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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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