^{Lewis Hamilton @ Shanghai GP [Credits: Emilgh]}

With the world seemingly against him, Lewis Hamilton proved them all wrong and raced to a fantastic win in Shanghai’s Formula 1 on Sunday. He was labeled arrogant by the press and some of his rival drivers even pledged to help his title rivals in order to pay him a lesson, but regardless of all the talk and chatter, the Brit is now in a sweet position to become the youngest world champion ever if he manages to finish in the top five on Nov. 2^nd in Brazil’s end of season race.

Hamilton had a fantastic race, dominating the field right from the start, to put insult to victory for the rest of the field he also managed to finish the race with the fastest lap of the race.

Ferrari contestant Felipe Massa assured that spectators had plenty of upcoming excitement in Brazil with his second finish, keeping the championship well and truly alive. If he was to win that race and Hamilton placed no higher than sixth, he could technically still take the championship home.

In the team stakes, Ferrari still rules the lot with 11 points ahead of McLaren-Mercedes. This certainly makes for a very worthy end of season keeping the tension trim right to the last minute.

1. Lewis Hamilton (McLaren-Mercedes)
2. Felipe Massa (Ferrari)
3. Robert Kubica (Ferrari)

Shanghai Property Market

Back in February we reported on the Shanghai property market slowdown and we wanted to look at the current situation in regards to the global property crunch. Last month we also learned that commercial property in Shanghai was booming despite the residential slowdown.

In order to lift the property gloom in Shanghai, the Shanghai Provident Fund Management Center released a Notice on Raising the Upper Limit of Housing Provident Fund Loans on October 14th.

This directly affected those households with two or more solvent borrowers, allowing them to up their borrowing limit from US$73,000 to US$88,000.

Those households with single borrowers won’t be able to benefit from this change. Other government actions have also seen tax subsidies for new and second hand home buyers in Hangzhou and other activities by the Chinese government to help alleviate the worst.

By the looks of it, Chinese officials are also trying to stem the flow of bad property market news by prohibiting major domestic websites and brokerage firms to report negative stock market information.

The current decline in the second hand housing market is expected to keep falling as many potential buyers chose the cautious road. The usually “golden season” during September and October has certainly not eventuated this year and many investors are less than optimistic about the imminent future.

To counteract this situation, several real estate developers have introduced price reductions up to 20% to keep the market moving.

More promising is Shanghai’s luxury market which has shown some strong performance over the past four years with a higher than usual vacancy rate by end of 2007 which indicated the investors were choosing to hold and rent rather than sell their properties.

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