Although the Chinese housing market has continued to slump since the beginning of 2009, the housing price in Yinchuan, capital of northwest China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, boasts the country’s biggest increase rate in the last six months.
Housing prices in the country’s 70 major cities fell 0.9 percent from a year earlier, according to a joint statement issued this week by National Development and Reform Commission and the National Bureau of Statistics. Housing prices in some eastern cities, such as Shenzhen, even fell by 16.5 percent in January.
However, the country’s relatively economic backward city Yinchuan, leads an upward trend, as the new home price there rose 8.8 percent year- on-year in January. The apartments in the city’s downtown areas are now sold at above 4,500 yuan (about 605 U.S. dollars) per square meter.
According to Xinhua the new home price in downtown Yinchuan only accounted for one fifth of that in Beijing or Shanghai, which is about RNB20,000 to 30,000 per square meter on average.
‘Only three years ago, the average housing price here was belowRMB3,000per square meter,’ Ma Jun, a real estate researcher said on Saturday. “The housing price keeps going up, but the average yearly income of Yinchuan residents has stood at about only RMB14,400.’
The city’s migrant population is said to be responsible for shoring up the ever-growing housing price.
The migrant population purchased more than 12 million square meters of apartments, which accounts for more than 57% of the total housing market sales in 2008, said Ma Jun.
Yinchuan, dubbed as ‘city of migrants,’ has a total population of 1.4 million.
Housing prices in underdeveloped west parts of China used to below, and those low price attracted many migrant homebuyers, Liu Xueli, an official of the city housing department, told Xinhua. Liu said that most of the buyers don’t intend to live there, but buy there as an investment shift from big cities.
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