9,600 Buildings, One Law:
What Hong Kong Solved That Italy and Dubai Haven’t
Hong Kong’s compulsory sale ordinance, Dubai’s new safety certificate, and Italy’s unanimous-consent rule are three answers to the same question: what happens when a building outlives the consensus needed to fix it.
Redevelopment law for aging buildings barely exists in Italy. Thousands of ageing concrete towers sit unsellable at a fraction of replacement cost — not because they failed structurally, but because Italian law requires near-unanimous consent from every freeholder to redevelop or tear a building down. One holdout, one contested inheritance, and the plan dies, sometimes for decades. Italy did not invent this kind of building. What separates jurisdictions is not whether buildings age out — all of them do — but whether the law gives anyone a way out when they do.
Hong Kong wrote an answer twenty-five years ago, and just made it stronger. The Land (Compulsory Sale for Redevelopment) Ordinance lets an owner holding a specified majority of a building’s undivided shares apply to the Lands Tribunal to force the sale of the whole lot for redevelopment, with minority owners compensated at tribunal-assessed market value. As of 2022 the city had roughly 9,600 buildings aged 50 years or older, most past their designed working life.
In 2024, Hong Kong lowered the ownership threshold again — down to 65% for buildings 60 years or older in designated districts, from a flat 90% when the ordinance first took effect in 1999.
A law this specific doesn’t stay theoretical for long: banks in Hong Kong now underwrite bridging loans against a developer’s expected compulsory-sale proceeds, before the Tribunal has even ruled.
Italy has no equivalent at any threshold. Redevelopment or demolition of a residential building requires consent that functions, in practice, as unanimity. Buildings like this aren’t failing. They are simply stuck, some for five decades or more, with no tribunal, no threshold, and no mechanism to force a different outcome.
A third redevelopment law for aging buildings, tried this year
Dubai took a different route in 2026: a Building Safety Certificate that sets a 40-year structural threshold, after which the Municipality works with an owners’ association toward managed demolition and redevelopment once retrofit costs exceed the building’s residual value. It does not require near-unanimous private consent. It also does not yet have Hong Kong’s twenty-five years of tribunal precedent, or the financing market that has grown up around it. Deira, Bur Dubai, Karama and Satwa are the first districts in line.
Redevelopment law for aging buildings, then, comes down to three jurisdictions with three different answers to the same underwriting question — one running for a quarter century with a functioning capital market attached to it, one written this year, one absent altogether.
For institutional capital committing to a twenty-year hospitality hold, the same horizon underwriting sale-leaseback structures now appearing across Milan and other European gateway cities, the number that matters isn’t only today’s yield. It’s whether the jurisdiction has a legal mechanism for what the building becomes in year thirty. That question is answerable before a deal closes, the same way title and zoning already are — it simply isn’t asked as often as it should be. A stabilized asset in a jurisdiction with no exit mechanism is still, quietly, a wasting asset.
Sources on redevelopment law for aging buildings: Hong Kong Buildings Department and Lands Tribunal records; Land (Compulsory Sale for Redevelopment) Ordinance (Cap. 545) and its 2024 Amendment Ordinance; Dubai Municipality 2026 Building Safety Certificate framework; ISTAT national housing stock data; Comune di Abbadia Lariana judicial auction records. Figures independently checked against multiple sources at time of writing; verify current status before relying on any single data point for transaction decisions.
