Over 780 shoebox flats in Hong Kong’s subsidised home ownership scheme still unsold despite more than a month on market
- As of Friday, 254 of the flats at Kai Chuen Court in Kowloon, offered under the Green Form Subsidised Home Ownership Scheme, still have not found buyers; all are smaller than 200 sq ft
- Other unsold units under the scheme include 537 flats in Tsing Yi and Chai Wan, with about 98 per cent of them smaller than 189 sq ft
More than 780 shoebox flats put on the market in Hong Kong’s latest batch of subsidised housing units have gone unsold for over a month, even as all the larger flats offered under the scheme were quickly snapped up.
The Housing Authority offered up a total of 2, 649 new flats for sale under the Green Form Subsidised Home Ownership Scheme (GSH) on October 29, including 2,112 units at Kai Chuen Court, which is situated above the Diamond Hill MTR station in Kowloon. Half of the units at Kai Chuen were sized between 184 sq ft and 287 sq ft.
However, as of Friday, 254 of the Kai Chuen flats remained unsold, accounting for 12 per cent of the estate. All of them were smaller than 200 sq ft.
Cleresa Wong Pie-yue, chairwoman of the authority’s subsidised housing committee, acknowledged that the smaller flats were less popular.
“We thought flats in Diamond Hill would be welcomed by the buyers given their urban location, but apparently it’s not exactly what we expected,” she said. “We should seriously look at the proportion of different flat types for GSH and see what can be done to cater to buyers’ needs.”
The sales this year also included 537 unsold GSH flats left over from last year’s batch, mostly at Ching Fu Court in Tsing Yi, but with a dozen located in Dip Tsui Court in Chai Wan on Hong Kong Island. About 98 per cent of those flats are smaller than 189 sq ft. So far, only 10 of those flats have been sold.
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Hong Kong’s new shoebox flats in Diamond Hill
The GHS flats, built by the authority, are sold exclusively to public housing tenants or those likely to be allocated a public rental flat within a year. The programme was introduced in 2016 to provide homes for sale at significantly less than market price.