In response to the Government’s announcement that it will abolish land sales by the application mechanism and resume regular land sales, the Business and Professionals Alliance for Hong Kong (BPA) said today (February 28) that the Government’s move to address housing needs through demand-side management measures is acceptable, adding that the move is also a testimony to the failure of the application mechanism over the past few years. The Alliance considered that it was not the lack of intentions on the part of property developers to obtain land that had caused the failure of the mechanism; instead, it was the Government’s high price tags for the sites that had made market supply inadequate.
BPA believed that for land sales, open auctions would be more transparent than tendering. Apart from resuming regular land sales, the Government should provide steady land supply and announce the number of sites to be on sale every quarter as well as the relevant information as soon as possible. It is also the BPA’s position that the Government should not be too aggressive in asking prices for the land so as to allow corrections to the property market.
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