 per cent expected the drop would be in the range of between 5 and 10 per cent and a quarter said it would be 10 to 20 per cent.
A third of the people interviewed supported an increase in land supply by speeding up redevelopment (33.1 per cent). Next popular was changing land use from non-residential to residential purposes (25.8 per cent), followed by resuming private land in the New Territories (19.8 per cent), and increasing building density and reclamation.
Chan said unsold new flats in the New Territories could drag prices in the district down by 10 to 15 per cent. But prices in urban areas were likely to stay firm due to the limited housing supply, which was a long-term phenomenon that could not be changed overnight, he said.
The government imposed cooling measures between 2012 and 2013 in response to rocketing property prices.
These include a 15 per cent levy on non-permanent residents and corporate property buyers, an expansion of stamp duties on quick resales of property and a doubling of duties on all properties costing more than HK$2 million, with exemptions for permanent residents who are first-time buyers or sell their only home to buy another.
Chan said the measures were unlikely to be lifted soon unless property prices dropped considerably. "Hong Kong still has a huge reserve of land, especially in the New Territories. However, those pieces of land are subject to a lot of use restrictions that limit the supply," he said.
