A luxury apartment in Hong Kong sold for a record HK$594.7 million (US$76.7 million), days before Christmas, making it the most expensive in the territory and possibly in Asia, reports said yesterday.
An unidentified buyer paid more than HK$1.117857 million per square meter for the 532m2 unit at the luxury 39 Conduit Road apartment tower in the upmarket Mid-Levels residential area, the Apple Daily and the Standard reported.
The condominium, on the 46th floor with a view of the iconic Victoria Harbour, had a list price of HK$646.48 million on developer Henderson Land Development Co’s (恒基兆業地產) Web site.
The price beats the previous record of HK$470 million paid for a luxury unit which takes up the entire eighth floor of the Opus Hong Kong, a 12-story residential building designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Frank Gehry, in 2012.
It comes as analysts said a US interest rate increase could put an end to the housing boom in the Chinese territory, which maintains a decades-old peg with the US dollar.
Hong Kong-based brokerage CLSA Ltd warned the residential market was at a “turning point,” with prices possibly dropping 17 percent by 2017, while other firms have tipped falls of up to 30 percent.
Hong Kong’s de facto central bank on Thursday last week raised its base interest rate by 25 basis points to 0.75 percent after the US Federal Reserve announced its first rate increase in more than nine years, but Buggle Lau (劉嘉輝), chief analyst for Midland Realty Ltd (美聯物業), said the record-breaking purchase does not reflect the bigger picture of the overall property market in the territory.
“The super-rich, I don’t think the small increase in the interest rates have any impact on their purchasing power,” Lau said.
“This is exceptional, it can’t reflect the whole market,” which he described overall as “sluggish.”
Property prices in Hong Kong, famous for its sky-high rent and super-rich tycoons, have more than doubled in six years due to record low interest rates and a flood of wealthy buyers from mainland China.
Many residents complain they can no longer afford decent accommodation in the territory of 7 million and analysts say property ownership is out of reach even for the upper-middle classes.
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