An expensive rental lesson

A year ago, Guan Lin came to Hong Kong for the first time in her life. The 24-year-old girl from the northeastern Chinese city of Fushun had just graduated from college in her native province of Liaoning.

Like many ambitious and talented Chinese youths, she hoped that post-graduate studies in “Asia’s World City” would take her career to the next level. So, she enrolled at the Chinese University (CUHK) to study computer-aided translation. But first she had to find a place to stay.

Apartment hunting proved to be an expensive, and shocking, lesson for Guan. Before departing from Liaoning, she read on the internet that Hong Kong’s flats are measured in “square feet” unlike the metric measurements commonly used on the mainland. She had to google the unit ratio to compare.

She learned that one square meter equals 10.76 square feet. But she didn’t fully grasp the true value of a square foot until she began inspecting apartments near the CUHK campus.

“They were all very small and very expensive compared to my home in Fushun,” Guan said of the flats she visited with the help of a local real-estate agency.

Finally, she settled on renting one bedroom in a 400-square foot two-bedroom apartment with a Shanghainese roommate in Prima Villa, an upscale Sha Tin residential tower. Guan’s room is about half the size of her bedroom back at her parent’s flat in Fushun. In Liaoning, she said renting a comparable lodging would cost less than a third of her apartment’s HK$13,500 per month rent at Prima Villa.

Guan has joined the ranks of a growing population of academic transplants from the mainland. Since 1998, when universities in Hong Kong began recruiting mainland students, more than 60,000 high school and college students have come to the city to further their studies, according to Xinhuanet.

Many mainland students live in dorms. Others have to rent off-campus lodging. All who remain in Hong Kong for employment, eventually, learn to pay the price of the city’s exorbitant rent.

Hong Kong has one of the world’s most expensive real-estate markets. By the end of 2012, the average rental cost had reached an all-time high of HK$23.3 per square foot, having increased by 15.8 percent from the previous year.