Canton Properties

London-listed Canton Property Investment, which develops malls in China, has said its executive chairman had disappeared and its shares had been suspended while the firm sought extra funding.

The Hong Kong-based company, incorporated in early 2007, said in a statement that the executive chairperson, Keng Wong had ‘recently been absent from the company and uncontactable.’

Wong’s secretary told Reuters she had not seen him since August, while executives at the company were unavailable for comment.

Canton Property is investing in projects in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, where property prices have dropped by as much as 30% in the last year after booming for years.

In March, the company said it had bought from Keng Wong and a business partner, Ye Zhuansong, a 100% stake in a mixed-use property project in Guangzhou for about $350 million.

The project, called Canton Finance Center and including shopping space, offices, serviced apartments and a hotel, would be worth about $1.2 billion when completed, the firm said at the time. But in its statement yesterday, Canton Property said it was seeking funding for the project.

Canton’s non-executive director David Brewer, who held the largely ceremonial post of the Lord Mayor of London in 2005 and 2006, resigned after a board meeting on Wednesday failed to agree on the appointment of an interim chairman.
Source: Reuters

Lanson Place, Shanghai

US-based investment bank Morgan Stanley, one of the biggest foreign investors in China’s real estate sector, is looking to sell two high-profile blocks of Shanghai luxury residences (Chateau Pinnacle and Lanson Place) for several billion yuan. In addition to putting the more than 100 service apartments in the city’s Xintiandi area up for sale,

Two other foreign property investors —  Australia’s Macquarie and HKR International of Hong Kong —  also have Shanghai residential apartment buildings on the market.

Morgan Stanley Real Estate Fund is also selling Chateau Pinnacle in the former French concession.

Local property brokers estimate the value of Lanson Place at no less than RMB1 billion ($145 million) at present market prices. Morgan Stanley purchased Chateau Pinnacle for about RMB800 million in 2006.

Source: Reuters

Shanghai’s new house sales in July dropped 30% over the previous month and average selling prices of first-hand houses slid to RMB12,824 per square meter from RMB16,988 in June.

Commodity property supplies in Shanghai were 1.74 million square meters in the month, slightly less than the 1.81 million square meters in June.

Commodity house supplies rose slightly from 1.29 million square meters in June to 1.29 million square meters.

Analysts said the major reason for the increase in supplies is that some large real estate developers sold new houses at discount prices and cut the prices of already-built houses. But the price reduction strengthened the negative outlook for the domestic real estate market and propelled more potential house buyers to hold money tightly, expecting for lower prices.

Analysts had little comfort to offer. They says as some demands for houses have been met in recent months and larger real estate developers’ price reduction attracted many house buyers from small ones, Shanghai’s real estate market would become even gloomier in August and  more real estate developers would have to cut prices.

This situation may turn better in September and October, when the price-performance ratio of some houses would be seen and another round of purchasing power would be accumulated. House sales then will pick up to a certain extent.
Source: Trading Markets

The continuous shrinking property transaction and dropping prices prompt more people to hesitate and even withdraw their decision to buy properties.

Industry statistics show that the ratio of sold floor area to finished floor area in Beijing, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Nanjing has below 0.7, putting more pressure on the property price.

Some customers’ eager to get refunds, however, are mostly in the mid-end apartments range which are in poor locations. For high-end apartments or villas, the price remained comparatively firm.

In early June, Beijing municipal commission of urban planning launched a new standard for construction, limiting the average floor area of each apartment to no more than 100 square meters.

Jason Leow, deputy CEO of CapitaLand, China’s property market is now seeing a big shift from investment-orientated buying to self-use buying. This requires real estate firms to pay much more attention to their product’s quality and services.

Jason Leow said, ‘In such a market with a wait-and-see atmosphere, we would be more critical about the location and quality of our products,’

CapitaLand planned to launch three residential projects in Beijing this year, all in the capital’s very urban areas.
Source: English People’s Daily Online

The average transaction price of new residences city-wide fell 8.2% to RMB13,893 ($1,985) per square meter in Shanghai in the first four weeks of this month. At the same time fewer apartments within the Inner Ring Road were sold.

According to statistics released yesterday by Shanghai Youwin Real Estate Information Service for the four weeks following May 1, the supply of new residential properties, excluding those designated for relocation uses, reached approximately 1.049 million square meters in the city while a total of 929,300 square meters were sold.

Xue Jianxiong, head of research at Youwin said, ‘The drop in the average transaction price of new homes over the past four weeks was mainly because fewer prime-located apartments, or up-scale properties, were sold during the period.’

In the first 28 days of May, some 66,900 square meters of new homes located within the Inner Ring Road secured buyers with an average transaction price of RMB32,150 per square meter, compared to about 106,000 square meters of new homes sold at an average RMB33,629 per square meter in April.

In June, three high-end projects within the Inner Ring Road, two in Huangpu District and one in Luwan District will be introduced to the market and several small and medium-sized apartment projects — with areas ranging from 50 to 90 square meters per unit and located in the districts of Changning, Putuo, Baoshan, Songjiang and Jiading — are due to be launched in the coming month.
Industry experts predicted Shanghai’s new housing market might see a mild performance in June with total transaction volume similar to May’s, and a recovery not expected till September.
Source: Shanghai Daily