Apartment-hunting in HK

Victoria Towers (the tallest buildings)

When M. and I moved to Hong Kong we always knew we wouldn't stay in Tai Po for ever. Part of moving to Hong Kong was to be part of the bustle of the city, and that bustle is pretty muted where we are on the outskirts of Tai Po.
We had planned to move around June, but one of the problems with this plan is that we knew nothing about finding an apartment here. We have spend the first few months trying to quiz the few people we know here about the process, but because none of them are quite in our situation, what they had to say was not always very useful to us. A few generous people offered to drive us around to real estate agents, and translate for us if necessary, and we'd seriously considered taking them up on those offers.
However, when we were wandering around Tsim Sha Tsui (TST) one day, M. was looking at the display in the window of a real estate agency trying to educate herself, and one of the agents came out and offered (in English!) to show her some places. Quite by chance this became the start of our apartment hunting journey - this was late March, and we weren't planning to move anytime soon. The agent, whose English was very good, showed us a couple of apartments in Victoria Towers (pictured above), including one on the top (76th) floor. Now as someone who has worked hard to overcome a fear of heights, this was a little overwhelming. I wasn't at all sure that I wanted to avoid looking out the windows of my apartment for an entire tenancy. This top floor apartment even included a huge roof 'garden' (eg. concrete area, ready for plant-pots, BBQ or whatever) which would have been a huge luxury in the centre of the city, but at a few hundred metres above ground, it didn't feel entirely like our idea of a garden. We were able to quiz the agent on some of the many details about private rentals that we were hazy on, which was useful, but ultimately we both decided that Victoria Towers was not for us. Still, it got us started on the process and that day we wandered around some more, and worked out an area of Jordan (the next neighbourhood north of TST) that we liked the look of.
As nearly everybody lives in apartment buildings in HK, and most of these are pretty big by world standards, often a building name is the most significant thing about your address. This information tells anyone who knows the area not just where you live but even quite a lot about how you live. So as part of looking around we also started noting down the names of some of the buildings we liked the look of, such as 3 Jordan and City 18.
Of course at this stage we had no idea how to find apartments in these buildings, but they certainly looked interesting to us. On our next visit down to the area we were again looking in the window of an agency, when someone called to us from across the road. Given that in this part of HK someone calling out to you is trying to sell you tailoring services, or fake handbags and watches, you can imagine the suspicion with which we viewed this. We looked at each other, but then instinctively decided that given our ignorance about real estate we probably had nothing to lose by talking some more about it. This turned out to be a good decision. Tom, for that was his name, worked for a small agency just on the TST side of the Jordan/TST dividing line, and had pretty good English - certainly better than our skill at Cantonese! So we talked to him about some of the buildings we had liked, and made a appointment with him to see a few apartments.

'Kitchen' of an older building

I won't bore you with all of the details of our search, because so much of it is new to me that I could probably write pages and pages about it, trying to understand it all. Suffice it to say that Tom proved surprisingly diligent in his searching on our behalf, and best of all, worked hard at listening to what we seemed to want in an apartment. There is an incredible range of apartments in HK, from grungy to super-swanky, from tiny-tiny to ridiculously big, and with furnishings ranging from everything to nothing at all. And when I say 'nothing', I'm not joking. This 'kitchen' turned out to be basically a bench with a sink, without even a cooktop, let along a microwave or a conventional oven. Had it crossed the fine line between kitchen and laundry?!? Given how much we like to cook, things like this sometimes presented a bit of an obstacle.
The other difficulty, that was not immediately apparent, was that because we liked those buildings that were smaller, both in height and size, we were immediately reducing our chances of finding anything we wanted. The reason everyone wanted to show us apartments in buildings like Victoria Towers is that because there are half a zillion apartments in that development, there will always be a few available. Whereas in smaller buildings, particularly the good ones, the turnover is low and the number of total apartments is small. This means that we could be waiting a very long time even to look at an apartment in that building, let alone finding one that suited our needs.

Our future home, Kimberley 26, in centre frame.

So in the end we ended up choosing one of the first apartments Tom showed us, even though initially we'd decided it was more expensive than we'd wanted. Having looked further we realised that it probably matched what we wanted better than most things we were likely to see, and so we did the Hong Kong thing, and bargained. In the end we got what seemed to us like a pretty good deal, though who knows if a shrewd Hong Kong local could have done better (almost certainly, I imagine). We ended up down in the heart of TST, rather than in the small area of Jordan that we initially liked the look of. On the upside, it is a very comfortable, nicely furnished apartment, with a better kitchen than most (by Hong Kong standards, which means that both of us could conceivably be in it at the same time, though we'll have to be very polite about it!), high ceilings, and a view out to a park, albeit at some distance. Most importantly, we are going from having just one supermarket a kilometre's walk away, to having so much public transport/commerce/ art/culture/street life right on our door step that it will take us months even to get our heads around it all. I'm particularly excited about having at least two cinemas within a five minute walk of the apartment - for me that spells civilization. There are also coffee shops nearby, though so far none that I have really been passionate about. Still, I've been getting into writing reviews for Beanhunter, so I suspect I will be able to expand the options of those looking for good espresso on Kowloon-side.
We haven't done all the formalities yet - we've signed a pre-contract and paid a deposit, but haven't signed the full tenancy agreement yet - so we're still very much learning as we go. So far, though, the process has been easier than we'd expected, though still with its moments of panic, as we realise how little we really know about the legal system here. It is all a very good reminder that there is really no substitute for the cultural capital of growing up in a place, and knowing enough about it to at least know the right questions to ask, or the right places to start looking. Without that, you just have to stumble along, like we have been doing, and hope for the best.