Property developers’ sales revenue slumps in Jan

Shanghai-listed property developer Gemdale Corp announced over the weekend its sales volume fell by 19.8 percent year-on-year in January, making it the latest of a long list of developers which reported declining sales performance in the first month of 2015.

Gemdale Corp said Friday in a statement posted on the Shanghai Stock Exchange that its transaction area fell by 8.6 percent in January from a year earlier, while sales revenue also decreased by 19.8 percent year-on-year.

The announcement came after statistics showed that the total sales revenue of China's 10 leading property developers, including Vanke Co and Poly Real Estate Group Co, fell by 5 percent year-on-year in January and decreased by 58.4 percent from the previous month, according to a report from news portal caixin.com released on Thursday.

Vanke Co, the country's second-biggest developer by sales, registered sales revenue of 23.2 billion yuan ($3.7 billion) in January, falling by 16.1 percent year-on-year.

The slump in transaction areas and sales revenue in January is due to strong purchases from consumers in December under preferential home prices, which reduced the demand for housing in January, Liu Yuan, a senior research director at real estate consultancy Centaline Group in Shanghai, told the Global Times on Sunday.

Most of China's property developers experienced a hard time last year amid a slowing economy and offered price concessions in December in order to reduce the inventory pressure facing their companies, Liu said.

"According to our statistics, transaction areas in 40 major Chinese cities dropped nearly 30 percent in January from a month earlier, but the slump is temporary," Liu said.

The transaction areas and sales revenue are both expected to rebound slightly this year following a raft of forecasted loosening measures such as a potential interest rate cut, which will help to reduce the financing costs of housing loans, Zhang Xu, an analyst with Homelink Real Estate Agency in Beijing, told the Global Times on Sunday.