Residential property sector set to have soft landing

As the focus of residential property sector regulations has shifted from avoiding housing bubbles to both contain the rapid growth of home prices and guard against any substantial price drops, a growing number of Chinese cities have taken measures to stabilize home prices, and experts believe the property market will successfully avoid a hard landing.

At least 21 cities, ranging from northeastern Liaoning province's Shenyang to southwestern Yunnan province's Kunming, have introduced measures to prop up home prices from falling drastically, said China Business News.

The list includes Hunan province's Yueyang, Zhuzhou and Yongzhou, Hebei province's Tangshan and Zhangjiakou, Jiangsu province's Jiangyin and Hubei province's Ezhou.

Measures announced by these local governments varied from issuing executive orders to summoning property developers for meetings-all in an attempt to prevent drastic price cuts.

"The majority of the cities that put a drop limit on home prices are third and fourth-tier cities, which are much more fragile than their first and second-tier peers during property market uncertainties," said Lu Wenxi, a researcher with Centaline Shanghai.

Under the central government's keynote guideline of "housing is for living in, not for speculation", speculative demand in smaller cities will retreat once the market trend changes, and home prices will decline accordingly as rigid demand fails to support current price levels.

"Real estate developers have a stronger willingness to accelerate home sales in smaller cities by offering larger discounts, in comparison to first and second-tier cities which can keep local property markets stable by fine-tuning credit lines and mortgages," said Zhang Bo, chief analyst at Chinese property portal Anjuke.

Most of the nation's 70 big and medium-sized cities saw their home prices edge down month-on-month in October, and their new and pre-owned home prices also grew at a slower pace from a year ago, said the National Bureau of Statistics. Experts explained that the housing market is undergoing an adjustment that may lead to a better supply-demand balance in home consumption.

Amid such a backdrop of market stabilization, more homes are used as collateral in project construction payments by cash-strapped property developers to their construction companies.

These collateralized properties are usually priced lower than those offered by real estate developers. Taking ones recently available in Guangzhou, for example, such a collateralized property can be priced between 100,000 yuan and up to 1 million yuan-lower than regular ones.

This is because construction companies holding collateralized properties are eager to sell the assets as quickly as possible to get cash, and the properties are usually situated in less ideal locations or on less preferred floors, Lu said.

"Many real estate developers and construction companies are feeling more capital pressure amid the ongoing market adjustment, so more collateralized properties have recently appeared in the market," said Yan Yuejin, director of Shanghai-based E-house China Research and Development Institution.

For the good of potential homebuyers, they should carefully check the authenticity, payment methods and sales legitimacy of these properties to protect their lawful rights in home purchasing processes, Yan said.

Illegal promotion in the name of collateralized properties is forbidden by local governments. In October, a property project in Xuzhou, Jiangsu province, was requested to sell at normal prices, as the project promoted itself as collateralized properties with steep discounts.

Along with the market adjustment, experts expect there will be more fine-tuning policies in the pipeline to ease financing and credit, and further ensure the healthy and stable development of the real estate market.

"Only by recognizing the vulnerability of the property sector are regulators quickly making fixes to maintain market stability. And real estate developers have ceased reckless expansion and instead are attaching importance to cash flow issues. Thus, we can expect the previously overheated real estate market to see a soft landing," Lu said.