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Residential housing prices in Hong Kong remain high amid a prolonged period of low interest rates. With the gradual recovery of the global economy, the United States Federal Reserve system is also about to enter a cycle of increasing interest rates. In order to explore public opinion on the residential property market in Hong Kong, The Chinese University of Hong Kong’s (CUHK) Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies recently conducted a telephone survey. The survey found that about three-fifths of the citizens did not think that it was an opportune time to buy a property right now and more than two-fifths of them said that the burden of domestic housing expenditure was quite heavy or very heavy.

The telephone survey was conducted in the evenings from 10 to 19 January 2022. The results show that 60.2% of the respondents believed that it was not an opportune time to buy a property and only 15.9% thought it was. 23.9% said that they did not know or it was hard to say. 46.7% indicated that housing expenses were quite heavy (34.4%) or very heavy (12.3%), while 38.0% claimed they were not too heavy and only 9.5% thought they were not heavy at all.

The respondents were also asked about their views on current residential property prices and their prediction for those prices in the coming year. More than four-fifths (82.4%) believed that the current level of residential property prices in Hong Kong was too high, 14.0% thought it was appropriate and only 1.1% opined it was too low. 42.7% predicted that residential property prices would remain at the current level in the coming year, 26.6% thought they would fall and 19.3% expected them to rise. Of those predicting a fall, relatively more thought the decrease would be in the range of 5% to less than 10% (34.5%) and 10% to less than 20% (18.6%). Of those expecting a rise, a relatively larger portion believed that property prices would increase by 5% to less than 10% (40.0%) and 10% to less than 20% (29.0%).

In addition, the survey also found that about four-fifths (81.0%) of the respondents believed that it was quite important (50.5%) or very important (30.5%) to have their own residential property, while only 14.3% said it was not so important (12.5%) or very unimportant (1.8%).

The survey employed a dual-frame sampling design that included both landline and mobile phone numbers. A total of 706 respondents aged 18 or above (landline: 348; mobile: 358) were successfully interviewed, with response rates of 28.2% (landline) and 30.3% (mobile). The sampling error for a sample size of 706 is estimated at plus or minus 3.69 percentage points at a 95% confidence level. Furthermore, the data in this survey was weighted based on the probability of the respondents being selected via dual-frame sampling design and relevant age-sex distribution of the population published by the Census and Statistics Department.