Hong Kong flat hoarders should face vacancy tax that ‘causes them pain’, property experts say
Chief Executive Carrie Lam considering adopting radical measure, but fails to give timeline on when it might come into force
The government could quite easily tax developers who hoard completed flats, analysts and property consultants said on Friday, but if it stops there and ignores homeowners doing the same thing, the policy will do little to ease Hong Kong’s acute housing shortage.
Eddie Hui Chi-man, a real estate economics professor at Polytechnic University said the government could identify unsold new flats in developers’ hands, and levy a tax “high enough to cause them pain”.
However, he and Leo Sin Yat-ming, a property marketing professor at Chinese University, stressed that buyers who had left their flats empty should also be targeted, though identifying them would be challenging.
It would, Hui said, incur “a huge amount of administrative cost and disputes”.
Government figures showed that by the end of last year, 9,370 newly built flats in the world’s most expensive property market were left unsold, accounting for 12 per cent of the 42,940 vacant flats in 2017.
