[photopress:guangzhou.jpg,full,alignright]The city government of Guangzhou will auction off nine plots of land in the next few weeks for residential development. Nine other plots were auctioned off in June. Zhang Guangning, the mayor of Guangzhou said the city government will work to rein in surging housing prices and build more ‘economical houses’ for the city’s extremely poor families by the end of this year.
He said, ‘The government wants to keep housing prices at a rational level so most people can afford to buy their own homes. The city government will increase the land supply for residential apartment developments and streamline procedures for housing approvals.’
The 18 pieces of land the city government has targeted for the auction block will have an area of 119,000 square meters, which will be enough to accommodate more than 4,500 residential apartments.
It will auction a further 13 pieces of urban land in the second half of this year, covering an area of about 518,000 square meters. The land will accommodate about 9,000 residential apartments.
Han Shitong, an analyst with the Guangzhou Real Estate Association said, ‘These 13,500 residential apartments are expected to help stabilize housing prices in the city.’
The problem is that the per-square-meter price of housing in the city climbed to RMB11,331 for new apartments in urban areas last month, up nearly RMB1,000 yuan from May. That was the biggest jump in a single month in recent years.
As well as releasing this land the government is also working to crack down on fraud by developers. Whether this will work is a subject open for debate. The track record in China is that no matter how much development land is released the prices go steadily upwards because developers consistently build the most expensive properties they can get away with. The government would like affordable housing to represent, say, a third of all development. It has not got near breaking single percentage figures.
Source: China Daily
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