Private housing construction reaches 16-year high

Developers started building 25,500 private apartments in 2016.

According to Bloomberg, Hong Kong’s construction of private residential units reached a 16-year high in 2016, a year that the city’s leaders stepped up efforts to cool the world’s costliest property market.

Developers started building a total of 25,500 private apartments last year, up 80 percent from 2015, the Transport and Housing Bureau said in a release on its website on Friday. That was the highest since 2000 when housing starts were at 30,100 units. Some 94,000 units will become available to buyers in the next three to four years, according to the bureau.

The number of private units on which construction started more than doubled to 6,400 in the fourth quarter from the previous three months, suggesting that the November curbs have yet to cool the pace of building by developers.

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