One-Bedroom Home in Hong Kong Sells for $3.2 Million (Update1)
2009-09-15 10:24:56.594 GMT

     (Recasts first paragraph.)

By Chia-Peck Wong
     Sept. 15 (Bloomberg) -- A one-bedroom apartment in Hong
Kong’s Kowloon district was bought by a local businessman for
HK$30,025 ($3,874) a square foot, a record price for properties
of that type in the city, Centaline Property Agency Ltd. said.
     The fully furnished home was used as a show apartment at
the Masterpiece development and has space of 816 square feet (75
square meters), Thomas Lee, senior sales director at Centaline,
said by telephone today. The broker sold the property for
HK$24.5 million ($3.2 million).
     “The buyer likes it because the location is convenient,”
Lee said. The new owner, who works in the area, plans to live in
the apartment, he said. The sale was reported by the South China
Morning Post newspaper earlier today.
     Residential prices in Hong Kong have risen 26 percent this
year as record-low mortgage costs and near-zero interest rates
on bank deposits encouraged investors to buy homes. A weekly
measure of home prices climbed to 72.7 as of Sept. 6, the
highest since July 2008, according to the Centa-City Leading
Index developed by Centaline and the City University of Hong
Kong.
     A furnished 4,088 square-foot show home at the Masterpiece
was sold for HK$150 million, or about HK$37,000 a square foot,
to a mainland Chinese buyer earlier this month, Jeff Lau, senior
sales and marketing manager at New World Development Co., which
built the project, said Sept. 8.