Hong Kong’s bankers have a peculiar problem when shepherding overseas clients around the city: persuading them it is easier to walk to meetings than book a limo. The central business district’s compact nature is unique among financial centres and has been a source of pride, even as it has spurred the highest office rents in the world.
Where once it was international bankers, now it is Chinese companies that are driving those rents ever higher. Hong Kong, no stranger to China-induced bubbles, is wondering how far this one can go. Bankers, increasingly forced into less central neighbourhoods, will meanwhile have to choose between taxis and traffic jams and taking the underground, known as the MTR.
To lease the upper floors of a prime Hong Kong skyscraper, companies must pay $279 a square foot a year, says PwC. That is 75 per cent more than the $158 paid in New York, the second most expensive city. Tokyo at $150, London at $114 and San Francisco at $113 round out the top five. Chinese groups took a record 43 per cent of space leased in Hong Kong’s Central district last year — double the proportion of five years ago, according to property experts Jones Lang LaSalle.