Wang Fuk's Sign-Up Order Decides Who Gets Kai Tak
The Sign-Up Race
The government put out a number this week and it sounds great: 85.6 percent of Wang Fuk Court owners signed the buyback deal before the June 30 deadline. Here is what the deal actually offers. Owners can cash out at HK$8,000 or HK$10,500 a square foot, with the price depending on the flat's size and layout. Or they can swap for one of 4,443 replacement flats going up in Tai Po, Kai Tak, Kowloon Bay, Tseung Kwan O and six other estates. On paper, that sounds tidy. It sounds like the city moved fast for people who lost everything in November.
Here is the part the press release does not say. Flat selection is first-come, first-served, by signing order. Whoever signs earliest gets to pick a flat first. Whoever signs last picks from whatever is left. So the June 30 date was never really a deadline. It was the closing of a queue. The signing deadline was June 30, but the queue it created runs all the way through 2029, the year the last of the 4,443 replacement flats is scheduled to be handed over.
Talking Solidarity, Signing Solo
SCMP reporting captured what actually happened here. Some residents stood up in group chats and meetings and said: hold the line, do not sign yet, we get a better deal together. The logic is simple. If everyone waits, they can negotiate as a group instead of each taking whatever terms the government offers first. Reasonable, in theory. Except reporting shows some of those same people quietly went and signed their own acceptance letters right after saying it. In public: wait for solidarity. In private: lock in my flat before the queue fills up.
I am not going to pretend that is some moral failing. If your neighbour might beat you to a decent flat, you sign. Waiting for the group only pays off if the group actually holds, and nobody wants to be the one who waited and lost the good unit. Anyone would do the same. But that is exactly the problem: a first-come, first-served queue turned honesty into a losing move. SCMP's reporting names the pattern, not the individuals. Hop On, the body running the buyback, has not published the signing-order list, so no resident can even check where they actually rank.
Hop On says the owners' meeting can go ahead in July, once the court fights over delay are resolved. But that meeting will not reorder the queue. The 1,698 households that already signed did so in a fixed order, and the flats in Tai Po and Kai Tak will be handed out in that same order starting in 2027. The fire took the building in November. The buyback took the trust that was supposed to rebuild it.