Shimao's four hotels -- Pudong Grand, Long Beach, Sheshan Golf, Kunshan Lake -- hit the market this week at a 33% discount off book value after HSBC creditors lost patience and moved to seize. The buyer queue will be short. At HK$64 million, the laundering case against the former official's son is the kind of number that announces itself; he was remanded Tuesday.

Property stocks slid on US rate-hike fears while a new study confirmed what anyone buying in the last thirty years already knows: flats have been getting smaller every decade since the nineties, not because architects ran out of ideas but because land cost per square foot kept climbing and developers passed it forward in centimetres. The government backed a HK$600 million microelectronics factory under a new industrial scheme Tuesday -- the first real piece of manufacturing ambition to land in a policy document this year -- and the factory, if it clears planning, is due to break ground in Tuen Mun, same district where Customs pulled HK$16 million in smuggled goods at the checkpoint this week. The rate decision in Washington that property investors are watching is the Fed's next FOMC meeting, currently pencilled for July 29.