An estate broker enthusiastically introduces apartments for sales to a potential home buyer at a housing exhibition in Huangshan City, central China

During the National Day holiday, property transactions hit a record low of 72% down year-on-year, in Beijing, which is usually the busiest time for housing sales. This is the worst period so far this year.

Liu Feng, a business director with Career International, one of the leading recruitment and consulting companies in China, says property agencies are the worst hit during downward housing sales as most of real estate developers give their apartments to agencies to sell.

It’s estimated that almost 800 branches of various property agencies were closed in Beijing, and half of the locations and agents were slashed in Shanghai since the fourth quarter of last year.

Manager Chen Min predicts it will need one or two years for the housing market to come stable and develop again.
Source:  China Daily

Self-help groups getting together to buy property.

Thousands of would-be home buyers are banding together in China to negotiate discounted prices with real estate developers in a unique solution that some hope could help prevent a property market crash.

China has so far escaped the worst of the global credit crunch, but borrowing conditions have been tightened to fight inflation — keeping many consumers off the property ladder.

At the same time, overstretched developers are unable sell houses to generate revenue — or borrow more money from banks — so they can pay down their debts.

Since July, more than 30,000 people have signed up to the ‘Housing for 10,000′ a group buying web site created by Zou Tao, a 34-year-old activist in Shenzhen, a booming city across the border from Hong Kong.

He said of those who signed up, about 500 have already succeeded in buying homes from developers at discounts ranging from RMB50,000 to RMB100,000 ($7,350 to $14,700), he said.

Others have since copied the model in cities such as Xian, Wuhan and Jinan.
Source: The China Post

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

Shanghai apartment

In Shanghai the real estate scene has changed since the beginning of 2008 — the number of property transactions has dramatically dropped, prices have soared and investors are turning to second and third tier cities for investment opportunities.

Shanghai´s residential property market appears dormant in some respects, with a plethora of buyers who have adopted a ´wait-and see´ attitude contributing to the decrease in performance since last year.

The decline of real estate transactions  in Shanghai has stunted individual mortgage lending.

The latest report from real estate advisers DTZ shows the number of major transactions (each valued at US$10 million or above) plunged dramatically from 17 in the first half of 2007 to eight in the first half of 2008.

According to the DTZ report, serviced apartment transactions in Shanghai accounted for two out of three such transactions in the whole of China.

In the first half of 2008 investment transaction value in the national serviced apartment sector rose from US$138 million to US$416.65 million — an increase of 201.9% year-on-year. At the same time the number of transactions decreased by 40% from the same period the previous year.
Much, much more HERE.
Source: Property Report Asia

China real estate sales show

The first half of 2008 saw a slowdown in the growth rate of loans to real estate developers and buyers.

The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) reports Chinese bankers held loans totaling RMB5.2 trillion (about $580 billion) to real estate developers and housing buyers by the end of June, up 22.5% year-on-year.

The central bank said the growth rate was two percentage points lower than the same period last year, representing a decline for seven consecutive months since last December.

China’s real estate investment grew fast in the first half, but the housing price decline in some cities has strengthened a wait-and-see attitude among housing buyers, which has held back housing sales.  The country’s real estate developers sold out about 260 million square meters of houses in the first six months, and the sales value totaled RMB1 trillion, representing a decrease of 7.2% and 3.0% over the same period last year, respectively.

The PBOC had been warning banks to control their exposure to real estate.  Obviously the banks are responding.
Source: China Stakes.com