China’s Real Estate Bubble

Is it the turn of China after the recent crack down of USA housing bubble? China is the world’s second largest economy with a $4.909 Trillion or 7.92% of the world economy and realty is contributing a lion’s share of 10% to it. With the USA sub-prime crisis, the world has not yet come out of shocks and now China leading towards the housing boom. China government is supporting the realty with its aggressive policies in making the realty a big boom to contribute toward its GDP. Does the government right enough to loosen the monetary and fiscal policies against realty to reach the double digit growth?

Government is intending the growth in GDP by massive urbanization all around the country and realty sector is playing a vital role in delivering the attentive results. Communist Party's clear expression of this view came in no. 1 document in January, a policy blueprint for 2010. In it, China vowed to reform the hukou system by giving rural citizens the right to the same services as urbanites, but only if they move to small cities within their own province. Chinese law says farmland is collectively owned by villages. In reality, the land is controlled by local governments. They, not the farmers, have the power to decide who can turn fields into real estate. Farmers say land reclamation rules are fixed against them, giving officials and well-connected developers the power to push them off the land without fair compensation. In some cases, local governments, which earned more than $230 billion from land auctions in 2009, are also being accused of demolishing old neighborhoods and unfairly compensating residents. In a recent poll conducted by China Youth Daily, a state-run newspaper, more than 80 percent of the respondents said local governments were a “major driving force” behind the skyrocketing property prices.

By 2025, the country will have 221 cities with populations of a million or more, compared to 35 in Europe, according to a report by McKinsey & Co, the consultancy firm. China had 108 of such cities in 2004. The sheer numbers involved in China's urbanization are staggering. To accommodate the on rush of new city dwellers, the country will have to pave 5 billion square meters of road, construct 5 million buildings, including 50,000 skyscrapers, and add up to 170 mass transit systems, all this by 2025. The McKinsey report said.

In the mission of urbanization by transforming dusty towns and villages into aspiring cities that will toll on the economy and society over a time, they are leaving behind the worrisome levels of debt piling. In such haste, quality of the work has got hampered; less thought has been given to energy efficiency and economic requirements of the common man. This has happened so quickly that the cities have not had an opportunity to grow organically. Urbanization is an inevitable trend. It's not whether you want it or not. There's no choice. But this urbanization path is a deformed bubble. As per Mr.Jiao Nanbo, secretary-general of the House Inspector Management Association of China, A large number of villas and townhomes inspected in Beijing have construction defects and some flaws could even endanger lives. Compared with Beijing's apartments, even though all of them had quality problems, villas and townhomes have many more construction defects and their quality is very poor.

One interesting fact is that most of these realty projects are taken up by the state-owned companies, which are ultimately controlled by the central government. These are the companies which are working for the central government to keep the real estate boom in achieving the intended GDP growth. These are bidding up prices on sprawling lands for big real estate projects. Land records show that 82 percent of land auctions in Beijing this year have been won by big state-owned companies outbidding private developers, up from 59 percent in 2008. A recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass., found that land prices in Beijing had jumped by about 750 percent since 2003 and that half of that gain came in the last two years. Housing prices have also skyrocketed, doubling in many cities over the last few years.

The report pegged a big part of the increase to state-owned enterprises that have “paid 27 percent more than other bidders for an otherwise equivalent piece of land.” Critics say the central government in Beijing unwittingly propelled the land frenzy by pushing a huge $586 billion economic stimulus package last year and encouraging state-owned banks to lend more aggressively.

Chinese finances are in good health, at least in official terms. The government says its total debt is just 20 percent of gross domestic product, compared with about 80 percent in the United States and nearly 200 percent in Japan. But officials acknowledge the picture is grimmer when local government debt loads are added.

Last year, state banks made a record $1.4 trillion in loans, nearly twice as much as the year before. Analysts now say they believe much of that money was diverted into the property market through off-balance-sheet maneuvers, leading to the record land bids and soaring property prices. That belief is adding to concerns that some of China’s biggest state-owned banks may be sitting on enormous unreported debt.

Though legally barred from borrowing, provinces and cities have found ways around the restrictions, often through government-backed investment firms. These financing vehicles have borrowed a total of 7.7 trillion Yuan ($1.1 trillion) from banks, according to the China Banking Regulatory Commission. That alone would about double the national debt. Realizing the potential scope of the problem, the regulator warned banks at the start of this year to limit their lending to local governments.

This increased investments and government backed policies have lured foreign investors also into the Chinese realty sector. According to international real estate advisor CB Richard Ellis, the value of en bloc property transactions in 15 Chinese cities has hit 49.9 billion Yuan ($7.36 billion) in the first-half of this year, among which 19.4 billion Yuan came from foreign institutional investors, 10.2 billion Yuan from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao, and the remaining 20.3 billion Yuan from mainland investors.

The path of urbanization is not good, and it will lead to a social turmoil, by grabbing the lands from farmers with out proper compensation. Any sector runs on the demand supply economics. Since, the government is backing the realty strongly with its much aggressive policies for building huge number of houses; this path will lead to speculative profits by speculators and piles up the housing loans in the financial institutions. Once there is a huge supply in the housing sector with skyrocketed prices; the sector will crack down and will hamper the growth path of China. The global economy will also be propelled to feel the pressure due to high end involvement and investments in the sector.

Now the Chinese government is feeling the heat of speculations and skyrocketed prices by compromising on the quality of houses. Government has started taking actions by implementing tougher policies and tightening the money supply into the system. According to the latest edition of a central bank publication China Finance, Chinese house prices face very large pressure to fall in the second half on weakening demand and increasing supply. Some of the recent policy actions taken by the government are as follows:

ü 78 State-owned enterprises with no core businesses in the real estate industry are asked to withdraw from the industry after completing unfinished land development programs. Regulator: SASAC dated 18^th Mar 2010.

ü Higher down payments and mortgage rates if one of the home-buyer's family members already owns property. Regulators: People’s Bank of China & China Banking Regulatory Commission dated 4^th Jun 2010;

ü Beijing banned all families from buying more than one home; it also bans mortgages for purchases of a third or third-plus home. Regulator: Beijing Government dated 30^th Apr 2010;

ü The central bank announced it will raise the deposit reserve requirement ratio (RRR) for financial institutions by half a percentage point from May 10. Regulator: People’s Bank of China dated 2^nd May 2010;

ü Developers were asked not to take deposits for sales of uncompleted apartments without proper approval and barred from charging "abnormally high" prices. Regulator: MOHURD dated 19^th Apr 2010.

With the recent intervention of Government in curbing the speculations and housing bubble, the markets will see a correction in the housing prices in second half of the year. The government should take a deep dive into the sector and have constant eye on it, to mitigate a bubble in the sector. So far, there has been only a mild correction in the property sector in response to the tightening campaign, and Beijing has indicated that it is determined to keep its foot down until prices drop to a more reasonable level. The issue is of particular concern because economic growth is the Communist Party's main tool for ensuring stability and legitimizing its rule.

Author: Murali Kashyap

Helsinki, Finland

kasyap.inc@gmail.com

Sources of information:

China’s real estate curbs (www.chinadaily.com)

Reuters (uk.reuters.com)

Economic times (economictimes.indiatimes.com)

Phayul (phayul.com)

China-Window (www.china-window.com)