The global financial crisis of 2008 was a watershed event few want to repeat, and certainly not those investors who were engulfed. But for institutional investors who dove into Asian commercial property markets after 2008, the past nine years have brought tides of returns.

But after nearly a decade of recovery in Asian property markets, anecdotes abound about record prices and real estate bubbles in the Far East, including Hong Kong, where per-square-metre housing prices have tripled since 2011.

But not only housing prices have skyrocketed in the former crown colony. In May, Henderson Land Development Co agreed to pay a record HK$23.3 billion (US$3.0 billion) for a plot of developable land in Hong Kong’s CBD held by the government. Moreover, mainland Chinese bidders were boxed out of the bidding action by Beijing capital-flight controls. And that record was broken the same month by a division of the Nan Fung Group, which outbid nearly a dozen other developers by payi