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The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)’s Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies recently conducted a telephone survey in which more than half of citizens said that the burden of various housing expenses was quite heavy or very heavy. However, compared to a similar survey last year, the proportion of people who thought it was an opportune time to buy a property right now had increased.

The survey was conducted in the evenings from January 30 to February 9, 2023. The survey results showed that 54.9% of the respondents said the burden of housing expenses, including mortgage payments, rent, rates, management fees and maintenance costs, was quite heavy (39.3%) or very heavy (15.6%), while 31.9% and 7.3% thought it was not too heavy and not heavy at all respectively. Compared to a similar survey conducted last year, the proportion of respondents who considered the burden to be quite heavy or very heavy had increased by 4.9 and 3.3 percentage points respectively, while those who thought it not too heavy or not at all heavy had decreased by 6.1 and 2.2 percentage points respectively. The Chi-square test showed that the percentage distributions of the two surveys were statistically significantly different.

The survey also found that 21.5% of the respondents believed that it was an opportune time to buy a property, a significant increase of 5.6 percentage points from last year’s survey, and 56.1% of the respondents thought it was not the right time, a decrease of 4.1 percentage points from last year’s survey. The Chi-square test also showed that there was a statistically significant difference in the percentage distributions between the two surveys.

Respondents were also asked about their views on current residential property prices and their predictions for those prices in the coming year. About 75.8% of respondents thought the current level of residential property prices in Hong Kong was too high, 14.4% said it was reasonable and only 1.8% felt it was too low. Compared to last year’s survey, the proportion of respondents who thought the property price level was too high had decreased significantly, by 6.6 percentage points. The Chi-square test also showed a statistically significant difference in the distribution of percentages between the two surveys.

Regarding predictions of the residential property price trends in the coming year, 35.8% of the respondents estimated that property prices would remain at the current level, 30.8% believed they would fall and 22.7% expected them to rise. Of those predicting a fall, relatively more people thought the decrease would be in the range of 5% to less than 10% (36.6%) or 10% to less than 20% (20.9%). Among those who expected property prices to rise, more than half (54.6%) predicted they would increase by 5% to less than 10%.

In addition, the survey also found that about four-fifths (80.2%) of the respondents believed that it was quite important (46.5%) or very important (33.7%) to have their own residential property, while only 14.9% said it was not so important (13.5%) or very unimportant (1.4%).

A total of 705 respondents aged 18 or above (landline: 321; mobile: 384) were successfully interviewed in this survey, and the response rates of the landline and mobile samples were 25.4% and 28.4% respectively. The sampling error for a sample size of 705 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 a dual-frame sampling design and the relevant age-sex distribution of the population published by the Census and Statistics Department.