According to the Demographia International Housing Affordability report, Hong Kong is the world’s most ‘impossibly unaffordable’ city in 2024 – a title that we have been crowned with for 14 years in a row now.
This annual report rates middle-income housing affordability in 94 major cities across eight nations. Since simply looking at housing prices will not paint an accurate picture, they score housing prices in relation to income, dividing the median house price by gross median household income. This means that middle- and lower-income households are better represented, instead of having the average skewed upwards by the incomes and prices of Hong Kong’s ultra-rich.
Out of all 94 markets, Hong Kong tops Demographia’s list as the world’s most ‘impossibly unaffordable’ city with a median of 16.7. We are also the only Asian location ranked within the top 10. To no one’s surprise, our city therefore has also been found to have the lowest home ownership rate at 51 percent. That said, this score is already an improvement from the pre-pandemic median multiple of 20.8 back in 2019.
In stark contrast, Singapore only has a median multiple of 3.8, which places them in the ‘moderately unaffordable’ category, at the 11th most affordable housing market on the list. They also have the highest home ownership rate among all the global markets surveyed, coming in at 89 percent.
After Hong Kong, the other most unaffordable cities in the world according to Demographia are Sydney (13.8) and Vancouver (12.3).
Since its first edition in 2005, the survey has always peaked at ‘severely unaffordable’, but this year, a new category of ‘impossibly unaffordable’ has been added to represent housing markets with a median that is multiple triple or more the ‘affordable’ standard of 3.0. Demographia states that this is a level of unaffordability that did not even exist a mere three decades ago.
Here are the world’s top 10 most unaffordable housing markets, according to the Demographia International Housing Affordability report:
- Hong Kong SAR
- Sydney, Australia
- Vancouver, Canada
- San Jose, USA
- Los Angeles, USA
- Honolulu, USA
- Melbourne, Australia
- San Francisco, USA and Adelaide, Australia
- San Diego, USA
- Toronto, Canada
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