Table of Contents
Under the neon lights of Apliu Street in Sham Shui Po, 42-year-old Zhong Yue'er, wearing ten-centimeter high heels, shuttled between tenement buildings filled with rental advertisements. This sex worker, who is called the "Queen of Subdivided Flats" by her peers, transformed herself from a streetwalker to a landlady with three properties worth tens of millions of yuan in just five years. Her story not only subverts society's stereotypes about sex workers, but also reveals the cruel rules of survival in Hong Kong's lower-class economic ecology.
Real estate agent under neon lights
Yue'er's office is an eight-square-foot subdivided flat. In addition to pink neon tubes, there are three bunches of keys hanging on the wall - representing the three properties she owns in Apliu Street. In between clients every day, she would log on to the Land Registry website to study transaction records, and she had the contact information of more than a dozen real estate agents saved in her mobile phone. When she bought her first home in 2014, she converted her income from receiving clients into a unit price: "600 yuan per hour, for 5,000 hours." This string of numbers became the motivation for her and her husband Chen Yuxing to save money.
Their investment strategy is so precise that it astounds professional investors: they specialize in tenement buildings that are more than 20 years old, choose low-rise units facing the street, and each household must have an independent water and electricity meter. After the renovation of this "subdivided flat standard room", the average monthly rent of the 21 pigeon houses can reach 10,500 yuan, and the occupancy rate has remained above 90% for a long time. Rather than saying this is a real estate investment, it is more accurate to say it is a precise harvest of Hong Kong's basic housing needs.
Undercurrent of wealth among marginalized groups
The sex worker community in Apliu Street forms a unique economic closed loop: they are both owners and tenants, collecting rent and paying rent. Among Yue'er's tenants, 70% are sisters in the same industry. This symbiotic relationship forms an alternative mutual aid system - Fengjies use their bodies in exchange for cash flow, and then inject the proceeds into the real estate market. While ordinary citizens are worried about the down payment threshold, these sex workers are quietly accumulating capital with daily cash payments.
The industry's unique cash flow model has become a financial management tool. Yue'er's account book shows that after deducting the monthly operating costs of 80,000 yuan (including protection fees, cleaning fees and maintenance expenses), the net income can reach 140,000 yuan. This high turnover cash flow allows her to always grab urgently sold properties during periods of property market volatility. The two units she purchased in 2016 were sold at a price below the market price of 15% when the owners were in gambling debt.
The double-sided mirror of subdivided flat economics
Yue'er's secret to success exposes the distorted ecology of Hong Kong's property market. The average return on the three properties she owns is as high as 8.7%, far exceeding the rental return of 2% for luxury homes on Hong Kong Island. Such huge profits come from the extreme exploitation of living space: each pigeon cage is less than 50 square feet, but has to accommodate a bed, a bathroom and a simple kitchen. Tenants are measuring Hong Kong's bottom line of survival with their bodies, while owners like Yue'er are reaping capital dividends in the cracks.
When the reporter asked about the moral controversy, Yue'er wiped her key chain and responded calmly: "No matter how small the subdivided flat is, it is still a roof over my head, better than sleeping under an overpass." This sentence fully reveals the absurd reality of Hong Kong's housing dilemma - even sex workers know how to use real estate to fight inflation, but ordinary citizens are becoming increasingly powerless amid soaring housing prices. This contrast is a dark allegory of class mobility in Hong Kong.
In the night, Apliu Street was still flashing with ambiguous pink lights. Yue'er stuffed the blueprint of the new property into her LV handbag and continued to inspect her "subdivided flat kingdom". The sound of her high heels echoed in the corridors of the tenement building, and every step she took was on the tightrope between morality and reality. This divorced woman from Hunan used the most primitive method of capital accumulation to weave her own myth of wealth in the shadow of the Pearl of the Orient.
