Field notes
Reading Vacancy on Mixed Residential Floors
In many Hong Kong residential blocks, a floor can show three empty doors while only one unit is genuinely waiting for a new tenant. The other two may be mid-handover, held for owner use, or still listed as occupied because the outgoing lease has not formally ended.
When we prepare a Portfolio Occupancy Study, we ask owners to mark units that are intentionally idle. That single annotation prevents vacancy rates from looking worse than the leasing team’s lived experience.
Floor plans help. A subdivided flat that still appears as one line on an old rent roll will distort unit counts until someone walks the corridor and redraws the inventory. We treat that redraw as part of occupancy work, not a separate surveying project.
If your building mixes serviced apartments with ordinary tenancies, keep those stocks in separate columns. Blending them into one percentage hides where marketing effort should go.