Hong Kong coastal listings: is 117 days giving a distorted picture?

N

NeatField

Buyer
I saved a group of Hong Kong coastal listings between HK$6,521,000 and HK$9,781,000 this month. They appear to need roughly 117 days to find a buyer, but the individual properties are moving very differently. Most of the long-running outliers seem to have maintenance or condition issues.

Is 117 days a useful signal here, or is my sample distorted because it mainly contains listings still online? I’d be interested in whether recent completed sales, withdrawals and new-listing volume tell a different story.
 
Listings still online will naturally overrepresent homes that have taken longer to sell. I’d separate recent completed deals from active and withdrawn stock, then compare their original listing dates. Otherwise a well-priced home that sold quickly disappears from your sample while a stubborn seller remains visible for months.
 
How are you defining “coastal”? Neighbourhood boundaries could be doing a lot of work here. Also, is 117 days the average or the midpoint of your saved listings? A few very old properties can pull an average upward, especially if withdrawn and relisted homes look new.
 
I’d also be cautious about attributing every outlier to maintenance. Condition matters, but a long listing period could reflect seller motivation, the timing of price cuts or a buyer’s financing falling through. Can you tell whether the maintained homes were priced differently from the start, rather than simply moving faster because of condition?
 
Completed sales won’t give the whole answer either. They exclude properties that sellers withdrew rather than discounting, so relying only on sold homes can make demand look stronger than it was. I’d track three outcomes for the same listing cohort: sold, still active and withdrawn. That would show whether 117 days means slow absorption or merely persistent asking prices.
 
A simple table should be enough: neighbourhood, asking price, first-seen date, condition notes, first price-cut date, current status and any apparent relisting. Group listings by the month first observed rather than mixing fresh stock with old stock. Then compare like with like inside the price range. I would avoid drawing a monthly conclusion until the completed and withdrawn entries have had time to appear.
 
The cohort approach makes sense, but don’t narrow it so much that you end up with only a handful of comparable homes. I’d first test whether the 117-day figure changes materially when the obvious maintenance cases are removed. If it barely moves, condition probably isn’t the main explanation; if it drops sharply, inspect those properties separately rather than treating them as representative of the coastal market.
 
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