HK to re-launch Home Ownership Scheme (HOS)

Today Hong Kong Chief Executive Donald Tsang finally announced during his last Policy Address to re-launch Home Ownership Scheme (HOS) which has been abandoned by the Hong Kong government since end-2002. New HOS (Home Ownership Scheme) flats will be available for sales starting 2014.

Although the Home Ownership Scheme (HOS) can provide non-luxury and more affordable flats for first-time home purchasers as stated in our article Special Stamp Duty (SSD) in Hong Kong, the annual supply of only 5 thousands (adjustable target) of subsidized HOS (Home Ownership Scheme) flats should still not be sufficient to meet the long-term housing demands of low-income families in Hong Kong.

Mr China Anniversary Celebration

September 30 in last month was a special day to Mr China and should be worth celebrating. One year ago, we started this website here to share our ideas and findings with you (reference: Our Big Day). In this anniversary celebration, we are happy to see that our website data reported by Google Analysis shows that the number of visitors has increased rapidly in each quarter. We can now declare this website an initial success.

However, this success does not come with ease. As we were all new to SEO (Search Engine Optimization), we did make some mistakes and faced problem in promoting through search engine(s) during our early months. For instance, we mistakenly added the same meta description to each article in late January 2011, and then suffered from a "duplicate meta description" issue. The Google Panda Algorithm Update that implemented since late February 2011 also brought another "shallow content" issue to us. We immediately added back a few more contents to our earlier articles to avoid being mis-considered as shallow content, although it is not quite convincing to us that the number of words in an article can truly represent the quality of that article. Another problem to us was that the Google Panda Algorithm Update has introduced a new algorithmic formula change that favors the already-existing authoritative websites. This is surely an unfair penalty to all new websites like ours.

Despite the above-mentioned issues, Mr China manages to evolve quickly as we continue to deliver high quality and unique articles in our website. Our usual readers may also find that the length of our current articles is now much longer than our earlier ones. Now our Google performance is much improved as our website is already 100% indexed by Google. Our newly published articles can normally be searched in Google index within 24 hours. Google currently becomes one of the top referrers of our website (you may also find our site via Google, right?).

There are more good news to Mr China. We have achieved a satisfactory search result from Yahoo, benefited from the recent integration between Bing and Yahoo. We have also got an improved search result from Baidu in the mainland China, benefited from the recent cooperation between Bing and Baidu.

In fact, during the past year, Mr China has introduced a series of unique features and new services such as Advertising Support and Download Section, Subscribing Channels, Online Donation, and the latest Stock Analysis.

As a summary of our efforts in the past year, here is a list of our Annual Top 10 Most Popular Articles (in descending order):

(1) 2011 China GDP Target.
(2) Inflation-linked iBond: Bond Analysis .
(3) Hui Xian REIT: Stock Analysis.
(4) Chinese Bank Declares RMB Business War Across the World.
(5) 2011 China CPI Target.
(6) China's 12th Five Year Plan.
(7) Glencore IPO: Stock Analysis.
(8) 2011 Hong Kong HSI Target.
(9) Inside China LGFV debts.
(10) More Interest Rate Hikes Against Inflation.

This top 10 list gives us an idea that we may need to consider focusing more on topics like the China GDP, Bond or Stock Analysis, RMB Business, and China CPI etc in the future. We, however, also realize that some articles can stay in our top list because of their longer domain age (refer to those which have been published for over 6 months and thus have longer time to get pageviews than newer articles).

One year before, we said we want to develop our website as a kind of online China economic magazine that you love to read. We think we have made it, but we also know we can be even better. We hope in the next anniversary celebration we will bring more good changes and share more success stories with all of you.