Someone Just Paid $1.3 Million For the World’s Most Expensive Parking Spot
June 7, 2021Hong Kong broke the world record for the priciest parking spot, again, after a space at a luxury residence was sold for more than $1 million.
One parking bay at the city’s luxury Mount Nicholson residential project was sold in recent weeks for HK$10.2 million ($1.3 million), local media reported, citing anonymous sources.
It beat the previous world record of $979,700, set in 2019 by a parking space at an office tower in Hong Kong’s financial district.
Hong Kong has the world’s most unaffordable housing market, with a medium home price 20.7 times as high as its median household income in 2020, according to the latest report by the Urban Reform Institute and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
Home prices have remained high despite the COVID-19 pandemic and Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong’s 2019 anti-government unrest, which has prompted some affluent families to emigrate.
The ever-growing prices of parking spaces also underscore the staggering wealth gap in the Asian financial hub. Just as the poor are struggling in the so-called shoebox flats, parking spaces have become speculative assets for the city’s rich.
Mount Nicholson, located in the exclusive Victoria Peak neighborhood, has some of Hong Kong’s most valuable homes. In 2017, two apartments in the project were sold for about $150 million in total, which translated into $17,000 per square foot.
Wheelock Properties, the sales agent for Mount Nicholson, did not respond to a request for comments.
It is not unclear who now owns the most expensive parking space on Earth. Property tycoon Edwin Leong told local newspaper Ming Pao that he had bought four parking spots at the same compound at more than $1 million each, but the most expensive one was not among them.
“Of course they are expensive, but I have no choice,” the 69-year-old billionaire was quoted as saying. There is “no way,” he said, that the owner of a 4,000-square-foot apartment only has one car.
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