[photopress:housing_Wang_Guangtao.jpg,full,alignright]China’s first batch of housing with limits placed on the selling price and on floor space of each apartment went on sale last week.
Poly Real Estate, which built 843 apartments each selling at RMB6,500 per square meter, at Jinshazhou of Baiyun District, Guangzhou City, sold about 700 flats on the first day of sale.
Only households certified by the Guangzhou Land and Property Administrative Bureau can buy homes from Poly’s price-limit housing development project.
The Chinese Minister of Construction Wang Guangtao, seen in our illustration, backed the scheme, saying price-limit housing would be a principal means of helping families with median income in large and medium-size cities solve housing difficulties.
Not everyone thinks it a good idea.
Fu Weichong, chairman of the board with Hopefluent Group Holdings , a real estate counseling business, vehemently opposed the practice.
He said, ‘It is a bad idea to implement the price-limit housing policy or carry out the practice of building apartments with subsidies from working units. Price-limit housing should be abolished as it will bring along new inequality and will do harm to the harmony of society.’
Xu Dianqing, an economist, during an interview with China Real Estate Business, a Beijing-based newspaper, said the government-supported price-limit housing lacks a theoretical basis, and would be considered as ‘gilding the lily.’
He said, ‘Housing prices are complicated, and are decided by diverse factors of real estate projects such as location, environment, structure and quality.
‘The intention on the part of the government is to transfer part of the profits of the developers to home buyers by way of setting a ceiling on the selling price of certain housing, but that intention is hard to meet in reality and in the end the quality of the housing suffers.’
Source: China View
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