Property transactions can be quite complex and, indeed, at times quite baffling.

China Central Properties (CCP) is a property investment company quoted on the London Stock Exchange’s AIM Market which focuses primarily on medium to large partially completed projects in China.

CCP has a portfolio of properties, which include commercial, retail and residential complexes, in Guangzhou, Dalian, Qingdao, Beijing, Chengdu, Shenyang and Chongqing.

It also owns a company called Mountain Breeze (Barbados) SRL which, in turn, has a subsidiary company called Beijing ZhongTian HongYe Real Estate.

Beijing Zhongtian has entered into several agreements for the purchase of Beijing Huapu Centre.

Beijing Huapu Centre is located in Beijing’s prime Dongcheng District and consists of two office towers, each 24-storey high on a nine-storey podium. There are about 127,500 square metres of mixed office and retail space.

The estimated market value of Beijing Huapu Centre is approximately RMB 2.5 billion.

Now CCP is disposing of Mountain Breeze (which includes Beijing ZhongTian HongYe Real Estate) and CCP will record a gain on disposal of the project, before transaction costs, of about RMB300 million. CCP intends to use the sale proceeds to fund its acquisition of additional property projects.
Source: Hemscott

Hong Kong-listed Agile Property has bought four land sites at Huadu District in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou for RMB920 million (US$124.2 million).

The total site area of the project is 283,000 square meters, with a gross floor area of 529,000 square meters, giving an average GFA (which stands for Gross Floor Area although why Reuters insists on using obscure acronyms wonders me) cost of RMB1,740 per square meter, which it said was competitive in the market.

Agile plans to develop the land into a community with schools and commercial facilities.

The land is in a prime location, with convenient facilities and good transport connections.

Meanwhile, Shui On Land has won a bid for a plot of land in China’s southern city of Foshan for RMB7.5 billion ($$1.02 billion) for redevelopment.

The land covers an area of about 639,320 square meters and will be redeveloped into a comprehensive mixed-use community with office, retail, hotel and cultural facilities and residential properties.

Domestic and foreign property investors are leaning more and more towards second-tier cities. Industry experts are of the opinion that they have strong economic fundamentals and the potential for bigger profit margins.

Chris Brooke, president & CEO of CB Richard Ellis said, ‘Though the property price of China’s second-tier cities has seen a big jump this year, I believe there’s still plenty of growth potential, compared with metropolitan cities that already have very high property prices.’

He said that some second-tier cities, such as Tianjin, Hangzhou and Chengdu, have been well explored, while others like Shenyang (seen in our illustration) and Wuhan are becoming more popular with investors.

He warned, however, that: ‘If the property price in those key second-tier cities grow too fast next year, real estate firms may turn their eyes to other second-tier cities and even third-tier ones.’

Sale prices of new residential apartments rose by 10.6% year-on-year in October, according to statistics from the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC). Ningbo and Urumqi led the price rise, with rates of 19.1% and 18.5% respectively.

According to Eric Chan, deputy managing director of Savills, a UK real estate services provider, the first-tier cities will see major opportunities in high-end buildings, while those second-tier ones have bigger chances in industrial and logistics real estate.
Source: China Daily

The Economist is one of the magazines journalists depend on. It is superbly edited and rarely gets things wrong.

Now it has said that home ownership among China’s urban households is 80%.

Sam Crispin, writing in CBiz.cn expresses extreme surprise. As you would. In world terms that is a staggeringly high figure.

According to the London Times only 70% of UK households own their own home.

Some digging into The Economist report suggests that it comes from an August 2002 (note the date) statement from the Ministry of Construction, as reported by Xinhua, which actually states that 4 out of 5 urbanites (not households) own their own home and 94% own some kind of accommodation.

The Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, dated July 2005, points to a possible cause. This paper shows the difference between fully transferable property rights that come with commodity housing (shangpin fang) and usage rights (shiyong quan). For the latter the rights are inheritable but there are restrictions on other forms of transfer. Ownership of a sort but not probably in the way that The Economist presented it.

So with that 80% quoted in The Economist, even though it was a very dated figure, you could make a guess half is usage rights and half is commodity housing with fully transferable title.

Sam Crispin writes, correctly:

The true significance of this is that we lack quality statistics with which to accurately measure home ownership, price increases etc and that policies are being drawn up without a clear picture of the real situation.

Read the full article by clicking on Source below.
Source: CBiz.CN

According to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), investment in China’s property sector jumped to RMB1.43 trillion ( $189.9 billion) in the first eight months of the year, increasing by 29% on a year-on-year basis.

The area of vacant commercial buildings was down 2% from the same period last year. Development of land has increased 15.3% according to the NBS.

China’s housing price rises grew faster in August despite various government control measures.

Prices in 70 large and medium-sized cities were up 8.2% in August over the same month last year, or 0.7 percentage points
Source: International Business Times