Hong Kong’s ‘haunted apartment’ prices levitate
HONG KONG: Ng Goon-lau pointed at a window inside a dark, tiny bedroom. The window was small and easily sealed, Ng explained, a perfect place for carbon monoxide poisoning.
A man once burned charcoal to kill himself there. Another tenant, a policewoman, also hanged herself in the same apartment.
“That’s why it was so cheap,” said Ng, the silver-haired 66-year-old landlord, who bought the tiny 325 sq ft unit after the double suicides for just over HK$1mil (US$127,400) in 2010, 30% less than the then market rate.
Eight years later, the apartment is probably worth around HK$4.4mil, Ng estimates.
Dubbed the “King of Haunted Flats” by local media, Ng has made a name for himself for speculating on such “hongza”, or haunted flats defined here as the places where tragedies such as suicides and murders took place. He has been able to buy some of the homes at as much as a 40% discount.
But Hong Kong’s record-breaking property price surge over the past few years is pushing many to reconsider such inauspicious apartments as bargains too good to pass up, whatever the bad history.
The once heavy discount on a haunted apartment’s price has narrowed from about 30% in 2013, to about 10% this year, said Ng, adding the discount dropped at the fastest rate in the past year.
“The market is crazy now, there is so much demand,” the former shark’s fin salesman told Reuters. “Buying an unlucky flat is now a very practical way to own a house, so competition is fierce.”
The financial hub’s housing prices have been on a record-breaking run for 18 consecutive months, with the city now one of the world’s most expensive real estate markets.
A skilled service worker would need to work 20 years to buy a 650 sq ft flat near the city centre, according to a UBS report in September, which also ranks Hong Kong’s housing market as the least affordable in a list of 20 world cities.
Only about 20% of Hong Kong’s 1.85 million taxpayers could afford to buy a medium-priced apartment costing HK$8mil, property consultancy Knight Frank said this month.
Property analysts expect prices to rise even further this year, with five analysts predicting overall gains of between 8% and 17% .
Even Ng, who has bought around two dozen haunted flats since the 1990s and flipped most of them for profit, is spooked by the market surge.
A double whammy of high prices and a heavy tax on non-first time buyers means he hasn’t bought a haunted flat for six years.
The amateur unicyclist isn’t looking to sell either, describing his existing portfolio as “pearls and treasures”.
Even for public housing, where the average waiting time is five years given limited supply and strong demand in one of the most densely populated cities in the world, many are flocking to a separate “express” queue for less desirable apartments.
These include, according to the Housing Authority’s website, unpleasant incidents”.
Last September, the government received more than 80,000 applications for 576 such flats.
The issue of a haunted flat melds the Hong Kong obsession with property with a Chinese population that tends to be superstitious and pursues ancient traditions, illustrated by the use of feng shui by many property developers to ensure that a building uses surrounding natural forces, such as mountains, wind and water, in a harmonious way.
Not only does a haunted flat drag down the price of all the flats on the same floor, it can also bring down the value of apartments above and below it, according to property agents.
It is commonly believed here that the trapped souls of murder victims are especially haunting, as they linger in humankind, mourning their untimely, vicious deaths and yearning to complete what they did not have time to do while they were alive. — Reuters those “involved in