When Sino Land’s Robert Ng first came to Hong Kong from Singapore about three decades ago, the real estate developer bid aggressively at land auctions and was widely seen to be an interloper.
Conventional wisdom was that he overpaid for everything, used a lot of debt and would surely implode. However, as market prices kept rising, his aggressive faith paid off big time and today, he is one of the top property tycoons in Hong Kong.
Now, Chinese developers are the object of a similar debate. Property, particularly residential property, has been very volatile, stories of vast ghost cities abound and few people have any desire to live in fourth-tier cities, the only ones where property is even remotely affordable for most of the population.