At Least Half of Apartments in Shanghai, Beijing Are Vacant, Daily Reports

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

The Chinese Property Bubble is not looking good at these rates...

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At Least Half of Apartments in Shanghai, Beijing Are Vacant, Daily Reports

By Bloomberg News - Aug 17, 2010 12:53 AM ET

At least half of the apartments in Shanghai and Beijing are empty, the China Daily reported today, citing an online investigation by volunteers conducted in 100 Chinese cities.

About 51 percent of Shanghai apartments, 66 percent of Beijing flats and more than 70 percent of units in Hainan are vacant, according to the survey, based on counting the number of apartments observed to have no lights on at night. It was conducted on more than 1,000 real-estate projects and was organized by news website Sina.com., according to the report.

"Investors and speculators are the owners of the vacant houses" as they wait to sell their properties at an appropriate time, said Lu Qilin, a Shanghai-based researcher at Uwin. "It's important for the government to introduce more measures to curb speculation."

China has restricted pre-sales by developers, curbed loans for third-home purchases, raised minimum mortgage rates and tightened down-payment requirements for second-home purchases. About 88.8 percent of those surveyed said property prices are being pushed up by speculators who buy several homes and leave them vacant, the report found.

Of more than 10,000 online users in the survey, 91.1 percent said the number of unoccupied properties is high in their cities.

Property prices in 70 major Chinese cities climbed 10.3 percent in July from a year earlier, the slowest pace in six months, the statistics bureau's newspaper, China Information News, reported Aug. 10.

An index tracking 34 real estate firms traded in Shanghai rose 1.3 percent at the 11:30 a.m. break. China Vanke Co., the nation's biggest listed developer, added 1.4 percent to 9.01 yuan. Poly Real Estate Group Co. climbed 3.7 percent to 13.45 yuan.

To contact the Bloomberg staff responsible for this story: Penny Peng in Beijing at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-1 ... ports.html