Two months ago, we observed the record plunge in Hong Kong home sales when according to Land Registry data, a paltry 2,826 registered residential transactions were record, down 14.4% from October and what we thought was an amazing 41.7% less than in November last year. This was the lowest print in the history of the series.

Little did we know just how bad it would get just two months later.

 

As we said in our last check on the HK housing market, the weakness was sharp and widespread, with sales of new homes declining to a three-month low. In the primary residential market, the number of home sales also declined 26.4 per cent month on month to 1,023 last month, according to Centaline. The total value reached HK$8.97 billion, down 15.4 per cent from October’s HK$10.6 billion.

Latly we presented some comments from local analysts, who perhaps unwilling to accept the reality, remained optimistic:

“The fall in transaction volume and value for new home sales due to an absence of big project launches early last month,” said Derek Chan, head of research at Ricacorp Properties. He expects to see an obvious increase in sales of new homes this month given more major projects are due to be offered for pre-sale.  Most of new projects launches will focus in the western New Territories ,” he said.

We concluded in early December that while “optimism is good… if and when this global housing luxury weakness mostly due to the withdrawal of the Chinese marginal “hot money” buyer crosses back into the Chinese border, all bets about the so-called tepid Chinese economic will be off, and since it will be just the moment when China resumes cutting rates, devaluaing its currency and maybe even officially (as opposed to the ongoing unofficial iterations) launching QE, that will be when one should buy commodities, as China does everything in its power to keep the house of $30 trillion in cards from toppling and sending a deflationary tsunami around the entire world.”

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