The once richest lady in China’s “Babylon” has lost half of her fortune due to recent cracks in the Chinese property market. The 27 year old, once worth an estimated $17.5 billion has lost around half of her worth since taking her company public about one year ago.
Yang Huiyan is one out of 80% of people in China who top the richest people list, having managed to acquire a fortune with real estate investments. She is the major shareholder of Country Garden, a high end residential developer. The worst affected listings are those in the big cities of southern China, namely Shenzhen. Once a hot property market, the price of flats have fallen by 28% since October 2007.
Beijing on the other hand shows a somewhat level playing field with leveled prices but a lower rate of appreciation altogether.
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With a strong and very optimistic outlook in China’s domestic real estate market, leading Chinese webites SINA Corp & Baidu.com have each announced a move into real estate web marketing.
Sina
China’s larget web portal, SINA is to embark on a joint venture with real estate service provider, E-House (China) Holdings Limited in a bid to launch a range of real estate and home decoration web channels. The JV would involve E-House China providing proprietary real estate content ranging from its property database & analysis system to its Chinese Real Estate Information Circle system (which contains transaction data on land, residences, offices, as well as commercial buildings in 30 major Chinese cities).
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Monday, February 25th, 2008
Posted by Overseas Property Mall in
China Property
Shenzen, China
After several years of unchecked growth, Chinese developers have run into the global credit crunch. Combined with a desire by the Chinese authorities to slow things down a little, shares in many of China’s largest listed property developers have fallen more than 50 per cent from their highs of last year in the face of investor fears that some developers might be forced into bankruptcy. The authorities have taken unusually strong measures to limit credit growth and have promised to introduce a tough new policy to reduce developers’ holdings of un built land.
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Shanghai’s real estate market is anticipated to slow down drastically in 2008, becoming more vulnerable to government policy shifts and attract less investment. This is according to several of the larger real estate analysts.
According to a Jones Lang LaSalle report released recently, after the government implemented the land appreciation tax and imposed additional restrictions on foreign investment in the sector, real estate investment saw a slowdown in the fourth quarter of 2007 and there was only one sizable sale completed in the city.
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The Japanese company, Sumitomo Forestry, is aiming to quadruple their sales of houses in China, hoping to achieve sales of around £4 billion by the end of 2009. The Sumitomo Forestry Company has a minority share holding in Paragon Wood Products (30%), a company that builds wood framed houses. At the moment, Sumitomo build very few units, but are planning on building 100 units a year.
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Rampant inflation; shaky, low interest no-deposit loans; 400 per cent stock market growth in 2 years; property values rising nearly 18 per cent over last year’s values.
Sound familiar? Followed by a tightening of lending restrictions, interest rate increases, 30-40 percent vacancy rates in new developments. Sound even more familiar? This is not the US market, this is China, which seems hell bent on following in the footsteps of the recent US sub prime crash.
The Chinese government is pulling out all the stops to prevent the same thing happening there. Interest rates have been increased five times in the last year and reserve requirements for commercial lenders increased eight-fold. The central planning agency imposed a price freeze on household essentials like cooking oil, electricity and water, in an effort to reduce inflation below 6 per cent. Securities regulators in more than one province have issued new rules banning high school and college students from buying shares to rein in speculative stock market investments.
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Tuesday, August 28th, 2007
Posted by Overseas Property Mall in
China Property
High rise apartment blocks under Construction in Shanghai [photo credits to DCF_pics]
The authorities in the People’s Republic of China (namely the central bank and the Ministry of Commerce embarked on another round of regulations for property investors in July, China Daily reports. The latest changes affect overseas borrowing for mainland China real estate projects with more exacting procedures for bringing foreign capital into the country for the purpose of incorporating a real estate concern. From the article it is not clear if this is the sum total of these property/foreign exchange controls. Inward investment by property investment companies with foreign shareholders that are already incorporated would be more difficult to control.
Writing in the South China Morning Post a week earlier, Cary Huang reported that the authorities are trying hard to stop ‘illegal’ funds flooding in and creating price pressures in the property and equity markets. Clearly there are plenty of investors who are betting that the yuan can only continue to rise against the dollar; that the Chinese currency is in the exact opposite position to that of sterling in the early nineties.
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Tags: shanghai+real+estate, foreign+property+china, expat+property+china
While the continued upward path of the Shanghai stock market has featured regularly in the world’s media, the city’s real estate market has not received so much attention. Nevertheless, property in China’s largest city is undoubtedly part of the boom and the web of economic dilemmas facing the Chinese authorities.
The latest efforts to curb real estate speculation have resulted in the introduction of a 20% tax on second-hand property sales. One explanation given for the increase is the authorities’ desire to prevent a speculative bubble in real estate fuelled by profits from the stock market. Another, more plausible reason is that the lure of the stock market is so great that people are selling property in order to finance speculative investments. This tax hike should certainly be seen in the context of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s general efforts to decelerate the juggernaut of the Chinese economy.
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Tags: china, shanghai, real+estate
Speculators from Wenzhou who contributed to the hike in real estate prices in China’s large cities, are moving their money to Malaysia.
A tour group is departing from Wenzhou for Kuala Lumpur and Genting on Friday. With most of the members being entrepreneurs and professional investors, the group looks like it will be doing more scouting property than sight-seeing.
Wenzhou is located in coastal Zhejiang Province, the richest area on the Chinese mainland, and many of the people there accumulated their wealth from manufacturing clothes and commodities such as lighters and drinking straws. They have invested in many cities across the country. Many have bought hundreds of apartments, spending tens of millions yuan. A few residential developments in Shanghai were bought in wholesale, such as The Xiangmei Garden and The Shimao Riverside Garden.
This time, the investors are going to Malaysia for their first overseas purchases because of the high return on investment, the Malaysian government invites of foreign investment and the convenience of getting there from China.
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Tags: property+china, real+estate+malaysia, property+overseas, real+estate+china
China is moving towards a new revolution in private property rights.
Although China’s economic and social conditions have changed dramatically with its emergence as an economic force, its private property rights have remained untouched and so far looked out of context. But on Sunday, as its top legislators urged the passage of a new law to protect private property, the pieces of economic, social and private property rights now appear to be falling into place.
China, a dominating communist force of the 20th century, has altered its contours significantly and is poised for another swing. The new bill, which is likely to be cleared by the parliament next week states that “the property of the state, the collective, the individual and other obliges is protected by law, and no units or individuals may infringe upon it“. This will help protection of private assets and stop any illegal expropriation. Although it will not solve all the issues pertaining to the property rights in China, it would provide a good balance between private investment and state control.
As the amount of private investment in China’s economy substantially increases, it is very important for investors and individuals to protect their property rights. The 40 page bill states that “the lawful property of individual persons shall be protected by law”, which would provide a boost of confidence to investors in private property.
Other major beneficiaries will be farmers who would get protection against illegal land seizures. This could bring to rest the farmers’ movement initiated by farmers to protect their farmland against illegal land seizures and transfers to commercial developers, often without adequate compensation.
It took much longer than anticipated for the legislators to bring about the much-desired change in the property rights law in China; it is a leap towards democratisation of China. However, critics still believe that the bill has a tone that recognises the state owned sector as the most dominating and leading force.
Whatever it is, we would say a great move for another revolution. As you can see in the tabs on the top, we now have a new forum where we would be glad to hear your thoughts. It’s very easy to join, try it out.
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