Real Estate Developers Association’s Stewart Leung says there is ‘no waiting for better times to sell’ in the industry
Hong Kong’s property developers have denied hoarding flats, saying that the reason there are more unsold newly built homes in the city, which is suffering an acute housing shortage, is because of an earlier increase of land supply.
Stewart Leung Chi-kin, chairman of the Real Estate Developers Association’s executive committee, said the increase in the number of completed but unsold flats from 4,000 in 2012 was due to the previous government selling more land.
“When the supply increases, it is natural that the leftovers will increase,” Leung said on the TVB programme On the Record on Sunday .
“Many of the 9,000 flats were only completed last year and are still in the sales process.”
Leung added that despite the increase in land supply, some developers were still worried that they might not be able to buy new sites, so they tended not to sell all of what they had built.
“There is no waiting for better times to sell in our industry,” he said. “Most developers want to keep building and selling.”
If the government insisted on introducing the tax, Leung said, it should exempt flats of more than 1,000 sq ft because the luxury sector operated differently and sales happened more slowly.
He added that developers which had been continuously selling flats should also be exempted because they had been “trying their best” to sell.
It is not unusual for developers to continuously release a few flats in a project at a time and selling all the units can take a long time.
