Housing sector keeps expanding

Housing investment is still on the rebound in November this year, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said Sunday, showing the housing sector continuing to expand despite government curbing policies.

According to the bureau, housing investment grew at 16.7 percent to 6.48 trillion yuan ($1.04 trillion) in the first 11 months of this year, 1.3 percentage points faster than in the period from January to October.

Sales of commercial residencies were 5.35 trillion yuan in the first 11 months of this year, up 9.1 percent year-on-year, according to the data.

"The investment growth is mainly due to developers' fever for land, and rebounding sales in the third quarter of this year," Ji Feng, a researcher from Centaline China Property Research, told the Global Times Sunday.

According to property research institution B.A. Consulting, the four major developers, including China Vanke Co and Poly Real Estate, bought 223 plots for 109.5 billion yuan in the first 11 months of this year, a value increase of 18.6 percent compared with last year.

Vanke sold 1.43 million square meters in November, up 94 percent year-on-year, and its sales in the first 11 months of this year surpassed last year's 12-month total.

Ren Zhiqiang, a billionaire property tycoon, said at a forum in Beijing Saturday that it will be hard for the GDP to maintain its 7 percent growth target if housing investment doesn't keep growing, and predicted that China's urbanization will further invigorate the housing industry.

"The housing sector will still be a necessary economic support in 10 years," Ren was quoted by news portal sina.com as saying.