NBS: Beijing happy at Jan-Feb property FAI 11.6% rise
NBS’s latest statistics showed that the sales of commercial housing declined 3.6% on year, or the first-ever decline in the past 14 months, according to the graph NBS included in its latest release, amounting to 141 million sq m for the first two months of 2019.
Mao Shengyong, spokesperson of China’s State Council Information Office, brushed off any market concern on this when queried at the press conference in Beijing on Thursday.
“China’s property price has been in general steady, the festive factor was not excluded from the January-February performance, and the latest development suggests that China’s property market has been into a new era in response to the central government’s guideline that ‘house is to live not to speculate on’,” he said.
“With the continuing perfecting the long-term strategy, China’s property market will be achieving a healthy and sustainable development,” he concluded with confidence.
It is worth noting that new land leases taken by the Chinese property developers declined substantially by 34.1% on year to 15.5 million sq m over January-February, according to NBS.
“China’s property market is cooling down with challenges in financing and sales,” an official from a property development company headquartered in South China’s Guangdong province confessed.
“Beijing’s withdrawal of monetary compensation for shantytown residents and the possible property tax imposition are dampening speculative buying enthusiasm in China’s property market,” he said, thinking the “prosperous days in the past few years are long gone”.
Some other market analysts, however, are not into pessimism yet.
“January-February alone is hard to present the whole year, as Chinese property developers can return to the market anytime on positive signs,” a Singapore-based market source said, adding, “they may want to assess the situation carefully and cautiously and they need to work out their credit limits with the banks at the beginning of the year.”
Over January-February, China’s property projects under construction reached 6.75 billion sq m and, up 6.8% on year, among which, housing accounted for 4.66 billion sq m, up 8.3% on year, and the newly-launched projects added up to 188 million sq m, up 6% on year with that for new housing project totalling nearly 136 million sq m, up 4.3% on year, according to NBS.
“Projects under construction are usually high in January and February as they are continuation from the previous year,” a Shanghai-based property market analyst said, pointing out, though, that the newly-launched project growth in the first two months was no match to the 17.2% year-on-year rise for 2018.
Written by Olivia Zhang, zhangwd@mysteel.com
Edited by Hongmei Li, li.hongmei@mysteel.com
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