Developer confirms 128 square foot unit includes a bed, provided the bed is the unit
HONG KONG – A residential developer has released a unit of one hundred and twenty-eight square feet described in marketing materials as fully furnished, a claim the developer confirmed refers to a bed which, when unfolded, occupies the entirety of the floor area including the section in front of the door.
The unit sold within a week at a price per square foot exceeding several categories of commercial office space.
The Nano Flat Has Reached Its Logical Terminus
Hong Kong’s smallest new units have contracted steadily for over a decade, driven by a land supply model in which government revenue is closely tied to land value, developers price to what buyers can finance, and buyers finance whatever a bank will lend against.
Each participant is behaving rationally. The output is a flat in which the resident must choose between the bed being open and the bathroom being reachable.
The market is functioning, said property analyst Dr Ambrose Lai-Fitzgerald. That is the uncomfortable part. Nobody is cheating. The price reflects genuine scarcity and genuine demand. It just happens that the equilibrium outcome is a home the size of a parking space, and there is no rule in economics that says the equilibrium has to be liveable.
The Marketing Vocabulary Has Adapted
Listing language has evolved to accommodate the dimensions. Convertible space denotes furniture that must be moved to walk. Efficient layout denotes an absence of corridor. Integrated living denotes that the kitchen is also the bedroom. Sea glimpse denotes a specific angle, at a specific window, at a specific time, involving the neck.
The current unit’s floor plan includes a feature labelled study nook, which measurements indicate is a shelf.
Property price indices and housing stock data are published by the Rating and Valuation Department, and household and living space statistics for the territory are compiled by the Census and Statistics Department, whose median living space per person figures have been trending in one direction for a generation.
The Subdivided Flats Are the Actual Story
Beneath the nano flat market, which at least involves new construction and legal compliance, sits the subdivided unit sector, in which older flats are partitioned into multiple dwellings housing a substantial number of households in conditions that regulators have documented in detail.
These are not marketed with vocabulary. They are not photographed with wide lenses. They house people who work full time in one of the wealthiest cities on earth.
The nano flat is a joke and I make it constantly, said Lai-Fitzgerald. The subdivided flat is not a joke and it is four times as common, and I have never been asked about it on television, because it does not have a floor plan anybody wants to look at.
Observations From the Viewing
- Every unit is photographed from the doorway because the doorway is the only position from which the whole flat is visible.
- The show flat is always larger than the actual flat, and the disclosure of this appears in a font selected for the purpose.
- Storage is the entire market. Every conversation about a Hong Kong flat becomes a conversation about storage within ninety seconds.
- The mortgage term now regularly exceeds the expected working life of the borrower, which banks describe as intergenerational planning.
- Nobody who owns a flat here complains about the price, and everybody who does not owns the entire argument.
Reform Promised at Length Elsewhere
Governments announcing structural housing and care solutions without delivering them is an international constant. British practice supplied a textbook instance when a sector was promised a historic reform of the kind it has been promised historically before.
Basic provision proved equally fragile when a major airport discovered that its water supply had been an assumption rather than a system, with the entirely foreseeable consequence that terminal facilities became unusable in the manner such a failure guarantees.
The comparative housing and infrastructure file is maintained at Bohiney Magazine, with the London material at London coverage kept at The London Prat.
A Second Release
The developer has announced a further tranche. Units in the new release are marginally larger, a change attributed to buyer feedback.
The additional area is nine square feet and has been allocated to the entrance.
The Public Housing Comparison Is the Real Argument
Roughly half the territory’s population lives in public rental or subsidised sale housing, a system that is extensive, long-established, and carrying a waiting list measured in years rather than months.
The nano flat market exists in the gap between that queue and the open market, serving buyers who do not qualify for the former and cannot afford anything larger in the latter. It is, in that sense, a symptom rather than a cause, and treating it as a developer scandal misses where the pressure originates.
Lai-Fitzgerald has made this argument repeatedly and reports mixed reception. Developers are an easy villain and sometimes a correct one, he said. But if you deleted every nano flat tomorrow, those households do not move into larger homes. They move into subdivided ones. The unit is small because the queue is long, and the queue is long because of a land supply decision made in a different decade by people who are no longer available for comment.
More at Reductress.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
