Hot Hong Kong home market expected to cool
April 18, 2017 Category Real estate, Weekly
Hong Kong’s home buying fever continued unabated in the first quarter, as purchasers spent a record HKD47.5 billion on new apartments – the biggest buying spree ever, according to Midland Realty, the city’s only listed property agent. But industry experts are now predicting the trend to slow considerably, after the Hong Kong government new policy stipulating that any local first-time buyer of multiple units in one contract must pay a 15% stamp duty for each flat bought. In the first three months of 2017, there were more than 3,580 registered transactions in the primary residential market, almost tripling from 1,323 deals in the same period in 2016. “It is the highest transaction value for new flats in the first quarter since we started collecting the data in 1996, when only the government offered a breakdown of the numbers for residential and commercial transactions,” said Midland’s Chief Analyst Buggle Lau. He attributed the hefty increase to the steep rise in home prices, which have encouraged developers to speed up their marketing for new projects. Year-on-year, the total transaction value of new private flats jumped 180.8% from HKD16.91 billion in 2016, another record-breaking performance, the South China Morning Post reports.
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