About this Newsletter: Get a quick but finer view of (still) one of the most important sectors in China, with the weekly chart and commentary from Real Estate Foresight (REF) - drawing on 13+ years of REF's research on China housing markets.
The 'superchart' below overlays multiple data points for the Hong Kong residential for-sale markets, putting things in perspective on a 2015-2025 timeframe.
Note that to paint a bigger picture over a longer period, we use the monthly 12-month average figures for primary (blue line) and secondary (orange line) home sales, the monthly index value (Jan 1999=100) for secondary home prices (grey line), and monthly absolute figures for units with the pre-sale consent (green line). Adding inventory levels and land sales would be too much for this one chart.
A few observations:
- Overall improvement in the latest data. All of these metrics show improvement in recent months.
- Secondary prices stabilise. The secondary price index has stabilised and increased slightly after the significant fall of around 26% from the peak.
- Primary volumes close to their highs. For primary homes, the figures are now close to the highs of the 2015-2025 timeframe (a reminder that we are using the 12-month monthly averages here), while for secondary homes, a clear improvement is also evident, albeit far from the historical highs.
- The primary market is much smaller than the secondary market by unit sales - as of October 2025, the primary was around 49% of the secondary.
- Strong correlation between secondary and primary sales. Except for a few periods in this 2015-2025 timeframe, the orange and blue lines tend to move in the same direction.
- Pre-sale consents from 2022-2023 built up extra inventory when sales were weak, but now with sales improvement and fewer consents by 2024, the inventory clearing has also improved.
At the macro level, the US interest rates (given the HK's linked exchange currency system), and mainland China's economic growth, remain the biggest external factors for the Hong Kong home sales market.