Yuexiu Property chairman Lu Zhifeng bullish on China for 2013
The chairman of Yuexiu Property, a Guangzhou-based developer, believes the mainland property market will improve in the second half of next year.
Lu Zhifeng said he was bullish on the property market in 2013. "The market conditions will remain challenging in the first half but I think the market will improve in the second half," Lu said.
He believed new cooling measures such as the tightening of mortgage and home purchases would not last for long.
"We saw mortgage-tightening measures have been loosened slightly. It is a good sign for the property market," he said.
"If the government released sufficient subsidised housing and curbed property speculation, I believe the prices of private homes would not rebound sharply."
The developer has generated 11.84 billion yuan (HK$14.58 billion) from contracted sales in the first eleven months of the year, 18.39 per cent more than its original sales target of 10 billion yuan for 2012.
He said the company hoped to maintain double-digit growth in contracted sales every year.
To maintain the growth, Lu said Yuexiu would continue to acquire development sites next year. The developer has a landbank comprising 13 million square metres.
"We have sped up the development period. We have a floor area of five million square metres and 40 projects under development," he said. "We have to replenish our land bank. But we won't acquire development sites blindly. We will start construction workthree to six months after we buy a site and launch the project for sales in a year,"
He said Guangzhou was still their central target for land acquisition. "We are also interested in buying sites in the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta and Bohai Bay Economic Rim," he said.
Yuexiu took an aggressive approach to land acquisition in the second half of this year, spending 350 million yuan on one site in Hainan last month.
"The site has an area of one million square metres. It is our first tourism-related property development. We will seek investment opportunities in tourism-related property development and housing for the elderly," Lu said.
