Property market showing signs of recovery

The sales performance of Chinese real estate companies stayed stable from January to April and financing scale saw a significant growth, suggesting a gradual recovery of the domestic property market, experts said.

According to a recent report released by the China Index Academy, average sales for the top 100 Chinese real estate companies reached 31.3 billion yuan ($4.6 billion) in the first four months of 2019. Among that, sales of Country Garden and China Vanke exceeded 200 billion yuan. Sales of 75 enterprises surpassed 10 billion yuan, it said.

The data showed the Chinese real estate market would see continuous rapid growth and is dominated by top companies, said Yi Xianrong, an industrial insider and former researcher for the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Meanwhile, transactions in China's key cities such as Beijing and Shanghai are also showing signs of recovery. Jin Mao Real Estate Co Ltd, a major property developer based in Beijing, opened a project close to the capital's Future Science City over the weekend, attracting more than 1,000 potential buyers on the first day of trading. More than 300 of them paid 100,000 yuan to demonstrate an intent to purchase, with starting price for an apartment hovering around 7 million yuan.

"We prefer to buy apartments developed by leading real estate companies," said Chen Xiao, one of the potential buyers.

Chinese property companies received financing of up to 850 billion yuan from January to April, among which 25.6 percent was from overseas. The average coupon rate of foreign debt is 8.82 percent, which shows the rising cost of financing for real estate companies, the report said.

Domestic investors also showed a greater interest in property market, according to Yi.