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High Demand

By HU YUANYUAN (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-07-16 09:38

It was a grim start to the year for Beijing's luxury housing market, but it started warming up again in the second quarter. And analysts expect demand for the city's high-end real estate will continue to rise.

Around 90 percent of residential buildings with unit prices higher than 10,000 yuan saw no transactions at all in March, according to property industry magazine RECG Media Group.

Guanyuan 8, a project located in the second ring road area, sold 38 apartments in January but only seven in February and none in March, according to the Beijing Real Estate Transaction Website.

And the villa market met with the same fate - only six sales were made in Beijing in March.

But as the number of sales drops, prices continue to climb. The average price of high-end apartments in Beijing hit 17,777.5 yuan per sq m in March, up 31.3 percent on January and 24.2 percent on February figures.

"This reflects a wait-and-see approach that's being fueled by the government's tightened policy on foreign investment and expectation of a further interest rate hike and a property tax being levied," says Dong Fan, head of the real estate research center at Beijing Normal University.

Experts say the fall in transactions is also contributing to the increase in supply. Overall supply in the capital's high-end residential market has seen a big jump compared with last year, especially on serviced apartments, according to a report by CB Richard Ellis (CBRE), an international real estate services company.

"There are some 2 million sq m of apartments with a unit price higher than 16,000 yuan available this year - both existing and new," says Xin Xiaomei, head of CBRE Beijing's research department.

Sales in Beijing's luxury housing market picked up in the second quarter, which typically sees brisk trade in high-end residential sales.

The landmark Yintai Center in Beijing's central business district saw its transactions double in the second quarter, compared with just 16 sales in the first three months of the year, according to the Beijing Municipal Construction Committee. Several developers raised their prices on strong market anticipation.

The capital flow from the stock market to the property market is one of the major reasons high-end sales warmed up in the second quarter, says Billy Chau, managing director of Savills Property Services (Beijing) Co Ltd.

After a sustained increase, China's stock market has seen big fluctuations since the end of May. And some investors are turning away from stocks and back to the property market, a comparatively safer investment channel, with strengthened purchasing power from their stock market gains. Chau says there is still growth potential for Beijing's high-end residential market, but the price rises are unlikely to be as dramatic as they have been previously.

"Compared with other cities in the world, Beijing's luxury housing is not so expensive," says Chau. "But if the prices rise too quickly it could spell trouble for the market."

And he says Beijing's rental market is an important support for the city's high-end apartments. Around 200,000 foreigners live and work in Beijing, and although policy prevents all of them from buying housing, they are still driving up rental demand and fueling investment in luxury housing.

Next year's Olympic Games will also create demand for Beijing's luxury residential rental market, according to the latest report from CBRE.

The high-end residential rental market saw strong demand in the second quarter, with average rents remaining stable and the vacancy rate dropping, according to a DTZ report.

"Owing to the pull of new projects with good conditions, the average price of luxury residential housing is expected to increase continuously," the report says.