Hong Kong’s property market is seeing more deals as buyers bet that the border with China reopening will help channel more capital into the territory and stoke a recovery.
The number of transactions in 35 major residential projects jumped to an eight-month high in the two weeks through Sunday, Midland Realty (美聯物業) said.
That is an encouraging sign for a market where combined new and used home sales slumped last year to the lowest level since at least 1996, data tracked by Centaline Property Agency (中原地產) showed.
The border between China and Hong Kong started to gradually reopen on Sunday after being effectively sealed since early 2020.
“The confirmation of the first phase of border opening can facilitate the exchange between the mainland and Hong Kong, bringing Hong Kong the long-absent Chinese capital,” said Sammy Po (布少明), chief executive officer of Midland’s home division. “It will stimulate the asset price to rise.”
Midland estimates that used home transaction registrations are to reach a seven-month high this month.
A family office with a Chinese background recently bought more than 10 apartments for about HK$100 million (US$12.8 million), said Edmund Pang (彭文浩), a senior district sales director at Midland whose team brokered the deals.
The buyer had been on the hunt for nearly five months, and news of the border reopening helped speed up their decision to purchase, Pang said.
“They think that both talent flow and economic activities will pick up between the two places soon,” he said.
Some analysts are already forecasting a recovery for Hong Kong’s residential sector.
Morgan Stanley expects peaking interest rates and a reduced exodus following the easing of travel curbs to support the market in the coming year.
The firm said that property prices would bottom out in the second quarter and eventually increase by 5 percent for the full year.
However, it is too early to say that the property market is headed for a recovery. It is unclear how much Chinese capital will flow into real estate following eased border controls.
Used home values in Hong Kong last year declined about 16 percent as borrowing costs increased along with a shrinking economy.
JITTERS: Nexperia has a 20 percent market share for chips powering simpler features such as window controls, and changing supply chains could take years European carmakers are looking into ways to scratch components made with parts from China, spooked by deepening geopolitical spats playing out through chipmaker Nexperia BV and Beijing’s export controls on rare earths. To protect operations from trade ructions, several automakers are pushing major suppliers to find permanent alternatives to Chinese semiconductors, people familiar with the matter said. The industry is considering broader changes to its supply chain to adapt to shifting geopolitics, Europe’s main suppliers lobby CLEPA head Matthias Zink said. “We had some indications already — questions like: ‘How can you supply me without this dependency on China?’” Zink, who also
The number of Taiwanese working in the US rose to a record high of 137,000 last year, driven largely by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) rapid overseas expansion, according to government data released yesterday. A total of 666,000 Taiwanese nationals were employed abroad last year, an increase of 45,000 from 2023 and the highest level since the COVID-19 pandemic, data from the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) showed. Overseas employment had steadily increased between 2009 and 2019, peaking at 739,000, before plunging to 319,000 in 2021 amid US-China trade tensions, global supply chain shifts, reshoring by Taiwanese companies and
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) received about NT$147 billion (US$4.71 billion) in subsidies from the US, Japanese, German and Chinese governments over the past two years for its global expansion. Financial data compiled by the world’s largest contract chipmaker showed the company secured NT$4.77 billion in subsidies from the governments in the third quarter, bringing the total for the first three quarters of the year to about NT$71.9 billion. Along with the NT$75.16 billion in financial aid TSMC received last year, the chipmaker obtained NT$147 billion in subsidies in almost two years, the data showed. The subsidies received by its subsidiaries —
OUTLOOK: Pat Gelsinger said he did not expect the heavy AI infrastructure investments by the major cloud service providers to cause an AI bubble to burst soon Building a resilient energy supply chain is crucial for Taiwan to develop artificial intelligence (AI) technology and grow its economy, former Intel Corp chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger said yesterday. Gelsinger, now a general partner at the US venture capital firm Playground Global LLC, was asked at a news conference in Taipei about his views on Taiwan’s hardware development and growing concern over an AI bubble. “Today, the greatest issue in Taiwan isn’t even in the software or in architecture. It is energy,” Gelsinger said. “You are not in the position to have a resilient energy supply chain, and that,
RSS