Office Block on Hong Kong’s Queen’s Road Sold by Receivers at 71% Off

A Hong Kong family has picked up an office building at the western fringe of the city’s busiest commercial district for 71 percent off its 2018 price as banks offload cut-rate properties from the balance sheets.

A company controlled by veteran local investor Fang Shin and his venture capitalist son Alex Fang (founder of venture capital firm eGarden Ventures), last month acquired 299 QRC, a 25-storey tower at 287-299 Queen’s Road Central from receivers appointed by the Macau unit of Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) for HK$611.4 million, according to Land Registry records.

The deal hands the 94,417 square foot (8,771 square metre) tower to the Fang family at a price HK$1.5 billion lower than the HK$2.1 billion that previous owner Tenacity International Group paid for the property in 2018.

The distressed deal for the 1982-vintage building in the Sheung Wan area – just west of core Central – comes despite signs of a turnaround in office rents in the district, as vacancy in Hong Kong’s core hub fell below 10 percent in February, according to statistics from JLL.

Bank-Seized Property

Fang is paying HK$6,476 per square foot for 299 QRC’s 94,417 square feet (8,771 square metres) of space, a price that Alex Leung, chief surveyor at Hong Kong-based CHFT Advisory and Appraisal, describes as “low, but not far below the market level”.

Just over one year ago, an investor purchased 152 Queen’s Road Central, an office tower 400 metres closer to the city centre than 299 QRC, for HK$18,197 per square foot, putting the deal for that 2020 building at nearly three-times the price of this latest transaction. 

Fang is picking up the commercial tower some 10-minutes walk from the Sheung Wan MTR station about eight months after agent JLL put the asset on the market on behalf of the receivers last July.

Tenacity Group, which was led by Patrick Wong, the son of Dah Sing Bank founder David Wong Shou-Yeh, mortgaged the property for a HK$1.47 billion loan from ICBC Macau in 2019, according to local media accounts. The property was used to secure a second mortgage from Chiyu Bank last February, after Tenacity was said to have sold it to an unknown fund in 2022.

The 1982-vintage tower comprises three floors of retail space in its lower levels, while the second to 23rd floors are for office use.

US fast food chain McDonald’s and a Chinese restaurant occupy the entire ground floor while the building’s first to the third floors are now vacant, according to market sources who spoke with Mingtiandi. The occupancy of the building’s offices from the fourth floor upward is roughly 70 percent, leased primarily to tenants from the professional services sector, including law, auditing and consultancy firms.

Asking rents for office space in the building  are currently HK$29 per square foot per month, per JLL.

Plunging Values

A previous owner of 299 QRC, local real estate investor Francis Law Sau-fai made headlines in 2018 when he sold the tower to Tenacity for HK$2.1 billion – three times the price he paid for the asset eight years ago.

At that time the property generated a reported annual rental income of around HK$40 million, representing a two percent rental yield to the buyer. Since that time office rents in Central have fallen more than 40 percent, pulling down commercial property values.

In January, receivers sold Connaught Harbourfront House, a commercial building at 35-36 Connaught Road West in Sheung Wan, for HK$208 million, or approximately HK$5,696 per square foot.

That price marked a 45 percent discount from the asking price the receivers had targetted in September 2025, and was 41 percent below the previous owner’s acquisition cost in 2013, according to local media accounts.