At the Boao Forum for Asia recently, people discussed building a public-housing information system so that people can check one's housing situation with an ID card number. But such a system may not include all housing information, as a lot of the welfare housing cannot be verified, says an editorial in Beijing News. Excerpts:

In China, before the marketization of the Chinese real estate industry, there are various kinds of welfare housing, including economically affordable housing. But many such welfare apartments are not registered officially for three reasons.

First, housing information was incomplete in early years, and some housing was not registered and even lacked property ownership certificates. Secondly, some of those apartments are built with funds collected by the buyers from a company that's not supervised. Thirdly, because there are various kinds of welfare housing, it is difficult to register them all.

If such information cannot be checked in the housing system, the system is no good either for real estate regulation or for battling corruption among officials. So we should first register the housing before we can build a useful public housing information system.

The good news is, the State Council is requiring a real estate registration system before June 2014 that includes all welfare housing. The construction of the system will be supported by a general investigation of the housing situation, and a registration agency to carry it out.

According to some experts, there are 24 different housing types just in Beijing, including low-rent housing, public rental housing, affordable housing, capped-price housing and orientation placement housing. So it seems that a lot of work needs to be done before we achieve our goal. But it is a necessary step.