By Ren Xingzhou, DRC

2016-11-7

As real estate is a bubble-prone sector, efforts should be made to guard against fast accumulation of housing bubbles. After China’s economy entered a state of new normal, the growth mode of economy is undergone changes and economic structure is experiencing adjustment. Against such a backdrop, housing supply has increased, which has changed supply-demand relationship and led to destocking in the housing market. This round of housing price hike has made the housing market become the most capital-intensive sector in some cities. Yet the number of sold homes is quite limited in cities with large housing inventory. The housing price hikes are featured by the swift increase of housing price and land price. The reasons are as follows. First, the easy monetary policy with low interest rate has channeled a large amount of investment into the housing market. Second, due to low returns on investment, investors have put their money in real estate sector rather than in real economy sectors, and real estate sector is becoming more and more integrated with financial sector. Third, the “core-city effect” has spurred housing price increase. Fourth, changes of market expectations have caused panic across the market and fuelled market speculations. The accumulated bubbles in the housing market have deepened potential financial risks, inducing crowding-out effect on the real economy. Besides, the rising interest rates have gone beyond the bearing capacity of enterprises and ordinary people. In order to control housing price hikes and evade market risks, we should intensify macro-control measures. First, we need to adapt different policy measures to local conditions and improve classified regulations on housing market. Second, we need to manage well the totality and scale of funds and loans so as to curb the push by a large number of speculative funds from driving up housing price. Third, we need to regulate the order of the housing market and accelerate the building of credit system. Fourth, we need to increase land and housing supply in cities with excessive imbalance between supply and demand. Meanwhile, we need to enhance the competitiveness of China’s real economy.