Hong Kong’s Housing Authority has approved a series of measures, including raising the allocation of homes under the White Form Secondary Market Scheme (WSM) and cutting the resale restriction period for new subsidized sale flats (SSFs) from 15 years to 10 years, to encourage upward mobility via the housing ladder.

The Subsidised Housing Committee announced on Thursday that the Housing Authority will increase the allocation by 1,000 to 7,000 starting from the next WSM exercise.

Half of the additional allocation will be reserved for young families and one-person applicants aged below 40 under the Youth Scheme (WSM), while the remaining 500 additional ones will be ordinary allocations.

“In response to keen market demand for the WSM quota, the Housing Authority substantially increased the quota by 1,500, and all of them were allocated to young families and one-person applicants aged below 40 under WSM 2024, which eventually was over-subscribed by about five times,” a spokesman for the authority said in a statement.

More than 80 percent of the applications came from young applicants under the Youth Scheme, which shows the scheme is valued by young people, said the spokesman.

The Subsidised Housing Committee decided to shorten the alienation restriction period for new SSFs offered for sale on the open market from 15 years to 10 years from the date of the first assignment, starting from the next HOS and GSH sale exercises.

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Cleresa Wong Pie-yue, chairman of the committee, told local media that the authority would review the possibility of relaxing resale restrictions for subsidized sale units sold between 2022 and 2024.

Noting that transaction volumes of HOS and Form Subsidised Home Ownership Scheme (GSH) flats in the open market have remained low since 2022 when the HA extended the resale restriction period from 10 to 15 years, she said: “Reducing the restriction back to 10 years can facilitate mobility without triggering speculation.”

Starting from the next Home Ownership Scheme (HOS) sale exercise, the authority will also increase the ratio of Green Form to White Form allocations from 40:60 to 50:50.

It will, at the same time, increase the ratio of larger units in HOS and GSH projects to encourage more public rental housing tenants to purchase SSFs.

“At present, the waiting time for public rental housing is relatively long,” Wong said, referring to the average 5.4-year waiting time for family and elderly applicants.

Considering that the supply of public rental housing will increase five years from now and applicants will not need to wait as long as before, the housing authorities hope they will be able to increase the flat size by 10 percent in general, she added.

On operational arrangements, the committee said in recent WSM exercises, an average of about 15 percent to 20 percent of applicants allocated a home failed to apply for a certificate of eligibility to purchase within the specified period.

To avoid wastage of allocations, the number of approval letters issued by the authority will be higher than the total WSM allocation from the next WSM exercise, said the Subsidised Housing Committee.

Details of the over-issuance will be announced prior to each application period, it added.

Starting from the WSM 2024, any unused allocations will be given to one-person applicants, consistent with the practice adopted in the sale of primary SSFs, according to the committee.

To ensure full utilization of the WSM 2024 allocation, the Housing Authority will issue an additional batch of approval letters corresponding to the ballot order.