Average wait time for public housing down to 5.5 years

12-08-2024 15:44 HKT

The Housing Authority announced on Monday that the average wait for a public housing flat as of the end of June had been shortened from 5.7 to 5.5 years.

The average waiting time for elderly individual applicants, meanwhile, dropped from 3.8 to 3.7 years.

The authority attributed the improvement to the allocation of more than 7,000 public housing units in the second quarter of this year.

The authority said the figure is the largest number of flats allocated since the third quarter of 2022. About 900 of these flats were allocated to elderly one-person applicants.

“In this quarter, 4,400 general applicants were housed to new public rental housing flats in Fu Tip Estate in Tai Po, Cheung Tsing Estate in Tsing Yi and Yip Wong Estate in Tuen Mun. Amongst these flats, those in Cheung Tsing Estate and Yip Wong Estate were under the “PRH Advance Allocation Scheme”, which had adopted a phased completion approach.

“With our efforts to expedite the allocation of new PRH flats, coupled with the fact that the average waiting time of PRH applicants for flats in the New Territories is relatively shorter, the relatively shorter waiting time of the above-mentioned PRH applicants was reflected in the average waiting time in this quarter,” it said.

As a result, the average waiting time in the second quarter of 2024 has dropped by 0.2 years to 5.5 years, it added.

Meanwhile, the authority said a number of its new public housing projects will be completed gradually and intake at some Home Ownership Scheme and Green Form Home Ownership Scheme projects will also take place this year.

Together with its continuous efforts to combat tenancy abuse, the authority expected that the average waiting time in the next two to three quarters will be benefited from the relatively shorter waiting time of the large number of applicants housed to Fu Tip Estate in Tai Po over the past two quarters. As such, the average waiting time will remain stable or even decrease slightly in the second half of 2024.