Property sector up despite curbing

Sales and investment in China's property sector have both shown increases recently despite the government's strict curbing policies, a property researcher said over the weekend.

Nationwide real estate sales revenue in the first 11 months of 2012 increased 9.1 percent year-on-year, with sales area increasing 2.4 percent year-on-year in the same period, Huang Yu, a deputy head of property research organization China Index Academy, told an industry forum Saturday.

Driven by rising sales, property investment has increased 15 percent year-on-year in the past 5 months, reversing a steady decline since 2011, Huang said.

The property market has been picking up since March because of fine-tuning policies such as interest rate cuts, preferential lending rates at some banks and an increase to the upper limit on provident fund loans in some cities, Liu Yuan, senior manager with Shanghai-based Centaline China Property Research, told the Global Times Sunday.

Increased sales have changed people's expectations for home prices and many who had held wait-and-see attitudes became home purchasers, leading to further market recovery, Liu said.

Trading volume in bigger cities has seen much greater increases, with a 30 percent year-on-year rise from January to November, Centaline said in a report Thursday.

Driven by rising sales, China's 10 leading property firms, such as Vanke and Evergrande, achieved record high total sales of 602.5 billion yuan ($96.5 billion) in the first 11 months.

The demand for land is also on the rise. The 10 leading firms have spent 200.4 billion yuan on land from January to December 10 and land prices have been driven to record highs in big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai since November.

However, the property market recovery is slow and stable, at a reasonable rate that is far from a rebound, Liu said.

As the country's strict curbing policies such as the home purchase limit will still be in operation, the market will see only a slight increase of 5 to 10 percent in sales and prices nationwide in 2013, he said.

Huang expected the market to further improve in 2013 because of economic recovery and adequate money supply, but he said the country will continue curbing speculative property purchases with tight policies in the long term, through purchase limits and property taxation.

Urbanization and China's plan to double average income by 2020, stressed at the 18th National Congress of the CPC, will enhance the growth of real estate in the upcoming decade, he noted.