Fancy an apartment the size of a Tesla Model X?
That's about 161 square feet (15 square metres) - and the size of a Hong Kong micro-apartment sold by property giant Henderson Land Development for just less than $US500,000 ($656,850). An actual Tesla Model X in Hong Kong starts at around $US150,000.
As Hong Kong housing prices reach new highs and keep the city the most unaffordable place for housing in the world, more expensive even than Sydney and Melbourne, developers have been offering more and more units of smaller and smaller size.
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20170623024855im_/http://www.smh.com.au/cqstatic/12z7v7/teslax.png)
One developer, Chun Wo Property Development, now even plans to build apartments as small as 12 square metres - about the size of a garden shed.
While small apartments accounted for just 5 per cent of the city's new housing in 2010, they jumped to 27 per cent as of last year, according to government figures. And they are forecast to take their share to 43 per cent next year.
Their prices soared 99 per cent since 2010 -- more than twice as fast as bigger homes that are unaffordable for the majority of Hong Kong's population.
"The pool of buyers for small flats is getting bigger and bigger because people have to downgrade their expectations of the size of flats they can live in," said Nicole Wong, regional head of property research at CLSA in Hong Kong.
Developers, looking to help the government achieve supply targets while aiming to lower the buyer's price threshold, need to recover the record prices they're spending at land auctions - so they're squeezing more units into a single plot of land.
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20170623024855im_/http://www.smh.com.au/cqstatic/12z7v7/world'smostexpensivemarkets1.png)
Hong Kong's incoming Chief Executive Carrie Lam, who takes over on July 1, the 20th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to Chinese rule, has promised to increase the home ownership rate by providing government help for people too wealthy for public housing and too poor to afford an apartment of their own.
The government, which champions the free market, has no immediate plans to prevent housing size from getting ever smaller.
"At this stage the government leaves flexibility to the market so that developers can respond to the needs of the market appropriately," said Terry Wong, a government spokesman.
Bloomberg
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