Wang Chi House's 87.5 Percent
The tower nobody burned
Here's the number that should stop you. Wang Chi House is the one tower at Wang Fuk Court the fire never touched. Not one flat burned. And yet 87.5 percent of its owners still signed up for the government buyback by the June 30 deadline.
Think about that for a second. If this were purely about damaged homes, the untouched tower should have the lowest signup rate, not the highest. Those owners could just move back in. Nobody would need to buy them out at all. Instead, they're leaving at a higher rate than the people whose flats don't even exist anymore.
So it's not the buildings driving this. It's the address. You can't renovate away November 26 (the date of the fire). Wang Chi House lost zero flats and still filed 87.5 percent of its buyback paperwork by June 30, ahead of the 85.3 percent from the seven towers that actually burned.
What the deadline buys
Across all eight buildings in the estate, the government now has 85.6 percent of owners signed up. Here's how the buyback actually works. The government is paying HK$8,000 or HK$10,500 a square foot. Which rate you get depends on your flat's land premium status (a technical marker of how much the original lease already paid the government for the land, and it moves the payout up or down). Owners can take the money as cash, or swap it for one of 4,443 replacement flats being built in Tai Po, Kowloon Bay, Kai Tak and Tseung Kwan O.
About 14 percent of owners haven't signed. Here's what waiting costs them: they can still say yes later, but they lose first pick of the good replacement flats, because those go to the owners who signed on time. And some of the holdouts aren't holding out for a better price at all. Some have said, publicly, that they don't want a flat in Tai Po or Kai Tak. They want to rebuild on the original site.
Hop On Management, which runs the estate, dropped its Lands Tribunal appeal this week and set the owners' meeting for July, after two prior postponements. That meeting is where the holdouts who want to rebuild on-site get to make their case in person. Not before.
The government has its 85.6 percent. Wang Chi House, untouched by fire, filed at 87.5 percent, ahead of the seven burned towers. The 14 percent still holding out lose priority on the 4,443 replacement flats the longer they wait, and some have said outright they want the original site, not Tai Po or Kai Tak. July's owners' meeting is where Hop On Management puts both groups in the same room.