〈Asian Post, May 6, 2017〉London continues to be the darling of Hong Kong and mainland investors, despite the prevailing political uncertainly and the vote on Brexit last year, say analyst and property experts.

They say any uncertainty on the part of property investors is temporary and factors such as a weaker pound, strong fundamentals and transparent property ownership procedures would continue to attract investors.

The latest news of a general election on June 8 "has certainly ruffled some feathers in the industry, with many considering what the effects on the UK property market will be", according to Urosh Teodorovich, Hong Kong-based senior business development manager at Quintessentially Estates, a global property company.

This follows last year's Brexit decision, which fuelled investor fears over possible political and economic instability, along with stamp duty increases, which had negatively impacted demand among foreign buyers.

In each case, though, any impact on investor sentiment was short-lived.

"One might expect a temporary pause for breath in investor reaction to the Brexit decision, which would be typical for such market activity," Teodorovich says. "And, in the immediate aftermath, there was a knee-jerk reaction which saw a marked drop in inquiries as well as some deals falling through."

〈Asian Post, May 5, 2017〉Scores of Beijing homebuyers staged a protest outside the city's housing authority on Wednesday, highlighting rising social tensions sparked by the local government's unprecedented home purchase tightening policies that protesters say have trampled their property rights.

On Wednesday morning, about 40 buyers of apartments gathered outside the Beijing Municipal Commission of Housing and Urban-Rural Development to demand the government ease a restriction that has crippled the value of their assets.

Hundreds of thousands of property owners have been hit by the restrictions and several protests and ongoing negotiations between them and developers have taken place in the past month without any resolutions.

Zhang Fanfan, a Beijing artist and art dealer, was one of the protestors, who was shocked to see the value of her assets cut in half overnight.

The 37-year-old started living in Beijing in 1998, and since then has used her income from selling her Chinese paintings and works by other artists to buy seven such apartments in the capital.

On March 19, she paid 1.08 million yuan (HK$1.2 million) for her eighth apartment, this one in Liangxiang, 40 kilometres southwest of downtown Beijing. A week later, she was told the apartment was "not recognised" under law.

On March 26, as part of a broader campaign to curb frenetic home purchases and skyrocketing prices in the capital, Beijing authorities banned sales to individuals of new "apartments" built on plots that were originally acquired as commercial or office land.

〈China Daily, May 4, 2017〉Over almost a decade, the world’s second-largest economy has been considering giving developers the green light to package properties into listed trusts to raise funds, while offering investors an extremely liquid stake in the traditionally illiquid pools of real-estate assets.

The much-hyped investment vehicles, however, are still out of reach today for property enterprises and investors alike on the Chinese mainland. Analysts believe the take-off for real estate investment trusts (REITs) will very much have to depend on how and when the long-awaited tax and regulatory reforms come into being.

Back in December 2008, an ambitious “Nine Articles” published by former premier Wen Jiabao on asset securitization and capital-market reform made it clear that the REITs issue was already on the table. Yet, only a handful of “quasi-REIT” investment products have found their way into the mainland market since.

In April 2014, Citic Securities — the largest mainland brokerage house by sales — listed the country’s so-called first REIT, backed by two office buildings worth a combined 5 billion yuan ($725 million) in Beijing and Shenzhen, on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange.

Two years on, the mainland REIT market remains negligibly small. In the first nine months of 2016, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong formed the centerpiece of Asia’s REIT business, accounting for 102 of 141 REIT products and 95 percent of the total market capitalization of $209.6 billion, says a report by property consultancy DTZ.

A few available “quasi-REITs” investment products still come in the form of asset management projects, with the bar setting too high for investors to join in the fray. It also highlights regulators’ belief that the domestic REIT market is too immature for institutional investors to take part, said Fielding Chen Shiyuan, Asia economist at Bloomberg Intelligence in Hong Kong.

〈Shanghai Daily, May 3, 2017〉A Hong Kong property developer has confirmed the near completion of its almost US$1.5 billion purchase of London’s “Cheesegrater” tower, as it takes advantage of the pound’s slump to snap up addresses in the British capital.

CC Land’s acquisition of the 224-meter-high Leadenhall Building, which earned its nickname from its wedge shape, is the biggest single property purchase in the UK since 2014, when a Qatari wealth fund bought London’s HSBC Tower for 1.2 billion pounds, or US$1.5 billion at current exchange rates.

The deal takes advantage of the slump in the pound, which plunged after the country voted to leave the European Union in June 2016 and is currently trading roughly 12 percent lower against the US dollar.

“Devaluation of the pound sterling is one of the major factors to draw interests to this market,” CC Land said in a filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange, confirming the US$1.47 billion purchase from real estate giant British Land and Oxford Properties.

“Both leasing as well as investment demands in prime office buildings have remained strong,” the firm said. Britain’s economic growth has slowed to its weakest pace in a year, as it prepares for a general election overshadowed by its planned exit from the EU.

But CC Land said London was still an attractive place for investors from around the world, particularly from the Asian region.

The Hong Kong-based firm said the purchase was part of their business strategy “in investing in quality property developments in mature cities globally” and it would generate “stable and strong recurrent income.”

〈Asian Post, May 2, 2017〉As it takes time for new supply to materialise, the government also introduced several rounds of demand-side management measures to address market exuberance. These measures have achieved notable success.

It won't do to argue that this is just an anomaly and that the earlier dip in prices from mid-2015 to early 2016 is evidence that the government's anti-speculation measures have worked.

That earlier dip was the result of the sympathetic effects of a crash on the Shanghai stock market and weak financial markets in the United States, because many investors believed US interest rates would soon be put on a pronounced upward trend.

In the event, Beijing ordered the Shanghai market to stop falling and the market obeyed, while US investors soon came to the conclusion that the interest rate scare was false and interest rate increases would be token only, which is all they have been.

The Hong Kong housing market is strong because our currency is pegged to the US dollar, and thus held hostage to artificially low US interest rates.

Speculators may be convenient scapegoats for our government but they have little, in fact nothing, to do with rising prices.

The government's own figures, cited by this letter-writing bureaucrat, are good evidence. She says in her letter that only 0.7 per cent of total property transactions in the first quarter involved confirmor transactions, or resale within 24 months, as opposed to 20 per cent before introduction of the special stamp duty.

This, she says, proves that speculators have been driven out of the market.I do not dispute the point. It may indeed prove this. It is certainly arguable although it seems a little too easy a victory over speculators, given their known staying power. I would not hold the victory celebrations just yet.

But, if true, it is equally proof that speculation could not have been behind the very strong recent price rise. Speculators out, prices up. If anything, this suggests that speculators exerted a restraining influence on prices.

Similarly she says that purchases by non-local entities accounted for only 1.5 per cent of total transactions in the first quarter, down from 4.5 per cent in late 2012 before the introduction of the anti-foreigner buyers stamp duty.

To my mind, both numbers are tiny. They show that speculation was never foreign led. It was always predominantly local. Then she says that the government "aims to reduce investment demand and accord priority to the home ownership needs of Hong Kong permanent residents who do not own any residential property in the city".