Franklin Koo

Opinion | Ticking time bomb: just how widespread are Hong Kong’s undetected illegal property renovations?

Illegal renovations on a flat only surfaced after a video was posted online. This raises the question: how many more similarly compromised apartments exist in our expensive and ageing housing market?

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The Capitol at Lohas Park in Tseung Kwan O on May 29. Building authorities and the estate management have demanded that the flat owner who modified a load-bearing wall take immediate action to ensure the safety of the entire block. Photo: Xiaomei Chen

Franklin Koo

Published: 8:15am, 3 Jun 2023

A house of cards. That might have been what some Lohas Park residents in Tseung Kwan O felt they were living in when they found that a flat owner had carried out illegal modifications on a load-bearing wall.

The discovery that a structural wall had been partially demolished was made by keen-eyed viewers in a video of the renovated flat. If it had not been uploaded onto a property-related channel with over 30,000 subscribers (the video has since been pulled), the illegal modification is likely to have remained hidden.

This raises a point – just how many other similarly compromised flats exist in a housing market that remains one of the world’s most expensive?

Hong Kong’s flats are not only expensive, but 59 per cent of private residential buildings are more than 30 years old. A Legislative Council report found that, at the end of 2019, many of the roughly 35,700 residential buildings were approaching the end of their 50-year working life. A fifth had been built in 1969 or earlier, and another 39 per cent were 30-49 years old.

Ageing flats are a concern as any permanent structural damage affects safety. Other factors such as property valuation and the determination of mortgages and insurance premiums are also affected.

Compromised load-bearing walls will shift the burden to other walls. Overloaded walls can fail, causing building damage. It is only a matter of time before structural failure happens – making it a ticking time bomb. The 2010 To Kwa Wan building collapse at Ma Tau Wai Road is a stern reminder that illegal modifications have serious ramifications.

With such devastating consequences, the elephant in the room is the absence of a mechanism to detect such modifications. Owners are unlikely to report their own illegal work and the problem may never surface until it becomes too late to rectify. Some offenders may wrongly believe that, since the building has not collapsed, it probably never will.