 Home>News Center>China | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Shanghai tightens grip on property prices
SHANGHAI: Government departments in the country's financial hub are stepping up moves to streamline its rocketing property market by developing an online platform to make the trading process more transparent and manageable. The upgrade of the platform, the city's only official online website, will inform people about exactly what stage a certain project is at. This is the latest government measure to streamline the city's red-hot but once highly speculative housing market, and to crack down on irregularities. Tough measures have already been taken by seven ministries to curb rising property prices in leading Chinese cities since June. All the buying and selling information and the development stages of a property sale will be available to potential buyers, dealers, regulators and property developers following the full upgrade of the website on Monday, according to government regulators. "The efforts we are making are to make the housing transaction process more transparent and fair to everybody concerned," said a senior official with the property service website, the city's sole official website responsible for monitoring the city's property trading. Information about the city's new apartment supply and prices as well as the availability of old apartments will all be available on the website. Local residents will be able to search for homes meeting specific requirements such as location, size and price. Qualifications and credit records of property agents and developers can also be found on the website, as a way to fend off speculative trading. "The new measures will make the trading information more solid and thus will create a more regulated climate for property trading," said Song Lei, manager of Corporate Communication of the Shanghai-based Midland Property Agency. "But the measure itself will not solve everything," The Shanghai government's efforts to increase the supply of low and middle-priced housing in the city have also begun to pay off, with the floor space of such housing reaching 744,500 square metres in June and accounting for 42.8 per cent of all supply in the month. The government announced in March that it would start building 20 million square metres of new housing priced below 4,000 yuan (US$480) per square metre, compared with the current average price of 8,013 yuan (US$968) for commercial residential projects. Statistics from the local branch of the central bank also said commercial banks have become more cautious about potential losses in the sector, facing rising policy and market risks. "Measures taken by the government are clear and firm, and they have made many speculators begin to pull out of the market," said a senior consultant with the Zhongyuan Housing Brokerage. Information released by the local monetary regulators also indicated that the growth of mortgages slowed down in the first half of the year. According to the Shanghai Branch of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, outstanding loans increased by 16.04 per cent in the first six months to 444.5 billion yuan (US$53.5 billion), with a growth rate slower by 3.49 per cent than that of the same period last year. But the growth rate of commercial housing loans to individual buyers dropped by 7.2 per cent, to 276.1 billion yuan (US$33.3 billion).
(China Daily 07/14/2005 page3)
| ||||||||||||||||||||
| Copyright By chinadaily.com.cn. All rights reserved |
14 July 2005
Shanghai tightens grip on property prices
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment