[photopress:property_foreign_capital_1.jpg,full,alignright]According to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) an increasing amount of foreign investment capital flowed into China’s real estate market between January and June.
Data from NBS show that in the first half of this year, realized foreign investment in the property sector accounted for 24.1% of the country’s total used foreign capital, 11 percentage points higher than the whole of last year.
Foreign investment in property projects averaged $7.04 million between January and February, up $3.61 million from last year’s average, while investment averaged $7.17 million between January and March, up $3.74 million.
The growth rate of foreign capital in China’s property sector surged 154.4% on a yearly basis in the first three months, 101.4 percentage points higher than all of last year. That was also 127.5 percentage points higher than the growth rate of total investment in the property sector during the same period.
Some analysts have said that growing foreign investment in the property sector will propel unbalanced development of housing supply in China, as most, if not all, of the investments go to medium-to-high-end housing markets.
China’s vacant commodity residential buildings of key property developers totaled 22.42 million square meters in floor space last year, and more than 70 of them were units of more than 100 square meters each. Which is the high end or expensive end of the market.
Analysts attributed the increasing vacant housing mainly to the short supply of affordable housing for lower income earners and the escalating housing prices to speculative purchases of medium-to-high-end houses.
Source: China Daily