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ShareHong Kong: What do you get when you combine excessive Chinese superstition with numbers, a profiteering mentality among property developers and a neo-rich Chinese readiness to buy anything 'premium' without consideration for value?
Answer: The world's most expensive apartment, at outrageous, sky-high prices.
Last fortnight, a luxury apartment in Hong Kong sold for HK$358 million (about Rs200 crore). At HK$88,000 per square foot, including the common area, it's being billed as the world's most expensive apartment.
But beneath those outlandish prices lies a (tall) tale of borderline shady methods employed even by reputed property developers to profit from Chinese blind faith in numerology, and an emerging class of nouveau riche mainland Chinese who are driving property prices sky-high.
The duplex apartment is billed by property developers Henderson as being on the 68th floor; the apartment one floor above it is billed as being on the 88th floor. Both numbers are misleading as the developers skipped floor numbers that are considered 'unlucky' in Chinese numerology. In reality, the '68th floor' duplex apartment is on the 43rd and 44th floors, and the one above it is on the 45th and 46th floors. The complex is 46 storeys tall; in other words, the 88-storey complex doesn't have 42 floors.
The Chinese word for 'four' (si) rhymes with the word for 'death', so the developers skipped floors 4, 14, 24, 34, 40 to 49; in addition, to accommodate other superstitions, they omitted a few other floor levels.
On the other hand, the developer extrapolated the 'storey' count to include the numbers 68 and 88, which are considered auspicious in Chinese and Cantonese (the spoken language in Hong Kong); that's because the Cantonese word for 'six' and 'eight' (luk and baat, respectively) sound like the words for 'blessing' and 'fortune' respectively.
The misleading floor numbering system has invited criticism that property developers had scaled new heights in unjust profiteering from Chinese superstitions. Local legislator Lee Wing-tat says he has received complaints about the "misleading" numbering system, and has sought government intervention against such "deceitful" practices.
But Henderson chairman Lee Shau-kee claims there was "no deception".
"The more floors we jump, the more interesting it becomes," he says. "Our customers love these numbers, so it isn't misleading."
The outlandish prices have fuelled fears of a property bubble, driven in part by low interest rates and neo-rich mainland Chinese on an acquisition spree.
