This is the story of Wu Guanliu, a peculiar real estate speculator who has been taking advantage of the fear that superstitious Hong Kong property owners have of ghosts, of spirits who have died violently and cannot cross over to the light. Wu (73 years old) acquires these unwanted houses at a 30% to 50% discount on the market price. After some time, he sells them for much higher prices.
"I know of a recent case where a son, upon inheriting his parents' flat, both of whom died in their sleep from carbon monoxide poisoning, contacted this gentleman directly to buy the property," says a real estate agent while pointing out several "cursed apartments" that Wu has purchased in one of the busiest commercial areas.
In the lavish real estate market of Hong Kong, the financial center that holds the record for having the most expensive square meter price in the world, there is an exception known as hongza, flats for sale at very low prices because there was some unnatural death there (murder, suicide, or accident)
The deeply rooted local cultural aversion to living in those places scares off most buyers. But Wu has acquired over 200 properties with these characteristics since 1993. One of his most profitable deals was in 2010 when he paid one million Hong Kong dollars (121,000 euros) for a flat where a man had set himself on fire and a woman had hanged herself. Eight years later, he sold that property for almost five million more.
Wu explains that his main clients are expatriates from Western countries and migrant workers from other parts of Asia who are not influenced by Chinese superstitions. In Hong Kong, unlike mainland China, there is no legal obligation for the homeowner to disclose to potential buyers any deaths that have occurred in the property.
But if it's not the neighbors who sound the alarm because they don't want anyone to wake up the "ghosts" and have them unleash their fury throughout the building, it's the banks that reveal the news of the incident because they are reluctant to provide mortgages for this type of properties.
"I once had to convince a bank to grant a mortgage to some buyers by proving with documents that the previous owner had died in the hospital and not from an accident in the house." Word of the man whom local media dubbed long ago as the "king of haunted flats."