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1. Housing and Land

Supply Situation

The first part of the Report started with an in-depth exploration of
the complex socioeconomic issues surrounding the existing public housing
system, and explained how our proposed “Subsidised Homeownership
Scheme” (SHS) and in the longer-term, the privatisation of existing
public rental housing (PRH) units, could be a set of possible solutions
to these issues. This part of the study will focus on the latest supply-
demand dynamics across different property sectors and an exploration
and review of the intricacies of land supply, with a view to raising policy
recommendations in this area.

1.1 Statistics on the Housing Market

At OHKF, we believe that in the current arena of public discussion,
there exists a certain degree of “information asymmetry” as far as housing
market and land supply situation is concerned. There is a notable gap in
terms of systematic, well-compiled and readily available data regarding
land supply and housing market in the public domain.

It is true that the government and other organisations have
been publishing statistics about certain aspects of the supply of first-
hand private residential property. In particular, the Transport and Housing
Bureau (THB) and Rating and Valuation Department (R&VD) estimate
future private housing unit completions mainly based on notification of
commencement of foundation and superstructure work received by the
Buildings Department (BD). However, such figures usually only entail the
forecast completions for the coming two years and are annual aggregate
statistics without the information of each development project.

OHKF strives to bridge this gap by presenting a comprehensive
forecast of future private housing supply in Hong Kong from 2016 to 2019,
which is presented in the Appendix. We forecast that in the next four years
the annual average completion of new private housing units will be about
18,000 units. This represents an approximately 60%-increase compared to the
corresponding figure of the preceding decade (2006-2015) of approximately
11,000 units. In particular, the expected number of private units completed in
2018 will possibly approach 19,000 units, the highest since 2004 (Figure 1).

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