Balancing Act

China will continue regulating the real estate market in 2012 By Wang Jun

Balancing Act

China will continue regulating the real estate market in 2012 By Wang Jun

China’s real estate market experienced challenges in 2011, with the overheated market starting to cool down and the exorbitantly high house prices growth starting to decline.

According to fi gures released by the National Bureau of Statistics, in November 2011, 49 of the 70 surveyed large and medium-sized cities saw prices of newly built commercial houses drop compared with the previous month, and another 16 saw prices remain the same as October.On the yearly basis, prices of newly built commercial houses in four cities dropped, while 61 cities saw lower growth of prices of newly built commercial houses than a year ago.

In 2012 the country will maintain its control over the real estate industry, said Jiang Weixin, Minister of Housing and Urban-Rural Development.

Curbing speculation

Wang Juelin, Deputy Director of the Policy Research Center of the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development (MOHURD), said preventing the real estate market from overheating and stopping real estate prices from rebounding will still be the focus in 2012.

“Previous regulations have proved that once the regulation policy is loosened, house prices will rebound rapidly, which will not only bring losses to the real estate market and hurt the consumers, but also affect economic development and social stability,” Wang said.

To make house prices more reasonable,it is important for the government to regulate the market’s supply and demand.

Firmly curbing speculative investment demand is also the focus of real estate control.Jiang said in 2012 the country will continue to carry out differential housing credit, taxation policies and purchase limit measures and strictly implement the identi fi cation standard of second home buyers. In the meantime,the country will control the total scale of real estate loans at a reasonable level and grant individual housing loans in a balanced way.

“One of the long-term goals for us to establish the real estate market is to allocate resources via the market so as to meet the diversified housing demand, but not just to provide an investment market,” said Qin Hong, Director of Policy Research Center of the MOHURD. “Whatever changes may happen in the detailed forms of regulating policies, the government won’t change the general direction of curbing investment and speculative demand.”

Differing from previous years, the MOHURD said in 2012 while it tries to curb irrational demand of home purchases, the government will support people’s reasonable demand of home purchase, ensuring to satisfy the demand of fi rst home buyers who are applying for loans. It will also fix a down payment ratio and housing loan interest rate in favor of fi rst home buyers.

In the past year, because of the tightened control of bank credit, some commercial banks have raised down payments and interest rates for loans,which is not in conformity with the intention of the macro control. Some experts thought this situation should be changed.

When curbing speculative investment, Jiang set an important task in 2012 will be to accelerate building of common commercial houses of low and middle prices as well as small and medium sizes. According to Jiang,land supply for affordable houses and small and medium-sized commercial houses in 2012 will account for at least 70 percent of the country’s total land supply for real estate.

Local responsibilities

In 2011, all 657 Chinese cities publicized their targets for controlling housing prices in accordance with the requirement of the State Council. By the end of last year, most cities had reached their goals.

Jiang said local governments should review their work on how they stabilized housing prices in the past year, and to those cities that did not accomplish the targets, local governments at the provincial level must report to the State Council by the end of January 2012.

Emphasizing responsibilities of local governments will be an important part of real estate regulation in 2012.

Ren Xingzhou, Director of the Institute of Market Economy of the Development Research Center of the State Council, said real estate regulation will reduce local governments’ revenues from transferring land use right to real estate developers, which will slow down the speed of local economic development and fi scal revenue growth.

However, in the mid- and long-term, the regulation is conducive to helping liberate local economies from excessive dependency on the real estate industry and advance readjustments to the industrial structure and revenue structure of local governments.

The MOHURD has also required local governments to accelerate construction of an individual housing information system.

“This is a very important task in 2012 and of great significance to strengthen and improve real estate regulation and social administration,” said Jiang. The individual housing information systems of 40 key cities should be connected to the system of the MOHURD by the end of the first half of 2012, according to Jiang.

Jiang said both the MOHURD and local governments should formulate housing development plans in 2012 to promote longterm development of the real estate market. In the meantime, the MOHURD will accelerate research on collecting individual real estate taxes by cooperating with other related departments.

Market changes

Continuing real estate regulations mean real estate developers will be deprived of capital in 2012 and may have to bid farewell to the favorable market from previous years.

According to Operation and Management of China’s Real Estate Enterprises (2011), a blue book jointly released by China Real Estate Association (CREA) and Rand Consulting Co. Ltd., in the previous two years the number of real estate companies reduced by one fourth, and the tendency is accelerating under the background of real estate regulation. If the regulation policies are fully implemented, it is expected that 30 percent of the existing real estate companies will disappear by 2015.

“In previous years, some real estate developers were expanding too fast, with debt scale increasing. Moreover, as some non-estate companies entered the real estate market, there are companies of various qualities in the real estate industry. Therefore, persisting in real estate regulation is conducive to accelerating integration of the real estate industry,” said Ren.

According to him, as the industry faces a slow drawback of investment and severe pressure of repaying debts, some unquali fi ed enterprises who do not emphasize product quality will be acquired or purchased by more powerful and competent enterprises.

Jiang said in 2012 the MOHURD will strengthen administration of home prices and punishment of illegal land use. The government will also improve public awareness of market risks and guide home buyers and real estate developers to settle disputes caused by price fl uctuations through contracts or judicial ways.

“There will be four changes in the real estate market,” said Zhu Zhongyi, Vice Chairman of the CREA.

First, a seller’s market will be transferred to a buyer’s market; second, major products in the housing market will be commercial homes and affordable homes instead of commercial homes only; third, both home sales and rent will be active in the housing market instead of selling new houses only; fourth, in the whole real estate market product varieties will be diversified to homes, business property, tourism property and industrial park property instead of homes only.

According to Zhu, real estate companies need to readjust their expectations of investment returns and transform their business development, focusing on improving cost performance of their products, not just scale and speedy development.

HOME SWEET HOME:Workers connect pipelines at a construction site of an affordable housing project in Taiyuan,Shanxi Province