| Bloomberg  Billionaire Lee Shau-kee said he has sold as much as 30 percent of his Hong Kong stock investments and is buying land, betting that the city’s efforts to cool home prices won’t work.
Lee’s Henderson Land Development Co. and partner New World Development Co. will pay HK$9.6 billion ($1.24 billion) for a building site, he said at a press briefing in Hong Kong yesterday. Henderson is also spending more than HK$10 billion buying old buildings for redevelopment.
Hong Kong luxury home prices rose 28 percent in the first nine months of this year, according to Colliers International, while the benchmark Hang Seng Index almost doubled. The city’s government is trying to cool the increase by tightening downpayment requirements for luxury homes and suspending mortgage insurance for rental property. On Oct. 14, city Chief Executive Donald Tsang expressed concern that a property bubble may be forming.
“The new mortgage measures are not going to have much impact on luxury home prices,” said Lee, 81. “Most of those buyers are tycoons and don’t need to take up mortgages to buy.” The increase in luxury prices hasn’t affected the mid- segment market, he said. An apartment larger than 1,000 square feet (93 square meters) is categorized as luxury under local industry standards.
The Hong Kong dollar is pegged to the U.S. currency, so a decline in the U.S. dollar makes the city’s assets cheaper for non-residents, boosting demand further.
“With the depreciation in the dollar, if you don’t buy fixed assets, you will lose money,” Lee said. He said his company spent HK$20 billion on land, without specifying a time frame.
Record Price
Henderson said Oct. 14 it sold a luxury duplex at its 39 Conduit Road project for a world-record of HK$88,000 a square foot, excluding areas shared by all residents.
Values of homes of at least 160 square meters have broken a previous record set in the third quarter of 1997, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the city’s de facto central bank, said in an Oct. 23 statement to banks when it tightened downpayment requirements.
Henderson and New World agreed to buy an agricultural site from the government and convert it to residential use, with an allowed 2.95 million square feet of floor area, Henderson said in a Hong Kong stock exchange statement yesterday. The premium paid to convert the land to residential use was reported earlier by the Hong Kong Economic Times.
The average price is HK$3,253 per square foot, according to the statement. Henderson units will pay HK$6.53 billion. Of that, HK$5.45 billion will be paid by the company, with outside shareholders in the units paying the balance.
Wu Kai Sha
The project at Wu Kai Sha, in the northern part of Hong Kong, will produce more than 3,000 housing units, Lee said, adding that he hopes to start selling the apartments late next year.
The conversion is “positive” for Henderson and New World, Deutsche Bank AG analyst Ken Yeung said in a report yesterday. “Developers with huge farmland reserves will benefit from recent debates for the government to increase land supply in Hong Kong.”
Henderson owned 32.4 million square feet of agricultural land in Hong Kong as of June 30, the biggest among the city’s developers, the company said in August.
The developer also has paid HK$4.2 billion for nine old buildings it bought to redevelop in Hong Kong, and expects to pay another HK$6 billion for similar acquisitions, it said in the statement.
Lee ranked third in Forbes Magazine’s list of Hong Kong’s wealthiest people published in March. His worth was estimated at $9 billion, behind Li Ka-shing and the Kwok family of Sun Hung Kai Properties Ltd.
To contact the reporter on this story: Chia-Peck Wong in Hong Kong at cpwong@bloomberg.net This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
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