(ECNS) -- Southern island province Hainan and China's capital Beijing lead the nation in terms of the relatively high price of purchasing a house, 21st Century Business Herald reported.
With the average nationwide annual salary of urban employees in China at 63,241 yuan ($9,670) in 2015 and the average home price about 6,792 yuan per square meter, it would take 9.7 years for an ordinary citizen to build up enough wealth, without any spending of their wages, to buy an apartment of 90 square meters.
It would take much longer to buy a modest home in top-tier cities like Beijing and Shanghai. It would require 16.6 years and 16.4 years for wage-earners to purchase a 90-sqm residence in Hainan Province and Beijing respectively, based on the latest available data of income levels in 2014.
Popular tourist destination Hainan ranked first because most buyers of high-end houses here are from other regions.
Economic powerhouse Shanghai also has high housing prices that can prove truly daunting to ordinary residents. Following the latest policies to cool the property market, Poly Real Estate Group purchased a plot of land, 14 kilometers from Shanghai's financial district Lujiazui, at 50,000 yuan per square meter and expects to set the price of homes built there at 80,000 yuan per square meter to break even.
Yet amid skyrocketing house prices, the purchasing power of ordinary salary workers is also increasing. The annual average salary for urban workers was 9,371 yuan in 2000, enough to buy the equivalent of 4.4 square meters. By 2014, workers were able to buy about 9.1 square meters.
Ningxia, Guizhou and Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region were the easiest places for wage-earners to buy a home, averaging 6.5 years, 7.1 years and 7.2 years in terms of buyers' full wages.
The house-price-to-income ratio in China was 9.3-to-1, much higher than the international range from 3-to-1 to 5-to-1.
From 1992 to 2014 the proportion of spending for food, clothes and household items by urban families dropped by 31 percentage points, while the cost of housing, transport and telecommunications rose by 27.1 points. In the same period, investment in China was centered on real estate and transportation.
