Hong Kong’s superluxury homes have lost more than a quarter of their value. Prices haven’t hit the bottom yet.
3 min
China’s economic slowdown is wreaking havoc on Hong Kong’s luxury property market .
The most expensive homes in the city are changing hands at steep discounts to what they were worth just a few years ago. Chinese property tycoons, struggling to contain the fallout of their collapsing business empires, have become forced sellers. Bank lenders are seizing properties after luxury homeowners miss loan payments.
The average selling price of superluxury homes, defined as those worth more than the equivalent of $38 million, has fallen by more than a quarter since the middle of 2022, said Cherrie Lai, senior director and head of residential sales in Hong Kong at Savills . It will fall further this year as sellers accept reduced prices to cash out quickly, she said.
The slide in prices shows the fallout of China’s sputtering economy, which is suffering from deflation , slowing exports and moribund consumer confidence. A continuing real-estate slowdown in China is proving particularly painful, since the country’s big-spending property magnates were behind some of Hong Kong’s biggest luxury-property deals in recent years.
Hong Kong’s property market has also been squeezed by rising interest rates in the U.S. The Hong Kong dollar is pegged to the U.S. dollar, and the city’s de facto central bank matches Federal Reserve interest-rate increases. But the U.S. market has held up much better: Nine-figure home sales in places such as California and Florida have skyrocketed , and luxury-home prices in the top 5% of the U.S. market have soared over the past decade.
The luxury homes up for grabs in Hong Kong include three mansions linked to collapsed real-estate company China Evergrande , said Victoria Allan, founder of Habitat Property. Local media reported they were ultimately owned by Hui Ka Yan , the company’s founder.
The three properties, which are adjacent mansions on a hillside road known as Black’s Link, have been seized by creditors. House 10B was sold for about $115 million in 2019 but it is now valued by banks at roughly $55 million, said Allan. It has yet to find a buyer. The other two properties could be put on the market next month, she said.
Chen Hongtian, the mainland-Chinese founder of property-investment firm Cheung Kei Group, bought a luxury high-rise apartment occupying an entire floor in a building designed by architect Frank Gehry in 2015, paying about $49.5 million. It was later seized by a creditor, according to official records. In September, shipping magnate Kwai Sze Hoi bought the property for $53.4 million, records show, below what property agents said was a market valuation of about $87 million at the time.
Homes seized by creditors usually sell at a discount to market prices, property agents say.
A waterfront house at Residence Bel-Air, a luxury residential development, belonged to Mai Fan , the chief executive of Kaisa Group —another developer that defaulted as China’s property crisis widened in recent years. He acquired the house through a company called Million Link Development in 2017, corporate and land records show, at a time when property prices were still climbing. Receivers were appointed to handle the property in 2021 and sold the house the following year for about $46 million, according to the land registry.
In one of Hong Kong’s top sales in recent years, a local businessman sold his house for the equivalent of about $107 million last month, well below the initial asking price of $166 million, according to Savills. It is located on Hong Kong’s Victoria Peak, a mountaintop neighbourhood that is home to business moguls and celebrities living in some of the city’s most expensive properties.
“China still has very wealthy people, but they’re a different group now,” said Victor Cheng, a realtor in Hong Kong. “They’re not the highflying property moguls but those who may not have made as much when China grew rapidly but whose businesses grew steadily.”
He said the new breed of luxury-home buyer in Hong Kong is cash-rich and less likely to load up on debt.
Some mainland Chinese homeowners have been forced or pressured to sell—often at around 20% below market prices—because they need cash to pay off debt, said Cheng. Some top executives from the mainland previously bought trophy homes and only used them occasionally without renting them out, he said.
Data analysed by online real-estate marketplace Spacious.hk suggest a tougher time ahead for luxury homes. The number of sale inquiries on the platform for homes priced at the equivalent of $10 million or above fell 45% in the past 12 months, said Spacious.hk Chief Operating Officer James Fisher. Inquiries for homes under $1.3 million and for those priced between that and $3.2 million fell by 8% and 25%, respectively.
The price index for private homes slumped to a seven-year low by the end of 2023, according to Hong Kong’s Rating and Valuation Department.
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Kit Braden, an executive at French beauty empire L’Occitane, has spent every winter for the past 13 years at the stone vacation home.
2 min
A historic Barbados estate with a 300-year-old villa and 11 acres overlooking the Caribbean Sea is now for sale with a guide price of $22.5 million.
The seller is Kit Braden, chairman of the U.K. branch of French beauty empire L’Occitane Group, whose family has spent every winter for the last 13 years at the island property, known as Fustic Estate.
“It’s very much a family house,” Braden said. “We love having a lot of people there. It’s a collection point to keep everyone together.”
The main villa dates to 1712, though it’s been reimagined and expanded substantially over the years.
It spans 13,000 square feet and features seven en suite bedrooms across three wings, as well as expansive verandas, stone courtyards and rows of louvered doors in gay Caribbean pastels.
In the 1970s, when the home was owned by Charles Graves—brother of British poet Robert Graves—it was reimagined by stage designer Oliver Messel, one of the foremost theater designers of the last century. Messel expanded the home, added a lagoon pool with a natural waterfall and other theatrical features, according to Braden.
“The whole place is a little bit magical,” he said.
The home sits about 350 feet above the water, and surrounded by lush gardens that slope towards the water.
“We look down through our garden—which is about 12 acres of tropical gardens and palm trees and wonderful old mahogany trees—onto the Caribbean,” Braden said.
He and his wife first saw the property on New Year’s Eve 2013, during a quick trip from where they were staying in Grenada.
The couple spent an hour walking the perimeter, some of it still untouched jungle, in the pouring rain.
“By the time we got back, I had fallen in love with it,” Braden said.
His wife, however, wasn’t so sure. But in Braden’s telling, a second visit in sunnier weather with two of their children brought her around.
“She had to be talked into that it was a jolly good idea; now she absolutely loves it,” he said.
When they bought the property, the edge that runs along the waterfront was a jungle, so they cleared the ridge and transformed it into gardens.
They also bought an additional sea-level parcel with two beach cottages, giving the property direct access to the water and the town below via a five-minute walk.
The property also has a 15-person staff, a reflecting pond, an outdoor pavilion suitable for yoga and a commercial grade kitchen that can serve more than 100 guests, according to a brochure from Knight Frank, which posted the listing in March. They did not provide further comment.
For Braden, the property is special because of its natural beauty, its proximity to the town of Saint Lucy and its history—which dates way way back to when the island of Barbados was first formed via tectonic activity.
“It was basically tectonic plates that collided about a million years ago so the seabed is the top of the hill,” Braden said. “We’re on coral rock.”
As a result, Fustic Estate includes an extensive network of caves that were likely used by the Arawaks, a Venezuelan fishing tribe that followed the fish to these islands about a thousand years ago.
“If the fish were good they’d camp here,” Braden said. “There’s evidence that they stayed there in those caves, they lived there in good winters.”
Now it’s someone else’s turn to live on the land shared by Arawaks, the plantation owners of 1712, Charles Graves and the Braden brood.
