It’s like the crunch never happened. Sino Land, the fifth-biggest Hong Kong property developer, plans to raise prices at a sparkling new complex in the New Territories by up to 5 per cent. In five days of selling Sino has offloaded about three-quarters of the apartments on offer; the previous weekend an estimated 30,000 people had queued in atrocious weather to view them.

This is a bona fide mini-bubble. The six big listed property developers have seen their aggregate market capitalisation more than double since October last year. Sell signals are blinking red: the trailing price/earnings gap between the property sector and the benchmark, which has averaged 200 basis points over the past five years, is now a mere 40. Residential property prices, meanwhile, have climbed back up to December 2007 levels; the recent peak, in March 2008, is a mere 15 per cent away. Hong Kong’s banks, awash in liquidity, seem happy to respond to demand. According to the HKMA, total outstanding residential mortgage loans were up 1.3 per cent, year on year, in April, while overall lending shrank by 0.5 per cent.