How to get rich

While researching the Hong Kong property for an article I am writing today, I came across a (sadly) typically HK fact of real estate life. In fact I came across hundreds of crunchy tidbits of property ridiculousness, but one sticks in my mind more than others.

I am sure this has been denounced a million times: last October, a mainland Chinese investor broke global real estate records when he bought an apartment in Hong Kong for US$57m, or around US$9,000/square foot.

So far, so "Hong Kong is expensive, what else is new?"

Well, the developers of the 46-floor building in question, to make sure that the penthouse would rake in maximum dollars, cut out a total of 42 intermediate floors – 14, 24, 34, 64 and all floors between 40-59– to make sure that the penthouse would be on level 88, a most auspicious number in Chinese culture, where 8 rules. How convenient! Now I had heard of not having a 13th floor sometimes (unlucky in Europe), and when I lived here in the nineties, we were on the 5th floor, which if you counted would actually have been the 4th (a very unlucky number in Chinese culture, as the number 4 sounds eerily similar to the word "death" in Cantonese), but cutting out 42 floors?!

To which information Krusty, ever the entrepreneur, reacted by suggesting that we repaint our own lift immediately to indicate that instead of the 16th floor, we are actually living on level 888, higher even than the world's tallest building. We could then invite unsuspecting tourists to visit our rooftops and give them oxygen masks to simulate the feeling of loftiness. We are going to be rich!

Then, Krusty continued, why not just cut out the middle man on our road to fortune, and directly pencil in some zeros on to our bank statements? We're going to be millionaires! Billionaires! Well, as long as you don't count the millions of dollars missing between our current balance and the ones I'm going to write on to my latest account printout...