1st September 2026 – (Hong Kong) A subdivided micro-shop in Causeway Bay has sold for about the same price as a luxury handbag, underscoring how far values have fallen at the once heavily marketed Causeway Plaza arcade.
The unit at shop 1061 on the first floor of Causeway Plaza, 1 Tung Street, has a gross floor area of about 40 square feet. It changed hands for HK$80,000, or roughly HK$2,000 per square foot. That is close to the HK$80,400 list price of a popular Hermès Lindy 26 bag, meaning a core retail address now costs what buyers might pay for a single designer accessory.
Two local owners bought the stall in April 2005 when the mall was first split for sale, paying HK$1.297 million, or about HK$32,400 per square foot. After holding it for 21 years they sold at a paper loss of HK$1.217 million, a 93.8 per cent wipeout.
The deal is the second at Causeway Plaza this year to fetch less than HK$100,000. In May, shop 2093 on the second floor, measuring about 62 square feet, sold for HK$58,000 at about HK$935 per square foot. That earlier transaction marked a HK$1.532 million loss, or about 96.4 per cent, and set new lows for both price and per-square-foot value at the mall.
Causeway Plaza is now widely regarded as a near-empty dead mall with little foot traffic. Veteran investor Yin Pak-kuen, known as the king of subdivided shopping arcades, bought the Causeway Bay Commercial Building from ground to fifth floors for HK$200 million in late 2004 and launched a split sale in early 2005. He carved 206 micro-shops across the first and second floors, with entry prices from a few hundred thousand dollars and per-square-foot prices of about HK$30,000. Buyers were offered rental guarantees of up to 7 per cent for the first two years, drawing many small investors. Early sales reportedly averaged about HK$2 million per unit and raised an estimated HK$400 million.
After the split, poor promotion and weak management left most units vacant. Owners who bought at the launch have since faced repeated distressed sales as values collapsed.
