First-tier cities see crowds of eager buyers
Homebuyers snapped up apartments in China's first-tier cities in the weeks after the Spring Festival holidays, thanks mainly to a slew of stimulus policies rolled out recently to support the sector, experts said on Sunday.
A project in Shanghai's Pudong New Area sold all of its 108 apartments in less than one hour after the opening of sales on Saturday, Shanghai-based news portal thepaper.cn reported.
As for secondhand homes, one property owner in Shanghai raised the asking price from 4.3 million yuan ($657,000) to 5 million yuan in one day during the first week after the Spring Festival holidays, the China Business News reported on February 22, citing a Shanghai-based agent.
"A raise of 700,000 yuan in one day may be an extreme case, but we do receive many inquiries from potential homebuyers these days," Liu Wenjun, a salesman from Shanghai Yanze Real Estate Co, told the Global Times on Sunday, adding that housing prices have never stopped rising in the city center.
"There has been an obvious increase in housing prices as the demand is quite strong recently," a Beijing-based real estate agent surnamed Huang told the Global Times on Sunday.
Experts generally attributed the booming market to a slew of stimulus measures announced this month, including a tax cut for property transactions and reductions to the minimum down payments for first- and second-time home buyers.
"These policies were supposed to help lower housing inventories in China's smaller cities. But the effects are actually being seen in larger cities, which have limited supply and strong demand," Deng Yongcheng, an associate professor specializing in real estate marketing at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, told the Global Times on Sunday.
According to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics on Friday, among 70 cities monitored, secondhand home prices in first-tier cities rose more than 20 percent year-on-year on average in January, while prices in most third-tier cities fell.
The first-tier cities are Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou and Shenzhen in South China's Guangdong Province.
Statistics from the Ministry of Land and Resources showed on Saturday that land supply for real estate reached 120,000 hectares in 2015, down 20.9 percent year-on-year.
