China’s beleaguered property market is already showing signs of recovery after the central government introduced a suite of stimulus measures last month, Bloomberg reports. Over the past two weeks, residential sales in Shenzhen and Shanghai have seen a promising upswing.
In Shenzhen, the surge in demand has led some developers to stop offering discounts and rebates on their properties, while Shanghai saw 50 percent more home sales on the secondary market last weekend than its daily average for May.
One Chinese real estate agent told Bloomberg that her team had been “working days and nights to answer questions” from potential buyers. She said she hadn’t “seen such a big wave of customers coming in for a long time”
Raymond Cheng, head of China property research at CGS International Securities HK, said he expected sales to continue improving. “The gradual improvement of market sentiment came after the strong policy support announced in mid-May,” he noted.
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The recovery is particularly evident in the secondary market, which is outpacing new-home sales. Buyers are reportedly attracted to existing homes due their steeper price declines.
The country’s property market crashed in 2021, when a number of major developers (including the behemoth Evergrande) defaulted on their repayments to investors – leaving many developments never completed.
The new policies recently announced by the government included lowering interest rates, reducing down-payment requirements, facilitating a trillion yuan (US$138 billion) in extra funding for home-buyers and allowing provincial-level governments to repurchase land sold to developers in cases where projects have stalled.
