Registrar-Generals-Department-Annual-report-1965-1966 — Page 15

18,560 assignments of undivided shares, one gets an average considera- tion of about $48,800 for transactions of this type as against $49,500 in the previous year. The slight decrease appears to indicate to some extent that the upward trend in the previous years due partly to rising land values and partly to increased building costs, has levelled off or perhaps even been reversed. In this connexion it should be borne in mind that in the case of new premises the prices included in the assignments are usually prices fixed perhaps one or two years previously when the agreements for sale and purchase were entered into.

26. With the decrease in the number of assignments there was naturally also a decrease in the number of mortgages, the total falling from 9,473 in 1964-65 to 7,303, including 158 building mortgages. The grand total of mortgage considerations fell to $1,059,818,000, 35.8% below last year's total of $1,651,911,000. This substantial decrease was striking evidence of the credit squeeze that followed the banking crisis and contributed to the recession in the property market. The figure included $97,093,000 in respect of the 158 building mortgages, which therefore averaged about $615,000 each. The number of re-assignments rose by 201 (4.5%) to the new record figure of 4,679, but the relevant considerations fell by $126,033,000 (21.2%) to $469,667,000.

27. The only other items in Tables IV and V that call for special comment are the decline in the number of Agreements for Sale and Purchase from 7,581 to 6,417; the marked decrease from 838 to 148 in the number of Exclusion Orders made under Section 31 of the Land- lord and Tenant Ordinance; and the grand total of considerations in all instruments which was down by 26.5% from $3,816,010,000 last year to $2,806,098,000.

28. For the past three years the Land Office has been operating a new system of registration of deeds relating to flats and other units of multi-storey buildings. This system was specially designed to cater for the now standard practice of selling buildings off in separate units of flats, shops, or floors, by assigning an undivided share in the land coupled with the right to the exclusive possession of a particular flat, etc. A separate card is opened for each unit on which are recorded the same particulars as were previously entered in a folio of the now discontinued sub-division registers. There is in addition a control card for each building or in the case of a large building for each floor therein, and on this are recorded in an easily understood fashion references to the individual unit cards.

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