A veteran of Chinese venture capital firm Ince Capital purchased a luxury apartment in Hong Kong, adding to a list of high-profile buyers as the city’s housing market shows signs of a recovery.
JP Gan, one of Ince Capital’s founding partners, spent HK$148 million ($19 million) with his wife for a home at The Legacy last month, according to land registry records. They made the purchase ahead of a tax hike introduced last week for high-end property transactions, the filing shows.
Gan and his wife confirmed the purchase while declining to comment further when contacted by Bloomberg News.
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Hong Kong raised the stamp duty ratio for residential property deals valued above HK$100 million to 6.5 percent from 4.25 percent as part of the annual budget announced last week. The new measure is expected to affect about 0.3 percent of transactions in the city and bring in around HK$1 billion of revenue each year, Financial Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po said.
The Asian financial hub saw a flurry of record-breaking sales in the months leading up to the tax hike, as overall home prices rebounded from a years-long slump. The measure is likely to cool the luxury market before it rebounds in the second half, Jones Lang LaSalle Inc’s Greater China Co-CEO Alex Barnes said in an interview on Bloomberg Television last week.
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Gan, who formerly worked at Qiming Venture Partners and Carlyle Group Inc, is known for his investments in Chinese tech companies including Trip.com Group and video-streaming platform Bilibili Inc, and more recently robotics.
