Money & me
Victoria Allan in front of the building she bought and is developing in K-Town.
Victoria Allan The founder of Habitat Property on where to buy in Hong Kong, jobs for kids and her weakness for YSL. How much is in your wallet? $700. What credit cards do you use? Citibank, but I don’t use credit cards very often. I don’t like getting the bill! Are you a spender or a saver? You will never see much of a balance in my bank account. I’m always investing everything I have in property. Why Hong Kong? I came to Hong Kong in 1997, just before the handover, to visit friends. I was offered a job and thought, why not? Tell us about how you started Habitat? I started Habitat after a brief stint in New York in 2000. When I came back to Hong Kong, I didn’t want to work within a corporate environment. An ex-colleague encouraged me.
68
expat-parent.com
What advice would you give someone starting in business in Hong Kong? Don’t think too much about it. If people realised how hard it is to run a business, they probably wouldn’t do it. When were you poorest? My first company flopped and I lost all my savings. We manufactured laptop covers and were trying to get into big box retailers in America. It was a hard market. I didn’t know enough about it and I didn’t have the cash flow to last the distance. After that fell apart, I started Habitat. It was tough. I was always struggling to find money for the bus fare. But I was determined to run my own business. Being totally broke was a definite motivator to make the new business work. Do you prefer to manage your own affairs? Yes, I manage all my own investments.
Do you invest with your partner? I’m married with two young boys. My husband also has his own business and we are involved in development projects together. What was your best investment? In 2004, I purchased the majority of an old, nine-storey walk-up building in Kennedy Town. Over the next five years I purchased the whole building, then spent four years with the Buildings Department getting various things approved. It’s been a very long and difficult process (and a huge learning curve), but at last the building will be completed at the end of August. It will have eight high-level loft apartments for leasing. It is going to be very cool and I am working with some fabulous Australian architects on the project. Do you own your Hong Kong home? We bought a house in Stanley in 2011. I had shown the property to about 30 clients. No one wanted to buy it. I showed my husband and we decided to sell other things to buy the property. It was a great decision. We did a big renovation and now we live in a really unusual house on the beach in Stanley. It’s perfect for young children. What was your worst investment? Some shares I purchased. I should have sold