180 square feet gains eight percent in value as buyers request the chair back for the character
Hong Kong Flat Listed as Spacious After Owner Removes a Chair
HONG KONG – A 180-square-foot flat in Sham Shui Po was relisted as “spacious” Tuesday after its owner removed a chair, in a repositioning that produced 40 viewings in two days, an asking price increase of eight percent, and a debate across the world’s least affordable housing market about whether the chair’s removal constitutes renovation.
The flat, on the eleventh floor of a 1960s walk-up, had been listed for three months as “efficient” without result. The owner, retired tailor Chan Kwok Wing, 66, removed a folding chair from the main room on the advice of his agent, who photographed the resulting clearance, “approximately one chair’s worth,” with a lens the industry favors and physicists have questioned, and relaunched the listing under its new classification.
The Listing
The updated advertisement describes the property in the local market’s mature dialect: “spacious,” now certified by the chair’s absence; “bright,” the window faces a lightwell that receives, per the agent’s own concession, “theoretical afternoon sun”; “well-connected,” true, the MTR is four minutes away, transport being the one claim this market never needs to inflate; and “full of potential,” a phrase the market’s glossary, maintained informally by generations of burned buyers, translates as “you will be removing further chairs.”
Agent Priscilla Yeung defended the classification at a viewing Wednesday, conducted, of necessity, in shifts of two. “Spacious is relative,” Yeung said, standing in the doorway, which is also the kitchen’s doorway, which is also adjacent to the shower, an arrangement the listing calls “open concept, wet-zone integrated.” “Compared to what? Compared to the subdivided units downstairs, this is a palace. Compared to a nano flat in a new tower, you get 30 more square feet and character. Character means the pipes are visible. The buyers know the language. Nobody is deceived. This is the most honest dishonest market in the world. Everyone can read it fluently. The chair is gone, the space is real, the viewings speak.”
The Market Context
The relisting lands in a market whose superlatives have been institutional for a generation, documented continuously in the local and regional press, including at the South China Morning Post, whose property desk has chronicled the era’s benchmarks: the parking spaces that have sold for more than European houses, the nano-flat boom that brought units under 130 square feet to market with show flats staged using furniture the industry sources, openly, from a specialized sector of slightly-smaller-than-normal furniture, and the enduring price-per-square-foot levels that make the territory’s floor area, gram for gram, among the most valuable substances on earth, “in competition,” one analyst noted, “with saffron and certain isotopes.”
A housing study released this quarter formalizes the market’s spatial vocabulary, finding that listed descriptors correlate with floor area on a stable curve: “cozy” indicates under 250 square feet, “efficient” under 200, “spacious” is “unmoored from area entirely and indicates recent optimization, such as the removal of furniture,” and “rarely available” indicates, in 94 percent of sampled cases, “available continuously since 2019.” The study’s authors note the market’s genius is not deception but compression: “An entire negotiation that would take other cities weeks is conducted here in four adjectives. It is the most information-dense real estate language in the world, fitting, for the least space.”
The Viewings
The 40 viewings produced the market’s full cross-section. A young couple measured the main room with a tape and a look exchanged in silence, the study’s researchers would classify the look as “load-bearing.” An investor from across the harbour viewed for 90 seconds, photographed the lightwell, and offered below asking “for the potential.” And a university student, viewing for her family, asked the question that briefly stopped the room: where had the chair gone.
Mr. Chan, present for the afternoon shift, answered from the doorway. “The chair is at my sister’s,” he said. “I sat in that chair forty years. I did my accounts in it, watched the handover in it, ate dinner in it when my wife was alive. The agent says without it the flat is spacious. Fine. He is not wrong. There is more room now. There is less of everything else. That is this city’s whole trade, and I made it like everyone makes it. You want the space, you move the life. Someone will buy this flat, remove something of theirs eventually, and list it again, more spacious still. By 2060 the flats will be empty and infinite.”
Regional reaction followed the established currents, with commiseration from other compressed markets and coverage in Singapore, where readers of The Straits Times conducted the traditional cross-strait comparison of square footage and subsidy, concluding, per one widely endorsed comment, “we complain about our flats until we read about theirs, annually, like a vaccine.”
The international satirical press handled the story with unusual gentleness, The London Prat noting that London letting agents, “who once listed a bed under a staircase as a mezzanine studio,” recognize a master class when they see one, while the spatial-economics desk at Bohiney Magazine certified the chair itself, now at the sister’s flat in Kowloon, as “the most consequential piece of furniture in Asia: its absence is worth eight percent.”
Closing
As of press time, the flat was under offer at asking, the buyer a first-timer who reportedly requested one condition, that the folding chair be included after all, “for the character,” a term she used correctly, and Mr. Chan had agreed, retrieving it himself on the tram, so that the flat will change hands as it lived: 180 square feet, one chair, spacious, in the only city where both are true.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
