Tuesday, May 22, 2012

China won't back off the property restrictions

Prices fell in 46 of 70 cities tracked. This compares to drops in 37 cities in March.
Prices fell the most in Wenzhou, 12.3% year on year.
Stimulus measures like Beijing offering first time buyer mortgages below the benchmark rate. Yangzhou will offer subsidies up to .6% of purchase price. Attempts by other localities to lift the central government's property curbs were stopped within a week. Home prices in decline in record number of Chinese cities
Private data also showed the home market continued to cool. April home prices fell to a 14-month low, SouFun Holdings Ltd., the nation’s biggest real estate website owner, said on May 2. Residential values decrease 0.3 per cent last month from March, the eighth month-on-month drop, said SouFun, which began compiling the figures in July 2010.

A gauge tracking property shares in Shanghai fell 1.7 per cent at the close of trading, compared with a 1.4 per cent loss for the Shanghai Composite Index.
Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd. suspended a 15 per cent discount on mortgage lending for first-time home buyers nationwide, the official Xinhua News Agency reported on May 5. The suspension was made to address tight liquidity and deposit instability and other Chinese banks may follow suit, Sophie Jiang, a Hong Kong-based banking analyst at Religare Capital Markets, said in a May 7 report.

“The government won’t back off from the property restrictions,” Patrick Chovanec, an associate professor at Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management in Beijing, said before Friday’s release. “If they lift the restrictions and the market keeps falling, which it will, they’ve lost the fig leaf that enables them to say they’ve got everything under control.”

No comments: