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Jan-Oct property investment totals $350b

By Zhao Tingting (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2008-11-14 17:36

National property investment totaled 2.39 trillion yuan ($349.75 billion) during the January-October period, up 24.6 percent year-on-year, while the growth rate was 1.9 percentage points lower than the first three quarters, said China Information News, citing the National Bureau of Statistics.

Investment for commercial residential housing amounted to 1.75 billion yuan, up 27.4 percent year-on-year and accounted for 73.1 percent of the total property investment. Yet the growth rate was 1.3 percentage points lower than that by the end of October.

Some 2.48 billion square meters of housing was under construction during this period, up 18.7 percent from the same period last year. Property developers purchased 300 million square meters of land nationwide, down 5.6 percent year-on-year and completed construction on 190 million square meters, down 2.5 percent year-on-year.

China sold 450 million square meters of commercial housing for 1.76 trillion yuan for the first ten months of 2008. The sales area and revenue of commercial residential housing was 17 percent and 18.2 percent lower than the same period last year, respectively.

Vacancies in China's commercial property sector surged 13.1 percent year-on-year to reach 133 million square meters of floor space by the end of October, and the growth rate was 2.9 percentage points higher than that by the end of September. Among those, 68.35 million square meters of commercial residential housing was vacant, up 18 percent year-on-year.

Property prices in China's 70 large- and medium-sized cities rose 1.6 percent year-on-year in October, the lowest growth rate since 2006, while it declined 0.3 percent month-on-month.

The price of newly constructed commercial residential housing rose 1.8 percent year-on-year, while it dropped 0.3 percent month-on-month. Prices for pre-owned housing rose 0.8 percent year-on-year, while it dropped 0.4 percent month-on-month.

Property developers' source of funds rose 6.4 percent to 3.07 trillion yuan in the first 10 months this year, with domestic loans of 596.1 billion yuan (up 6.2 percent year-on-year), property developers' self-financing funds of 1.23 trillion yuan (up 31.7 percent year-on-year) and funds from other channels of 1.19 trillion yuan (up 11.3 percent year-on-year).

The Real Estate Climate Index declined 1.47 points to 99.68 points in October, down 6.06 points from the same period last year.