China’s Property Market Is ‘Out of Control’ as Prices Climb Further from freeamfva's blog

China’s Property Market Is ‘Out of Control’ as Prices Climb Further

China’s home prices grew at the fastest pace in eight months in April after curbs failed to stem buyer enthusiasm.To get more news about China property market 2021, you can visit shine news official website.

New home prices in 70 cities, excluding state-subsidized housing, rose 0.48% last month from March, when they gained 0.41%, National Bureau of Statistics figures showed Monday. Values in the secondary market, which faces less government intervention, climbed 0.4%, the same pace as a month earlier.

Buyer euphoria is persisting, with investors using real estate as a hedge against global inflation. That’s prompted authorities to issue a drumbeat of statements designed to cool down price expectations. Year-to-date residential sales have more than doubled from the same period in 2019 in cities including Shenzhen, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Nanjing, according to China Real Estate Information Corp.President Xi in late April repeated his mantra that houses are “for living in, not for speculation” when chairing a meeting of China’s 25-member Politburo, the Communist Party’s top ruling body. Last week, policy makers signaled they may revive efforts to introduce a long-delayed national real estate tax via a trial.

“The home market has remained sort of out of control, the wider the curbs, the more resilient the market becomes,” Yang Kewei, a research director at China Real Estate Information, said before the figures were released. “That’s why a trial of levy of home ownership may come sooner than expected, as a stronger show of policy strength.”
In discussions about China’s frothy real-estate market, the country’s parlous demographics are often raised as a looming threat. As the national population begins to decline in the coming years, won’t the market lose some steam?

Perhaps not—at least in the places foreigners are most inclined to watch. One way of thinking about the question is to look at areas where population decline has already begun, in some cases at considerable speed.

Andrew Batson, China research director for Gavekal Dragonomics, notes that the 2020 census implies a much sharper decline in the populations of three northeastern provinces than previously believed. Since 2010, the recorded populations of Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang have declined by 2.6%, 12.3% and 16.9%, respectively.

The National Bureau of Statistics monitors the selling prices of homes in five of those provinces’ largest cities: Shenyang, Dalian, Harbin, Changchun and Jilin City. And in the past five years, newly built residential property prices have risen by at least 40% in each of them. Properties are far cheaper than in the wealthiest cities, but the climb in prices hardly reflects the reality of a sliding provincial population.