Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
fell back quickly to under five percent although prices continued to rise up
to 1995. Clearly home-purchasers in the inflationary market of the late
1980s and early 1990s were buyers for at least the medium-term, as one
would expect for investments intended to provide the security of asset diver-
sification. It was the more home-grown inflationary cycles of the 1970s and
early 1980s that drew greater short-term speculative activity.
Transnational Real Estate
Nash's (1991) estimate that 60-80 percent of Hong Kong capital bound for
Canada in the 1980s was heading for property investment is readily recon-
ciled with trends continuing into the 1990s. A study by the Vancouver Sun
in 1995 examined ownership rates by nationality in the commercial prop-
erty market in the central business district. In this downtown area of office
towers and part of the central retail core, Canadian full- and joint-owner-
ship still accounted for 70 percent of buildings, led by pension funds, while
the Asian share was 20 percent, leaving a relatively small residual compo-
nent for European and American interests (Constantineau 1995). But this
depiction overlooked large residential and commercial projects on the edge
of the financial district.
Concord Pacific's immense land purchase on the north shore of False
Creek covered 82 hectares and envisaged an eventual build out of 10,000
units besides commercial property (Figure 5.2). For this massive project
Hong Kong's multi-billionaire, Li Ka-shing, owner of Cheung Kong
Holdings and the Hutchison Whampoa companies, recruited fellow tycoons
Lee Shau Kee (Henderson Land Development Company) and Cheng
Yu-Tung (New World Development Company); between them these four
top-15 listed companies on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange accounted for
over 13 percent of the exchange's total capitalization (Olds 2001). In 1993
Li and Lee's companies still generated well over 90 percent of their earnings
in Hong Kong; clearly in anticipation of 1997, diversification was in order. 9
After its proven success, the tycoons have withdrawn profits from the project
and in 2003 family friends, the Hui family, 10 bought Concord Pacific and
took it private. As the 20-year build out of False Creek enters its final years,
the Concord Pacific site was valued at $5 billion in 2005 and its Toronto
brownfield sibling, Concord CityPlace at $1.5 billion (Konotopetz 2005).
The other downtown mega-project is on the Coal Harbour waterfront, on
the northern edge of the financial district (Figure 5.2), where Canadian
Pacific had long held railway and port property. Marathon Realty, its
real estate arm, was jointly developing its sizable 17-hectare Coal Harbour
holding with another major Hong Kong player keen to diversify, Sun Hung
Kai Properties, number 4 on the Hang Seng exchange, immediately beneath
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