Have you heard the one about real estate prices in Hong Kong? A couple paid $433,000 on a single parking space, and flipped it for $760,000 just nine months later! It sounds like an admittedly not very funny joke, but actually it really happened, as reported by the South China Morning Post.
The unnamed couple purchased a single parking spot at a luxury housing development called Ultima in September of 2017. As Sandia Lau, a director at Centaline Property Agency explains, the reason parking spaces are going for such high prices is because A: Parking is at a high premium, and B: Residents in places like Ultima have money to burn:
"The development is in a luxury residential area. The residents have a lot of cash and simply do not care about a few million dollars when a flat there costs about HK$100 million … Their convenience is more important."
The parking spot in question measures 16.4 x 8.2 feet, which means the spot's current value comes to about $5,600 per square foot. If you think that sounds like a lot, you're right even by Hong Kong real estate standards — it reportedly comes to about three times the average price per square foot in the notoriously pricey city.
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The sale makes Ultima the most expensive place on Earth to park, an accomplishment which can partly be traced to the decision to give the 527-unit complex just 370 car spaces, a situation that when combined with the factors above seems to have created the perfect environment for hyper-expensive parking spaces. Earlier this year, in April, one space was rented on a monthly basis at a rate of $1,274, making it the most expensive parking rental in the entire city.
It's all part of the skyrocketing Hong Kong real estate market, where records continue to fall almost on a regular basis.
