Concrete Analysis | Hong Kong car parking spaces now go for HK$1m

Parking spaces in Hong Kong do not come cheap these days and price tags of more than HK$1 million are commonplace.

The charts show some macro 1997 to 2014 data on parking spaces, be they located in an industrial, commercial or residential property.

Note that transactions of whole parking complexes are excluded. The total transacted price tends to be small. In 2014, it was about HK$8.8 billion, having peaked in 1997 at HK$11 billion and reaching a bottom of HK$1.5 billion in 2002 (first chart).

Note that the total dollar volumes for industrial and commercial parking spaces tend to be smaller than those of residential, first or second-hand sectors. For instance, in 2014, the industrial and commercial parking space sectors totalled HK$500 million to HK$600 million each, whereas the first and second-hand residential space sectors reached between HK$3 billion to HK$4 billion each.

Second, dollar volumes can fluctuate immensely year to year - both the transaction volume and price level have been rising in recent years, thus leading to higher overall dollar volumes. However, on a year-to-year basis, the fluctuation in the total dollar volume could be immense (second chart).

Interesting to note is that while the dollar volumes for industrial and commercial parking spaces tend to be much smaller, their growth in dollar volume has outpaced that of residential, in particular second-hand residential parking spaces.