Theoretical and empirical studies on how building quality or performance is valued by the property market abound in the literature. While some of them investigate the changes in property price after building renovation, little has been done on the pricing of safety performance of buildings. In this regard, this preliminary research aims to explore if residential properties in safer buildings command higher market values in Hong Kong. Hong Kong provides a good laboratory for this study because it is a densely-populated city where high-rise buildings are common. In such an environment, building failures can pose a serious threat. A spate of building-related accidents in the city in recent years has demonstrated the painful consequences of neglect of building safety. For the purpose of this study, the safety performance of a building is measured by the weighted number of unauthorized building works (UBWs) present on the external walls of the buildings. By their nature, UBWs are building works that are constructed without prior approval and consent from the government. A hedonic price model is developed for assessing the market value of building safety. For the model estimation, apart from the property transaction data, the number of unauthorized appendages (i.e., UBWs attached to the building facades) in each building under study is obtained through a building survey. Based on the analysis results, several hypotheses built upon the theories of self-protection and self-insurance put forward by Ehrlich and Becker (1972) are tested.