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 [转帖]Patrick Chovanec (程致宇) : China Real Estate Unravels |
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高树
头衔: 海归准将
声望: 学员
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加入时间: 2007/03/13
文章: 489
来自: 美国加州旧金山湾区
海归分: 121480
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作者：高树 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
China Real Estate Unravels
Author: Patrick Chovanec · May 16th, 2012
As a prelude to a broader analysis of China’s GDP, and the accuracy of its official GDP figures, I want to start by examining the national real estate statistics for the first four months of 2012. This discussion feeds into the broader GDP picture, but the property story that has been unfolding is important and interesting enough to be worth taking a close look at on its own.
Getting an accurate view of the property sector is complicated by the fact that neither the official price index, nor the Soufun price index, nor the average price/square meter that can be calculated from the investment numbers seem to track very well with each other or with point-of-sale impressions of steep developer discounts over the past eight months. Developers and local governments also enjoy a great deal of discretion in deciding what to count as a “start” or a “completion.” Monthly data releases are never revised, which often gives rise to huge corrections that are simply lumped into the end-year December data release, giving a distorted impression of how trends are unfolding (so, for instance, the 19% drop in property starts in December 2011 probably wasn’t as sudden as it appears, and more likely reflected an unreported decline spread over several preceding months).
All that being said, I’m seeing some rather striking patterns in the data that tell us two main things:
The market is not poised to recover, but will continue to see greater downward pressure on prices; and
Real estate investment is likely to flatten out or start falling, erasing several percentage points of GDP growth.
Last month, many observers took comfort from reports that overall real estate investment in Q1 rose 23.5% (in nominal terms) compared to the same period the previous year. To be sure, this was a comedown from 2011, when property investment rose 27.9%, or 2010, when it rose 33.2%. But it still seemed to reflect resilient growth: hardly a collapse in market, more like the kind of modest slowdown consistent with “soft landing.”
Very few people paused to ask where this investment growth was actually coming from. After all, the market was clearly struggling. Year-on-year sales in Q1, for all real estate, was down -14.6%. The decline was even steeper, -17.5%, in residential property, which accounts for about 80% of the market. Office sales were down -10.2%, while growth in “commercial” (i.e., retail) property sales, which saw a boom in 2011, decelerated to +10.5%. Although many people were touting a month-on-month sales recovery in March, compared to the Chinese New Year period, March sales were still down -7.8% from the year before, for the sector as a whole, and -9.7% for residential properties (by comparison, sales in January-February were a disaster, falling -20.9% overall, compared to the first two months of 2011, -24.7% for residential).
Given this consistent fall-off in sales, it’s not surprising that new property starts began to stall. I already mentioned that the 19% drop in new starts in December may have been a bit of a statistical aberration. Starts (measured in floor space) in Jan-Feb were up 5.1%, although the gains came entirely from office and retail — housing starts were flat. But overall starts fell by -4.2% in March, with housing starts down -9.8%, ensuring that overall starts for Q1 were flat (+0.3%) with residential starts down -5.2%. Land sales for Q1 were also flat, with sales proceeds rising 2.5% but land area sold down -3.9%. In March, they were negative (-3.6% sales revenue, -8.5% area sold).
So if sales were down, and starts were either flat or down, where was the 23.5% investment growth coming from? Developers, burdened by 70% leverage ratios and loans threatening to come due, were rushing to complete whatever projects were already in their pipeline, in order to put those units onto the market and raise cash. Completions (measured in floor space) were up 39.3% in Q1, compared to last year (residential completions were similarly up 40.0%). But, of course, those completed units weren’t selling like last year, so unsold inventories expanded. At the close of Q1, the total amount of floor space “for sale” was up 35.5%, compared to the same date last year, while the floor space of residential units “for sale” grew 47.4%.
(That’s just the floor space that developers admitted was for sale. There are plenty of tricks they can use to hold units off the market, in order to massage the official data and avoid spooking buyers. At the end of 2011, total floor space “under construction” was roughly 4.6 times the floor space sold that year. Assuming it typically takes three years to build a unit, from start to finish, that suggests about a year and a half worth of excess inventory hidden somewhere in the pipeline. The ratio for residential property was 4.0, which suggests that, while there may be about a year’s worth of unsold inventory in the housing market, the overhang in commercial real estate is even steeper. Although in absolute terms, it’s the housing overhang that matters).
作者：高树 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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 [转帖]Patrick Chovanec (程致宇) : China Real Estate Unravels -- 高树 - (5172 Byte) 2012-5-18 周五, 04:54 (2018 reads)
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