Senior Chinese officials are claiming that they have no plans to launch a new round of property market tightening as they expect prices to fall considerably in coming months.
Wang Yulin, deputy research head at the Ministry of Housing and Urban Rural Development, said the government would step up efforts to implement tightening measures which have already been announced to rein in the real estate market, including curbs on purchases of multiple homes and restrictions on lending to property developers, but no new measures were in the offing.
And Minister of Land and Resources, Xu Shaoshi, said that he expects property prices to fall in the third quarter of the hear as the tightening measures take hold. He added that China’s property market would not experience a hard landing this year.
Opinion varies over how much prices could fall. According to Michael Klibaner, head of research at consultants Jones Lang LaSalle, they could fall as much as 20% in what he described as ‘a healthy fall’.
‘We actually expect a very healthy correction, something in the order of 15 or % in terms of price correction. But we don’t see any reason why there will be a risk of a crash at the moment,’ he said.
China’s property boom is cash driven rather than leverage fuelled, which means there’s only a low chance of the type of forced selling that exacerbated the US housing market collapse, he said.
But this view contrasts with Harvard University’s Kenneth Rogoff’s prediction of a collapse in China’s property market that will hit the nation’s banking system. ‘You’re starting to see that collapse in property and it’s going to hit the banking system,’ said Rogoff, the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.
Nomura Holdings economists Sun Mingchun and Sun Chi also believe that average property prices are set to fall up to 20% in the next 12 to 18 months but they don’t believe it will have a big impact on China’s economy.
Property prices in 70 Chinese cities rose 12.4% in May, the second fastest pace on record, heightening concern a bubble is forming in the nation’s housing market.
But a report earlier this week from Changjiang Securities suggested that Shanghai’s new home sales fell 70% from a year ago in June. While a report from Uwin Real Estate Information Services said that sales of new homes in the city fell 57% in the first six months of the year, the lowest in five years. But it found that new home prices rose 48% from a year earlier.
Looking forward Uwin also expects prices to fall by 10 to 15%. ‘Shanghai property prices are likely to head downward further in the coming months as sales continue to decline and the government shows firm determination to curb the prices rises,’ said Lu Qilin, a Shanghai based researcher at Uwin.
