2024-02-23 09:45:00
The latest bad news: The average residential price in 70 large and medium-sized cities, which reflects the overall situation of China’s real estate market, has fallen sharply.
The Wall Street Journal calculated based on data released by the National Bureau of Statistics of China on Friday that the price of new homes in January fell by 1.24% year-on-year, which was higher than the 0.89% drop in December last year.
Second-hand home prices fared even worse, falling 4.4% year-on-year in January, the largest decline in nearly nine years.
The continued decline in home prices points to the daunting task facing China’s policymakers, who have taken several steps to revive the property market but have so far failed to reverse the market’s decline. The slump in China’s real estate market has pushed many developers to the brink of collapse and severely damaged confidence in the country.
Liu Yuan, head of the real estate research department of Centaline, said that the bottom of housing prices is far from coming, and it will not happen in 2024.
Real estate has been a popular investment among Chinese people for years, and the sector’s slowdown has had widespread repercussions. Consumer confidence is near its lowest level in more than three decades, according to a government survey. Deflation, slowing exports and sluggish private investment have weighed on the economy.
China’s No. 2 leader Li Qiang last week called for strong action to boost confidence in the economy. The government and state-owned banks have announced a series of policies to revive the housing market, but so far they have preferred a piecemeal approach to solving the problem rather than launching a large-scale stimulus package.
Local governments in Beijing and Shanghai have relaxed restrictions on home purchases. Thousands of real estate projects are set to receive billions of dollars in funding from China’s state-led financial sector following the recent release of a whitelist of developers eligible for financing support. China’s big state-owned banks cut a key lending rate last week.
Analysts at Bank of America said China’s central bank cut interest rates last year in an attempt to revive the economy and may take more steps this year to lower borrowing costs.
But past attempts to ease credit have had limited success because a loss of confidence means potential homebuyers are doing more than simply doing the financial math when deciding whether to buy a home.
The real estate industry has been a major driver of China’s economic growth for decades. According to widely mentioned estimates by Harvard University professor Kenneth Rogoff and IMF economist Yang Yuanchen, related industries such as real estate and construction have accounted for about a quarter of China’s GDP in recent years.
It’s hard to say how far-reaching the real estate slowdown will be.
Chinese local governments, which have relied on land sales for most of their fiscal revenue for years, have been hit. The hidden debt of these local governments ranges from US$7 trillion to US$11 trillion, causing a huge headache for the central government.
Bond investors and banks were also hurt by extending credit to developers. According to data from S&P Global Ratings, between 2020 and the end of 2023, the scale of overseas bond defaults by Chinese companies exceeded US$100 billion, most of which came from the real estate industry. This effectively shut down the junk bond market in Asia.
The latest data shows that the price of new residential buildings in China’s first-tier cities fell by 0.5% year-on-year in January. First-tier cities include Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, which have the hottest real estate markets in China.
But beneath the surface, there are signs of diverging fortunes in these cities. In January, new residential prices in Beijing and Shanghai increased by 1.3% and 4.2% year-on-year respectively. In the two southern cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen, new residential prices fell by 3.6% and 4.1% respectively, offsetting the above-mentioned increases.
Second-hand housing prices in these four first-tier cities all fell, with the decline ranging from 3.7% to 6.1%.
Unofficial surveys show that sales of new homes by China’s top 100 real estate companies fell sharply in January. According to data provider China Real Estate Information Corp., new home sales among the top 100 real estate companies were US$32.8 billion, down 34% year-on-year and the worst sales performance in a month since at least July 2020. .
The Chinese government will announce an economic growth target for 2024 at a major political conference next month, which is widely expected to be slower than the 5.2% growth achieved last year. Some economists believe last year’s growth figures were exaggerated.
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