There is nothing extraordinary about this proposition. Hong Kong people like gadgets but are not alone in this. Around the world, homeowners seek to trade up in a sharply rising market. What marks out the SAR is the excess that typically marks cycles, whether they are mobile-phone product cycles or the shift from bull to bear property market. Picking turning points in these great swings of sentiment is as much an art as a science.
Property markets are rather more complicated than mobile-phone markets.
The common refrain is that the excess of HOS flats continues to hurt confidence, reduce market activity and so dampen consumption demand across the economy. These are the worries of socialist planners everywhere, who must predict complex economic outcomes influenced by multiple factors outside their control. Fortunately, an elegant and simple salvation lies in the pricing system. Remember the mountain of commentary a few years ago about a massive over-supply of office property in Hong Kong. Well, a lot was built, but the price of renting dropped by as much as 60 per cent and almost all of it is now full.